Robotics;Notes was never going to have an easy time. Not when it was following Steins;Gate, one of the most critically lauded series in recent memory. I’d say there were high expectations, but most discussion before its airing was rather muted. Nobody believed it could have ever been as good as Steins;Gate. Fortunately, by being part of Nitroplus’ and 5pb.’s Science;Noun (or Semicolon or whatever you want to call it) metaseries, it was also preceded by ChäoS;HEAd. Which was absolutely shite. Nobody believed it could be worse than that (spoiler: it isn’t). Expectations were surprisingly balanced and realistic.
This time around, instead of dealing with conspiracies involving time-travel and murder à la Steins;Gate or conspiracies involving dimensions… and swords and… whatever the fuck Chaos;Head was actually about, we get conspiracies involving robots, augmented reality and the motherfucking sun.
The story of Robotics;Notes revolves around (or at least starts with) our two protagonists, Kaito Yashio and Akiho Senomiya, who are the sole members of their school’s robotics club. Akiho wants to fulfil her older sister’s dream of building a giant robot from the (fictional) anime series Gunvarrel, but their club is in danger of being shut down. Naturally, she does all she can to keep it running, entering a hobby robot competition for a start. Kai is mostly only along for the ride, being her childhood friend. But their connection runs a little deeper than that – years ago, a strange incident on the S.S. Anemone left them both unconscious and with a curious condition where they occasionally have seizures. These seizures however cause them to perceive time differently – for Akiho, a few hours will seem like minutes (putting her into a precarious position where her breathing and heartbeat drop considerably), whereas Kai will experience a few seconds as if it were minutes (placing a great stress on his body).
One day, after seeing some strange things on his PokeCom – a tablet-sized smartphone with augmented reality (AR) capabilities – he investigates a nearby abandoned facility. Here, he discovers and downloads an AR annotation, which turns out to be the first of the Kimijima Reports, and everything begins to get a bit crazy.
To call the plot of Robotics;Notes a mixed bag would be an understatement. Everything good is really good; everything bad is quite disappointing. But let’s start with the good: a fuckton of thought and planning has gone into the overarching story. It really is quite intelligent. The conspiracy is wide-reaching and intricate, with a lot of subtle foreshadowing and plentiful callbacks. Small details early on end up taking a surprisingly large role within the conspiracy, and seemingly insignificant elements that are introduced without much fanfare can play a major part in the story. Everything has its place, very little is pointless, and even the shocking twists stay comfortably consistent with everything that’s known. It even manages to tie in Steins;Gate and Chaos;Head in a meaningful way, as well as reference real world conspiracy theories. Despite the scale, scope and complexity of the plot and the conspiracy that is in the centre of it all, it never goes nonsensical or becomes illogical. Provided you’re willing to take the time to look into it all, everything makes sense within the reality they construct. If.
The problem with the plot is that there’s just too much to it. Becoming lost amongst all the details and outstanding plot threads is trivially easy, and it’s very difficult to keep track of it all, and know what is relevant to a given situation and why. If you forget a plot point earlier on, a whole scene may make no sense. This is a problem that really raises itself early on, becomes persistent in the second half, and almost ruins everything near the end. Being genuinely confused about what’s going on isn’t fun, and instils a sense of indifference, as it becomes difficult to care about what’s happening. Why would you when you have no idea why it’s even important? And while most everything that appears has legitimate and necessary significance, the few things that don’t stand out painfully – most egregiously, the monopoles (“Wow! This changes everything we know about science! Let’s just use them for a fuel and never actually investigate where they came from or anything.”).
This is all largely an issue with execution, although scaling back the size, reach and complexity of the conspiracy certainly would have helped. The flaws in the execution are quite easy to see. First, the pacing is iffy. The first half is really slow, with too much time spent finding the Kimijima Reports, and not enough time showing their importance. Lending more time to the conspiracy, having the characters piece together everything they know to help the audience do the same, it would have helped a lot. Giving the audience more information than it did would be problematic though. By and large, we only ever know about as much as Kai does, if not more as we do occasionally see things from the perspectives of unrelated people. This does create an interesting way of looking at the plot, of feeling as out of our depth as Kai did… if it ever looked like he didn’t know what was going on. His easy understanding of everything unfurling around him only serves to make the viewer’s experience more frustrating than anything else.
At least it all, y’know, makes sense to some degree, unlike Chaos;Head.
