Category: Robotics;Notes

Ah, and some more of the different storylines are starting to connect more closely. This episode reaffirmed that the bad guys in this series were basically trying to annihilate the entire world, but this episode showed that the final episode of Gunvarrel contained quite a number of big hints that these plans were in the works. So yeah, Frau’s mother knew what was going on, and tried to stop it, using the same kind of subtle messages that that dead guy whose name I forgot has been showing. My guess is that he knew what happened to Gunvarrel, and tried to be even more secretive, hence why these hints were even more obscure.

The solar storm thing by the way is something that really shows that this is from the same creators of Steins;Gate: the world won’t be destroyed because some giant thingy of doom will explode, no: it put some extensive background into why this will happen with the magnetic storms. It found quite a clever way to put these in by not fully having the characters explain what would happen, but to show a file containing the details. This will be something that you need to pause your browser for in order to fully understand, but I find it a very nice addition there.

Also things just got real here. The solar storms happened at the end of this episode. What I didn’t expect was that at this stage, this series would ask even more questions: which bugger managed to hack into Frau’s twitter account? It probably has to do with the cheater subplot, which will probably get a lot clearer in the next few weeks. I actually like that a lot: the series has managed to balance all of its different subplots quite well. Probably the only one who doesn’t really fit is Subaru: what’s his point in this series? He hasn’t really done anything major, other than help a bit with the robot building.

Oh, and I just realized: the solar storms and the robot building are of course linked to each other because it’s the solar storms that will make all robots go out of control. Next question: why is the main robot of this series special here?

Al for the characters, Frau went through a lot here, even to suicide attempts, although it seems that she was stopped just in time. We also finally got to see her younger version, which always is a great way to flesh out a character. It’s clear that the second half of this season will be a lot heavier in terms of drama, and yeah: with Frau the creators again did a very good job.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Robotics;Notes has returned, and with a pretty interesting episode to boot. Instead of continuing the main storyline, it makes a little detour to a couple of side characters: Jun and her grandfather. This is where the character-development really begins, starting with some of side characters.

I nearly forgot that that old guy was the grandfather of Jun, but his illness really reminded me again. And thi showed some interesting dynamics between the two of them, along with the past they shared. It revealed the guy feeling guilty over whta he did to her in the past, and how he let one of his robots go out of control.

It had a bit of cheese, but it worked. The end effect of this episode was that it was quite heart-warming to watch. Most interesting was Jun overcoming her own fears though. I liked her doubts about the robot club and how she was forced to choose between two things that she’snot entirely confident of, but she has fond memories with.

Also, new OP and ED. I think they’re improvements over the previous ones. They are more slick and interesting looking. Nothing amazing yet, but definitely better. The ED is a slide-show, but it does show a lot more about the character. It slightly flehses the cast out a bit, which is a nice touch.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

How everything is going to tie together, I have no idea. But this episode definitely went into the right direction by providing some great twists for some of the different subplots of this series.

So Kimijima Kou elaborated a bit on how the world would be destroyed, and this episode definitely drove home that Misa now has completely changed, and works for the bad guys now (although I suspect very much that things will get a bit more nuanced in the future). But this episode also laid links between the Kimijima Report and Frau’s mother and subsequently the final episode of Gunbarrel, which ended up being an incredibly pessimistic troll ending.

My guess would be that Frau’s mother knew the same thing that Kimijima Kou knew, and also tried to show this through the Gunvarrel anime, but got found out before the final episode which she used for these hints, came out. That probably explains why Kimijima Kou made the instructions to get to his reports so ridiculously complicated. Why the story is centered on robot building amidst all this… still isn’t clear to me, but who knows?

Also the twist that someone is using the accounts of the top 3 players of Killballad is quite morbid. And surprisingly like that one arc in Psycho Pass, although here the impact is really on the fact that someone is cheating in a completely different way than expected, and using such morbid means in it. The deaths here do make more impact compared to Psycho Pass because the murders there are the orders of the day: it’s a police series about serial killers, while this is a show about building robots.

