Some franchises exist primarily for merchandise. In all honesty, there are certain time periods and genres (like older Mecha shows) where this is true even of strong and well-respected properties. I’m also no stranger to product tie-ins in my reviews, having covered a couple of card game tie-ins, the lamentable Luck and Logic and the surprisingly effective Selector.
None of the entries I’ve yet addressed, though, are quite as blatant about the “Buy our stuff!” angle as Frame Arms Girl. For those who don’t know, Frame Arms Girl is a line of plastic model kits. They’re a spinoff of the Frame Arms series, which is a line of mecha model kits featuring a poseable endoskeleton (the Frame) and easily interchangable or kitbashed shells of armor and weaponry (the Arms) intended to let modelers create their own custom robot action figures. The Frames Arm Girl line is the same idea, but with Mecha Musume (a concept I talked about when reviewing LBX Girls) as its main theme, rather than straight-out robots, offering a variety of girl bodies as well as their attendant armor, weapons and many, many interchangeable parts (around 200 in a single kit, if the manufacturer is to be believed).
In all honesty, it’s a pretty cool idea… but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the anime shilling it being any good.
The story starts with a strange and possibly malfunctioning delivery drone bringing a package to Ao Gennai, a high-school girl living on her own because her parents work overseas. The package contains Frame Arms Girl Gourai, in this universe not just a plastic model kit with interchangeable face plates to be displayed with different emotions, but a little AI robot girl capable of walking, talking, learning, and so on. Gourai insists that Ao put her armor together, and instructs the kind of airheaded highschooler on the proper use of model kits and following of directions as bits are removed from their sprues and applied to the girl to make a proper mini mecha musume out of her.
The next day, the dubious drone delivers two more boxes, containing another pair of Frame Arms Girls – the tempermental Stylet and silly and childish Baselard, who insist they’re here to fight Gourai. There is at least a decent reason for doing so, as it turns out that all these girls are prototypes and, since Ao managed to somehow activate the sample Gourai, they want to battle her in order to collect data and refine the AI of the eventual final product. The company behind the girls will even pay Ao for the testing, so if she takes the plot hook she doesn’t have to get a part-time job. Incentives!
The battle takes place on a hologram battlefield that’s kind of like Angelic Layer without the excuse of a special super-advanced arena device and that’s rendered in CGI that’s… a little tragic. It’s not Pilot Candidate bad, and it could be a deliberate choice to have it be conspicuous, since it’s all for the transition from normal world to hologram battle world, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be quite this jarring. This is especially strange given that the girls are often 3d models in normal space as well, so it shouldn’t be that different.
In general, the show follows a pattern where each episode has two vignettes, mostly around “cute girls doing cute things” style Slice of Life. Along the way we introduce one other recurring human, Ao’s model enthusiast friend Bukikio, and several more FA Girls that are presumably all sold separately, who lose to Gourai and then join the party. Past Stylet and Baselard we find Materia – a pair of girls called Materia Black and Materia White or simply the Materia Sisters who play the “sweet and sadistic” angle. After them is Jinrai, an edge-of-chuuni wannabe ninja obsessed with the Edo Period, who looks and at first feels like this show’s version of Laura Bodewig. Finally we meet Architect, whose bit is that she’s a robot. Which is kind of funny when you think of it because technically the FA girls are all robots, but Architect plays it up.
These are all added by the end of episode 5, taking up about half of the vignette slots while the other half just try to do comedy. Episode 6 is an all-comedy breather (not that the FA girl battles are serious for the most part) and then episode 7 introduces the closest thing the show has to a heel, Hresvelgr. Hresvelgr likes fighting in a way that seems a little more aggressive and exclusive than the others, and particularly enjoys beating down Gourai. She even wins her fight and goes back home rather than losing and moving in with Ao, the nerve!
The loss gets Gourai down in a big way which, after a little “how it’s made” on injection molded plastic models becomes the theme of the next few vignettes, preparing for the rematch, holding a pep rally to cheer Gourai on, and playing house. We get another episode and a half of generic filler (Ao gets a cold and has a weird dream of living a normal life with all the girls as human friends, then the team makes Hot Pot) before Hresvelgr comes back for round 2
In Round 2, Hresvelgr threatens Ao (about as well as a scale model armed with a broken chopstick can) to get Gourai incensed to fight, and drops mid battle that Gourai and the others will be recalled if she loses. The fight is inconclusive, however, as the power goes out before it can be decided.
We then go back to puttering, this time with the theme of Gourai becoming overprotective of Ao. There’s one decent half a vignette here where Ao visits the factory and talks with Hresvelgr, getting some actual character development out of our some-assembly-required antagonist, but the main gist is resolved in the obligatory fanservice bath house episode.
After that, Hresvelgr comes back (introduced in a post-credits third of the episode with Gourai the worrywart), now with blonde twintails and a psycho attitude that’s not even having fun, identified as Hresvelgr Alter, who challenges Gourai to round 3.
Alter proves to be incredibly powerful, but also unstable, entering a berserk state where even her Alter persona breaks down into pretty much just screaming and throwing off energy blasts. The other girls send all their gear to help Gourai, who becomes the heavily-armed golden version of herself as Hresvelgr Alter pulls herself together enough for one final spectacle battle, ending with the “Rush past each other and wait a beat to see who falls down” trope.
As Hresvelgr Alter falls we find that we actually have… shockingly much running time left in the final episode. How do they fill it?
Well, there is some welcome/needed breakdown. Hresvelgr recovers from her sound beating with her Alter body but original fun personality, the Factory recalls Gourai but its only for repairs, and Ao is ultimately asked to keep looking after her since the AI development is going well.