One of Steins;Gate’s great strengths was its diverse, charming and memorable cast, all of them as brilliant as the other, helping bring a great sense of personality to the series. Even Chaos;Head had some memorable and interesting characters, even if most of them weren’t. Robotics;Notes doesn’t quite reach the level Steins;Gate did in this regard, but it continues the trend at the very least.
Kai starts out as the least interesting of the core group, seemingly falling to MC-itis. He doesn’t really have a strong opinion on anything, doesn’t get excited for much, won’t do anything asked of him unless the asker can beat him in a round of his favourite game, he’s just your average, every day, generic high school male lead. Sometimes he even comes across as bit of an asshole. A disappointment after Okabe. To his credit though, he gets better as the series progresses, and he’s shown to care and be more active than he ever really lets on to Aki. He even becomes a bit of a badass towards the end.
Akiho is Kai’s childhood friend, president of the school’s robotics club, and optimistic and energetic as fuck. She’s a massive fan of Gunvarrel, and basically approaches life like she’s living in a b-grade, hot-blooded mecha anime. She brings a ton of personality to the show, and is often (unknowingly) driving the plot – her desire to impress her sister is a very important aspect to the plot. She provides a great counterpoint to Kai’s stoicism, and when the drama or tragedy of what she’s involved in gets to her, the massive swing in her mood does a great job of emphasizing just how much of a big deal it really is. The way she’s incorporated into the story does cause some problems however. Both she and Frau’s personalities are such that they often cause some major inconsistencies with the tone of the series, providing far too much optimism or humour for a situation that does not call for it. In a later episode, Aki delivers a speech straight out of a hot-blooded mecha anime… despite being in a life-and-death situation and therefore fucking up the tone of the situation dramatically. It’s not so much her as a character, as to how she’s occasionally handled in the writing that causes these issues, but by and large she’s incredibly entertaining and endearing.
Jun and Subaru both suffer from largely the same issues – some really memorable, important or interesting early episodes that give way to a relative irrelevance later on. Jun is shy and cute and stuff, and starts out with a fear of robots, which eventually gets resolved in quite a pleasant episode. Subaru is the more mature and serious member of the team, but has a glamorous, secret secondary life. He also has some family issues which don’t really get resolved in a satisfying way. But in the end, they’re just kinda there. Neither important nor particularly entertaining. A waste of potential, particularly in Subaru’s case.
Kona ‘Frau’ Furugoori is easily the standout cast member. Hikikomori, fujoshi genius programmer with a stutter, she basically steals every scene she’s in. The cynically minded may decree her as a character designed to pander to the otaku fanbase, but that doesn’t change just how damn entertaining she genuinely is. Frau isn’t just comic relief though – Robotics;Notes does an excellent job with her characterization, making her sympathetic and giving her an emotional character arc. It’s a shame that everything that happens between Kai and her is forgotten a little too easily afterwards, but that doesn’t remove the depth that it gives her, nor does it undermine her importance and contributions to the plot.
As for the rest of the characters? Unlike Steins;Gate, Robotics;Notes has quite the large cast, and does a frankly excellent job of making all the important ones distinct and standout. They get characterization, a certain level of depth depending on their importance, and meaningful involvement in the story to varying degrees. They’re all handled pretty damn well.
It’s easy to focus on all the negative aspects of Robotics;Notes, because they’re pretty damn noticeable. The thing is it almost all comes down to an inconsistent execution of a story that was probably just too ambitious. It was clear that they sat down and planned this intricate, far-reaching and massive conspiracy, but when it came to telling that in a cohesive and coherent manner, they failed to some degree. Had they scaled it back a touch and sped the pacing of the first half up to give more time to the important events in the second, the general opinion of this series would likely be a lot better.
As it currently stands for me personally, Robotics;Notes sits in a really awkward situation. If I give the story and the narrative greater weighting than I currently do, this series is quite easy to rate as decent, but significantly flawed in some key areas. If I consider the characters, their interactions and just my general enjoyment of the show more important to determining the overall quality, I could safely say that it was really entertaining with some brilliant characters, and a plot that while awkward in some manners can easily be forgiven. But neither of those are the case – I’m stuck right in between the two of them!
Looking back though, I remember far more moments where I was having a ton of fun, really cared about what was going on, and was sincerely enjoying Robotics;Notes. And it’s that entertainment factor that just nudges it score for me.
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