Also, I was wrong: next week will air another episode. After that we’ll get a one-week hiatus… and then the Noitamina-timeslot will move to Tuesday Evening. Yes, after all those years of Noitamina airing on tuesday, it will finally change its schedule. The question now is: will that retain its viewers. In a way, I can understand it though: over the past years, thursdays got way too crowded: most likely due to its influence, there were way too many shows that aired on the same day and therefore much more competition. In comparison, Tuesday evening has always had much less series. I really hope that the viewers will move along with them and allow the timeslot to be even more successful.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

It’s a bit of a strange twist: the previous episode left off with a disaster of a robot that refuses to move because it lacks power, and in this episode some kind of awesome light ending literally drops out of the sky in order to help the cast.

But I guess that that’s one of the charms of Robotics;Notes: on one hand it is deconstructing the giant robot genre by showing what it would really take to make such a thing even remotely usable, and examinig what a challenge it would be to even build one. On the other hand it has mysterious AI girls and sparkly things that fall from the sky. It’s definitely using the former to build up for the latter, and that build-up is LOOONG. This really needed to be a 2-cour series, otherwise this entire effect would have been lost.

Regarding build-up though: the key is also being able to use it. We’re now nearly at this series’ halfway point (after next week there will probably be a big hiatus), and the characters so far are down to earth, realistic and believable. That’s good, however the pay-off of all this is also something that the creators really need to pay attention to. If it works, then it will be awesome. If not… then I get the feeling that I’ve wasted my time a bit.

Still, the series continues to drop good hints. The end of this episode where Mizuka with her defunct leg asked Airi to go away made a good impact: finally this show starts to delve a bit into the links between all of the subplots it has been creating.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

This was a major episode for Robotics;Notes: the big guy finally moves… a bit. Before coming to an abrupt stop. Yes, giant robots like that have actual problems moving right. They’re giant heavy objects that need a huge amount of power to be even able to lift one leg. I’m surprised that it didn’t even tumble over.

But yeah, talk about a different portrayal of mecha in this series. This episode also contained this interesting bit about hyping these kinds of things: I mean these are high school kids who built this giant robot, but with that marketing campaign of that guy people were expecting way too much out of it and with these kinds of things, when just one thing goes wrong it already feels like a major setback, instead of the huge improvement that it actually was.

The thing is also that I still have no bloody clue how all of this is going to play out, and how all these different plot threads are connected: on one hand you have Airi and that evil Jaxa, then there is Airi’s quest to build the giant robot, Kaito with Frau about Killbala are also trying to get somewhere, and with this episode Airi’s sister also turned out to be completely different from what I imagined and that also is related to everything… somehow. She’s probably working for Jaxa, but even then I have no clue what the point of it all is. I mean that in a good way by the way, because I’m quite interested in finding out.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

Okay, so this show likes its anti-climaxes. In this episode we saw two examples of the creators toying with this: first of all, the lady of last week’s cliff-hanger is not a threat at all, and instead wants to help the lead characters build their robot, not to mention that she’s working for Akiho’s father. Then the end of this episode comes, and casually mentions that there is an evil organization about to kill 6/7th of the world population.

Instead there was this big typhoon acting as the red herring in this episode: totally unrelated to the plot, but it kept the characters busy, and Akiho now knows about Airi (which I believe should have happened earlier by the way), and I admit that the way in which they used Kaito’s time issues during the typhoon. It looked much more painful than the other times so far, good job from the creators.

It’s also quite a strange way for a guy to hide his reports, using some of the strangest requirements that could break down making some of the clues potentially unsolvable. I really wonder why. I mean, I get that he was a playful guy and all, but would even such a person want to joke about something so serious? Was there a reason why he had to keep things so secret to keep them from finding out?
Rating: 4.5/8 (Good)

What I love about this show: the slow build-up. Every episode it slowly builds up tension and raises the stakes in the midst of all the slice of life. You could really see this in Steins;Gate as well, even though the characters there turned it into a completely different anime. It’s pretty much how a slow pacing should be done: this series feels slow because it’s building up, not because i’ts padding for time.

