Robotics;Notes

It has always been the aspiration of the Central Tanegashima High School Robotics Research Club to complete the GunPro1, a fully functioning giant robot. For years, the members of the club have contributed to its progress and it is now Akiho Senomiya's goal to finally make the dream of all the past club members become a reality. However, things are not as easy as they seem as the club lacks the funding for such a huge endeavor. Aside from that, the only other club member, Kaito Yashio, shows no interest in assisting his childhood friend and instead indulges in playing mecha-fighting games on his "PokeCom."

As Kaito is in the middle of wasting his days, he receives an indecipherable message and hears a voice that seems to be drowned out by the noise of static. He searches for the source, only to realize that it came from Airi Yukifune, an AI which only exists within the augmented reality system accessible via the PokeCom. Robotic;Notes follows the story of Kaito as he discovers a peculiar report in Airi's database, one that would have disastrous consequences in the future.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Furugoori, Kona Main

Nazuka, Kaori Japanese

Senomiya, Akiho Main

Nanjou, Yoshino Japanese

Yashio, Kaito Main

Kimura, Ryouhei Japanese

Yukifune, Airi Main

Kugimiya, Rie Japanese

Hidaka, Subaru Main

Hosoya, Yoshimasa Japanese

Daitoku, Junna Main

Tokui, Sora Japanese

Tennouji, Nae Supporting

Yamamoto, Ayano Japanese

Irei, Mizuka Supporting

Honda, Takako Japanese

Kimijima, Kou Supporting

Morikawa, Toshiyuki Japanese

Senomiya, Misaki Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Wada, Jouji Producer

Kimura, Makoto Producer

Katsumata, Hideo Producer

Reviews

Mar 20, 2022

LightScaryRobo

Recommended

This story was kind of... average? It didn't jump out to me at all but it was a relatively intuitive concept. It was enjoyable, but it did not feel like anything particularly special.


My opinion on the animation jumps from being very engaged to being able to tell the different layers apart - you can see when something is a background layer because the art style isn't actually the same.


The voice acting is comedic and well done. The openings and endings were decent. They kind of blended together a bit but were good to bob your head to.


Kona Furugoori (Frau Koujiro) - ... The creator of Kill-Ballad. She joins the Robotics Club as the team's programmer.

Akiho Senomiya - The main female protagonist of the series. She is the President of the Robot Research Club.

Kaito Yashio (Kai) The main male protagonist of the series. He is a skilled player of Kill-Ballad and a member of the Robotics Club.

Airi Yukifune - Airi is IROU's A.I.

Subaru Hidaka (Mr Pleiades) - A skilled roboticist who won the Robo-One championship

Junna Daitoku - A karate practitioner and a member of the Robotics Club. She has a phobia of robots.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jan 4, 2023

Disapeared_Ghost

Mixed Feelings

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.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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Nov 9, 2019

mouthpiece

Not Recommended

This is the third adaptation of a visual novel made by Nitroplus, after Chaos;Head and Steins;Gate. And no, despite all three VNs taking place in the same setting, they have absolutely no connection to each other, besides a few Easter eggs with no relevance to the plot. You don’t need to watch the earlier shows in order to better understand what is going on. In fact, they are so distinctive in their plots and characters, that each one leaves you with an equally different feeling.
- C;H is enraging you for wasting so many good concepts in a messy plot full of stereotypes and cop-out battles.
- ... S;G is exciting you for having so many lively characters and an interesting blend of mystery and science fiction.
- R;N is making you … feel nothing. Really. There is nothing in it.

The show is animated by Production I.G. a studio which does wonders when it comes to science fiction but has otherwise a very hard time to make characters who don’t act like robots. And indeed, the production values are ok, but there is simply nothing special about them in terms of aesthetics. It’s just a typical looking school, with typical looking people, doing silly stuff. Almost like a K-On clone.

The cast is also fairly generic and uninteresting, you basically get a gamer who is bored with his life, being surrounded by cute girls and doing silly things just to win in an amateur giant robot tournament. And he is constantly motivated by an aloof energetic girl. It is all very basic and the much recent to it Hyouka blows it out of the water with its similar main duo.

The earlier two adaptations had very eccentric characters and a story that was full of superpowers, mystery, murder, mysticism, weird science fiction and otaku culture. Well, R;N has some of the last part and nothing of the rest. Seriously, it’s school life comedy about a few teenagers making a robot and taking part in a school tournament. NOTHING MORE! It occasionally tries to be mysterious by having all sorts of weird stuff going on, such as some sort of psychological syndrome, or a ghost girl only videogame screens can see, or the sun being speculated of blowing up and NASA is an evil organization. But they never try to do anything much with those, other than trying to keep you awake from the otherwise totally boring plot. I had ten times more fun watching Plawress Sanshiro and that is an almost 30 year old show.

I understand what the scriptwriter was trying to do here. The show is basically a tribute to mecha shows and tries to present them from a more humorous and realistic perspective. Even as such though, it just doesn’t have any particular hook for the average viewer to be interested in it. The objective of the story is very weak and the two protagonists are not likable at all. They are just a bored gamer and stupid girls; you want to slap them instead of rooting for them. Also, there have been much older mecha parodies, such as Nadesico and DaiGuard which did a much better job for having far more interesting stories and characters.

Furthermore, since the series is based on a visual novel, you will be constantly getting a lot of stuff that many be very appealing to the average gamer, but completely ridiculous for everybody else. Episode 14 is an easy example of that; the gamer literally saved the world from a robotic invasion, while playing videogames in a dark room like a NEET and while next to him he had a half naked creepy girl who wants to do all sorts of deviant things with him. And even if it sounds awesome as an event, even that was presented in a most dull way. The show fails even in pandering its target audience! In episode 16 you practically have the gamer witnessing a death of a dear person and by the next episode he acts like it wasn’t important at all and he is back to playing games and building robots.

Thus R;N is a waste of time that will only appeal to some for its nostalgic take on a subject that others already did 10 times better, 30 years ago, and with just a fraction of this show’s budget. Not recommended.

And now for some excused scorings.
ART SECTION: 6/10
General Artwork 1/2 (generic)
Character Figures 1/2 (generic)
Backgrounds 2/2 (basic but fitting with the feeling of the series)
Animation 1/2 (basic)
Visual Effects 1/2 (basic)

SOUND SECTION: 6/10
Voice Acting 2/3 (corny but fitting with the feeling of the series)
Music Themes 2/4 (mediocre)
Sound Effects 2/3 (ok I guess)

STORY SECTION: 3/10
Premise 1/2 (simple)
Pacing 0/2 (dull and slow)
Complexity 1/2 (not much)
Plausibility 0/2 (none)
Conclusion 1/2 (simple)

CHARACTER SECTION: 4/10
Presence 1/2 (generic)
Personality 0/2 (simple and annoying)
Backdrop 1/2 (generic and simplistic but it’s there)
Development 1/2 (overblown but it’s there)
Catharsis 1/2 (overblown but it’s there)

VALUE SECTION: 1/10
Historical Value 0/3 (none)
Rewatchability 0/3 (no reason to rewatch it)
Memorability 1/4 (a few nice ideas for gamers but otherwise nothing worth remembering)

ENJOYMENT SECTION: 1/10
Art 0/1 (looks typical)
Sound 0/2 (sounds meh)
Story 1/3 (some nice ideas presented in a most dull way)
Characters 0/4 (simple and annoying)

VERDICT: 3.5/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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