Robotic Notes The Anime
Robotic Notes is the sequel to Chaos Child and takes place after Chaos Head. It is stand alone and accessible to anyone who has not seen the previous anime. What is notable about the Robotic Notes entry is its focus on previous events on what has happened over the years and returning cast members from Steins Gate.
It focuses on the robotics club on Tanegashima now led by Akiho Senomiya and her close friend Kaito Yashiro who are the only members of the club from their high school. Over the years, the club has become very technologically advance but no Tanegashima is in dire financial straits and members are trying desperately to prevent the robotics club from closing.
The team starts recruiting new members from their classrooms to help complete a new robot that has been in development for a long time. Kaito encounters a mysterious A.I named “Airi” and he finds out about a report called the “Kijjima” and now he and his friends are targets of the Committee of 300.
Theres now a secret resistance group fighting against the Committee of 300 with the Chaos and Steins Gate cast with some notable exception. If you played Steins Gate, you would know that one of their goals is to create mass genocide. In this anime, the Committee of 300 plan to eradicate most of humanity so that the wealthy elite can take over and its up to the robotics club to stop them.
The animation by Production I.G is incredible and the CGI for the most part blend in really well with the digital drawn cel animation. The visuals were very bright and a stark contrast to the darker style of Chaos and Steins Gate. The art was pretty good and the character designs were generally ok. The musical score is generally good. While the voice cast of the original game returns to reprise their roles, the English voice cast was a hit or miss. The characters all seem too familiar and cliched while some were just there for fanservice. Characters were all over the place and appeared and disappeared.
The show’s pace felt slow and takes a while for it to set up but it does pick up after a while. Alot of the scenes in the show didn’t really have any purpose and were only there just to pad the running time. Even the entire focus of building a robot was put in the backburner for the boring slice of life elements and for a Science Adventure entry. What the story does best is the sense of awe at the sight of robots and the workings that goes along creating them. What pass for comedy was the same recurring gimmick. The dialogue was cheesy and horrible.
Since it’s a science adventure, expect countless pop culture references especially mecha anime like Gundam and anything Hideaki Anno has worked on. In the show Gunvarrel is based off one of the most famous entries of the Gundam series Gundam Seed. Unlike Gundam Seed which was shown in its entirety, the finale of Gunvarrel was never shown on air because the Committee of 300 killed all of the staff members to further their goals of world domination because it was referencing the mass genocide through solar flares.
There is fanservice in the show but it feels very tacked and purely made for the fujoshi crowd. One scene in particular was really boundary crossing and very unpleasant where Aki and Junne were being sexually harassed by Mitushiko’s uncle who’s the president of Space Candy, and as a teacher, did nothing to stop it. The whole scene was just very uncomfortable to watch.
The story as in many science adventure ips’ has a very prevalent issue where subplots and plotpoints are introduced and is later dropped and many unresolved plot threads are left behind. Also, many of the scientific concepts that are supposed to be explained aren’t really fully developed, due to the preference on slice of life elements.
If you watched all of the Science Adventure anime and played the games by now, the story becomes predictable really quick. 4 out of 5 times (Chaos Child) the Committee of 300’s plans will fail and the endings will often be bittersweet to a total downer at worst (Chaos Child) but Robotics Notes has the happiest ending of a Science Adventure entry. However, even the ending feels cliched as they all live happily ever after and the Committee of 300 is still there so that more Science Adventure entries could be made and Anonymous Code being saved to resolve all of the plotholes.
The action scenes were well executed but very predictable. In some scenes, it felt more like it was really little kids pitting robots against each other. Some missed opportunities for scenes that could have been used would be Misaki apologizing to her friends for abandoning them, and for what she has done and saying how proud she is of the robotics dream for not just finishing the gunvaralel mech but also for achieving their dreams showing they have more than just the “right stuff”.
This wasn’t really that enjoyable than I thought it would have been and this story is basically Haruhi but with Mechs.
It gets 2out of 5 stars.
I could only recommend this series to a hardcore science adventure fan. It looks as if Mages/5pb is milking this series for all its worth.