This episode brought in a lot of mystery by also involving a murder plot involving an anime production staff, in which Fraukojiro’s mother was the main suspect. The whole episode being overlaid with that children’s song that is very often used to create a creepy atmosphere. It worked really well at the climax of this episode. It’s also not like the tension of each cliff-hanger is completely useless: it carries on over the next episode, as shown with how much Subaru changed here now that his father got into the picture.

The dialogues in this show by the way are quite down to earth, and I like that a lot about it: it fleshes them out really well. This episode was just one string of dialogues between different people, and it was actually quite well balanced: it didn’t go on and on around one particular couple, and yet the dialogues were long enough to give some extra character to the ones involved.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

This episode had some interesting developments: it’s turned into a bit of a murder mystery which I really liked. There are so many unanswered questions about this Kou Kimijima, about the things he created and left behind. His story is getting more complex and intertwined with the characters with every episode.

Then there was the end of this episode, that explained why Subaru has been acting strange over the series: his father. I feel that perhaps the creators could have just shown him, looking at the robot and taking Subaru away, rather than throwing that entire over the top tantrum, but perhaps it was the creators’ intention to make him into a psychopath like that.

Apart from that, lots of slice of life and people interacting with each other. Overall, I like these scenes as they show the cast getting to realize their dreams, although I do have to say that Kona is getting more annoying with every episode with her leet-speak.

Also, the supernatural is a bit unfair to the cast in this series. Kaito gets hit, and in return he gets powers that allow him to experience time really slowly, allowing him to be one of the best pilots in the world. Subaru gets powers… to faint. Mizuka… loses the ability to walk. That is some really unfair karma there…
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

This episode really reminded me of Sword Art Online, and how much better the execution of this show is. The big difference is that Robotics Notes isn’t all about wish fulfillment: the male lead can normally interact with girls without romantic hints being dropped over and over. The AI that appears actually acts a bit believably as an AI, instead of having a ridiculously contribed backstory, and the girls do no revolve around the main guy at all. That alone made this episode very refreshing to watch.

But there is more: as a big mystery-fan, I loved the second half of this episode when it started focusing on this. Where did that AI come from? What makes her so special in a series that’s actually about robots? Who made that prediction, and why did he know the exact times when the solar storms would happen? Why did this Kimjima Kou know Mizuka?

Also, Steins;Gate turned Cern into an evil organization. This show seems to do that with NASA and JAXA. I also like that they used their real names this time. I like this back-story as an added intrigue. The pacing of this show is slow, but it does add in quite some significant new stuff with every episode.

What I also liked what this episode did, was how it focused on the world itself: with beached whales, and talking about the wheather around the world. They’re small details, but these bring life to this series.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

This episode was mostly basic fodder for competition-based series: the part where the rivals end up working together after having shown off once, while other build-up stuff happens at the same time and new characterts get properly introduced. These were the most unremarkable parts of this episode: Fraukojiro turned out to be this shut-in who talks with internet speak, who really needs some time to warm up, and to be honest the world championships felt rather boring to me.

But then there were some parts in this episode that really impressed me: the background for the characters and the mystery. In particular the latter, as it’s finally revealed what some of the strange moments of the previous episodes were about, and it’s this strange phenomenon that occurred putting everyone to sleep. I really like the idea of one person experiencing time really fast, and the other really slow.

I like how they establish that this is a realistic setting, with supernatural events, right at the beginning, rather than pulling the magic card somewhere in the middle. This was a problem I had with Steins;Gate and Chaos;Head, so what I like about Robotics;Notes, even though Steins;Gate’s first four episodes still were much better, is that it does attempt to fix some of the issues that I had with its predecessors.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)