I honestly just picked this up since it got recommended to me on the Jump+ app and I was a fan of the original Kuroko manga to give it a shot. I had no expectations and I felt disappointed by the end of it.
Story and Art: Robot x Laserbeam has a pretty typical sports manga setup (protag is somehow really good at the sport but doesn't care much for it, meets a rival who ignites his passion for said sport). The setup really allowed for this series to continue for longer than the 62 chapters it got, but WSJ is a brutal periodical and I can see why it got axed rather quickly. The problem with the setup is that it doesn't really go anywhere afterwards. The protagonist and his rival now have a goal, but then the story just doesn't do anything with that. There's a timeskip that essentially cuts out a significant portion of time that could've been used to develop characters. I'm still sitting here wondering why Fujimaki did that for seemingly no reason so early on in the series (there's no way he knew he was getting cut from WSJ at this point of the story). The rest of the series just showcased one tournament arc and then like 1/3 of one before ending (my guess is after the first tournament arc, Fujimaki heard he was getting axed). It was just lacklustre all around because there were so many characters being introduced in the chapters leading up to the conclusion; none of which ever end up being used or developed past just a copy/paste Generation of Miracles-esque design. The art itself is fine, but just boring and repetitive.
Characters: This is where I had the biggest gripes with the series as a whole. Almost all of the characters are just carbon copies from Kuroko no Basket and it's pretty evident with their designs. Even their personalities were almost carbon copies and it just sucks. It's difficult to develop characters for a sports manga that isn't repetitive/the same as another character from another series, but I felt that the character designs/development in this manga specifically were lazy. The protagonist was basically Kuroko but not invisible and played golf really well and a lot of the other characters had a mashup of personality traits from the Generation of Miracles/Seirin. You can really see the influences from Kuroko in a majority of the designs, which can be a good thing, but I just found it was repetitive. It's also not Fujimaki's fault that he introduced all these powerful rival characters only to have the plug pulled from right underneath him, but I could immediately match each character's design with a specific sports manga rival personality or draw parallels from Kuroko.
Enjoyment: The manga was pretty standard for the first 8 chapters and I felt myself wanting to continue with the series. I kept going with it until the end because it was short, but it was just one disappointment after another. The story loses its charm once you start drawing parallels and seeing how repetitive it is. I love sports anime/manga and I know there's going to be a degree of repetition in the genre, but Robot x Laserbeam was just way too similar to Kuroko no Basket and I couldn't enjoy it. The only thing I didn't mind was the lack of supernatural signature moves and things were more rooted in reality, but I feel like that would end up happening if this manga got a longer runtime than it did.
Overall, Robot x Laserbeam is just disappointing as a manga. There's just way too many missing story sections to make it something worth anyone's time. The characters just felt like a carbon copy of Kuroko characters and it was very hard for me to dissociate with that parallel once it was made. It's just kind of sad how it got cancelled by WSJ after 62 chapters and I feel like if it was serialized in a different magazine (Jump SQ for example), it would've been better for the story/pacing.