After that, we find out it’s pretty much Christmas, and on Christmas Eve have a party with all the girls that’s in line with ordinary vignettes. At the end of it, Ao asks Gourai what she’d like as a present, and Gourai… wants her surname, becoming a proper part of Ao’s family
This results in another movement where the other FA girls decide they need to strike out and find masters of their own who they can bond with, and that they can meet again after that. Take one home yourself, why not! They say their goodbyes, but it turns out that there were still something like ten minutes of last episode that needed filling. As such they show us a long, draggy going away party where all the girls (in small groups) go up on a virtual stage to do a song and dance.
The rendering for the song numbers – of which there are three full songs – is particularly conspicuous, clearly being done in a different software than the battles. I personally suspect they just went and put their 3d models into Miku Miku Dance, except a lot of fan-made MMD videos are a lot better than these numbers.
And even if the song and dance would still be quite passable by MMD standards, with non-garbage choreography and professional if unfitting models, that still doesn’t excuse filling so much dead air right at the end here.
But, whatever, we eventually get done with the Youtube videos that someone asked the intern to provide in order to burn time without spending more money, see the girls off, and officially end the show. How was it?
Well… it mostly wasn’t painful. It was a sort of forced cute with an edge of fanservice (Gourai and Stylet are walking panty shots, the other girls default to bodysuit, and Ao gets victimized in a couple of vignettes) and it did have something of an arc regarding Gourai’s growth and understanding of emotions.
That said… it is kind of a gutterball. I’m going to go in what I think of as reverse order, addressing the show’s issues from the micro up to the macro.
In that sense, first off you have elements in the execution. Scenes in this show tend to be kind of draggy, in a way that’s… not fun. It’s slow, and bits overstay their welcome. Nobody in this show really expresses anything in one line that they could say in three instead, and it’s clear that the writers were really struggling with that broadcast anime time slot on even the deepest level. At this layer, you also have the technicals, how the battles are choreographed acceptably but don’t look that great and how the FA girls interacting with the world only really works some of the time.
Moving up, we get to the vignette structure. The show technically has an ongoing thread, but it’s chopped up into all these mini episodes so that tends to get lost. For the most part you could watch an episode fragment from early in the show or one from late in the show, and unless it was centered on Hresvelgr you couldn’t really say where it might have come from.
The slice of life skits, and the fact that they are very much scenario-driven light comedy, kills the momentum and direction of the show. I get it, it’s a living toys setup, you want it to be fun and harmless. But Angelic Layer was fun and harmless without losing the fact that the characters are learning, growing, and have something to gain through their experiences, which are a linear series of events. You had twelve episodes each with a twenty-some minute running time, quite possibly the easiest possible format to tell a little story in, one that should be trivial to fill up… but it’s clear that Frame Arms Girl is spinning its wheels with that much space.
And to the top level, independent of anything that speaks to the grade of Frame Arms Girl, I really have to ask… why the living toys route? You have these Mecha Musume designs, creative fusions of pretty girls and fantastical armor and weaponry, and you choose to keep them as plastic models in-character. Is that the limit of your vision? The extent of your creativity? Did you look at marketing vehicles like Transformers and seriously think, “Ah, that would be so much better if they were actually the toys and not what the toys represent!”? Even LBX Girls, which was a pretty bad show, understood enough to guess that people interested in Mecha Musume would probably like to see some actual military action. They flubbed it big time, but they tried.
I’ve seen the Frames Arm Girl models. I saw the models before I knew this show existed and thank Haruhi for that because I sure wouldn’t have looked them up after. I’ve never been too serious into a modeling hobby, but I’ve dipped my toe in and they look like a line that could be entertaining. But, more than that, when somebody looks at those models, at the plastic Gourai and Stylet and Hresvelgr, and looks at them without any knowledge of this anime outing, what does that person imagine?
I think most people would imagine scenarios more interesting and creative than the creators did here. Show the models to somebody who doesn’t know and ask them who this character is and what she does or what story she’s part of, and I bet the story that person makes up on the spot will be a much better chassis than “She is a little plastic model and fights other little plastic models in a VR glow field for no stakes”. Maybe they’ll come up with a space war like Gundam or a humanity-defending bug hunt like Muv Luv or a “combat as sports” affair like too many battle school shows to list, but it would have more meat to it than this.
But I can’t grade Frame Arms Girl down on not delivering what the barest concept had the potential to bear as fruit. I can, however, grade it down for all those other things, for having a badly frayed central thread held together by fairly lame slice of life antics, homeopathic comedy, and Ao having one brain cell that bounces around her head like one of those old DVD player wait screens.
There’s one of the vignettes where all the girls are doing acts as part of a talent show/pep rally to cheer up Gourai. In it, Materia’s bit is that the two of them do a stand-up routine where they seem to deliberately flub or dodge the punch lines, putting no energy or zing into their “comedy”. It gets Jinrai rolling on the floor laughing, but everyone else is just faintly baffled at what they’re watching. Materia’s awful stand-up is the show: it’s trying to accomplish something that’s dubious at best, but can’t even manage because it’s got terrible pacing and no real payoff, leaving the audience to just sort of scratch their collective heads over what was even going to be done here. It’s slow, unenergetic, and doesn’t really care when it misses its mark.
For all that, Frame Arms Girl is a D product. As I said earlier, it’s entirely watchable. It doesn’t offend you or make you suffer. It’s… just kind of there, and not in a way that one can really appreciate. There’s a degree to which it almost more deserves a “Fail” on the “Pass/Fail” scale, just indicating that it’s not something to bother with, but in a sense I think that would be too harsh. Rated at a D, that communicates that there are redeeming features or moments that work, it’s just not a product that has enough to it to be even remotely worthwhile, leaving me still on the hunt for a show with a story as cool as the Mecha Musume visual style to go with it.