Robotics;Notes

It seems it was just left out of the anime. In the VN it's revealed she died.

You mean IMPACTO!

edited 21st Mar '13 7:48:08 PM by tvsgood

Not a good ending. It does that nasty shounen thing acting like defeating the bad guy is all we want to see. Then again, even Psycho Pass did that.

The battle though, was pretty good for the amount of realism they managed to include.

So yeah, in the end that's all there was to it. The series was fraught with pacing issues, didn't really want to bring anything new to the table and didn't take the time to end properly. Strange, Visual Novels usually have pretty definitive endings.

I feel like it would have worked a lot better if it was given 24 episodes.

Apparently, the anime left out a bunch of info and stuff from the VN. Like how it was Kai's dream to be an astronaut, which is what lead to that ending scene...

edited 21st Mar '13 9:10:56 PM by tvsgood

They might have been trying to reference that with the flashbacks of an excited Kai watching the rocket launch.

Okay, so where the hell did the monopoles come from? That's all I really want to know.

The rest of it while not explicitly stated can be inferred from context, but the monopoles literally just fell from the sky for no reason and ended up being the key to their victory.

Edit: The Right Stuff is a movie about astronauts, so I thought it was pretty obvious from the beginning that Misaki was encouraging him to pursue his dream of being an astronaut, as a kid.

edited 22nd Mar '13 3:21:05 PM by Clarste

The monopoles were due to the experiments Kimijima Kou was doing. Note haw they start falling shortly after Kai does the thing with the satellite dish.

...what kind of experiments was he doing?

That, more than anything else, seems like a plot device to me. I mean, the AR stuff and artificial intelligence and even brainwashing were all foreshadowed heavily before they were abused, and I can completely buy that blowing up something in the atmosphere could have a worldwide effect, but making monopoles of all things magically appear in the sky in such a way that only one group of people in one tiny region of Japan seems to be find them...

It was pretty much the same shit he was doing with the boat Kai and Aki were on. Remember the machine in his basement that was sending out those signals? They were messing with the Earth's atmosphere. That's why when they put the thing from the machine into Noah IV, Kai got the seizures.

I assume Kimijima's robots also needed monopoles.

It was pretty obvious he made them with his experiments, and that's probably why.

edited 22nd Mar '13 3:53:55 PM by UltimatelySubjective

That doesn't explain magnetic monopoles. Very few things do, honestly. I mean, I suppose this is a universe where you can accidentally make a time machine out of a microwave, but it's certainly a lot easier to accept one leap of science as the central conceit of a series than it is to accept that monopoles spontaneously appear as a side effect of unrelated experiments.

Also, he didn't really need robots. He used them, certainly, but they weren't central to his experiments. He certainly wouldn't need to invent a world-changing, physics-defying object just to power them...

edited 22nd Mar '13 3:56:30 PM by Clarste

Like I said, I doubt they're a side effect.

I don't really know anything about real robots, but don't those monopoles give them just the slight handwave they needed for the motor issues of the robots?

But complaints may be grounded. Kimijima is basically doing G La DOS level SCIENCE!, just with a goal.

edited 22nd Mar '13 4:02:29 PM by UltimatelySubjective

Monopoles are a theoretical entity predicted by string theory that have never been proven to exist, and if they do it must be in extraordinarily tiny amounts undetectable by modern science. They're about as extreme a thing as Dark Matter, and break the familiar laws of physics about as much as black holes. The existence of monopoles is about as absurd as time travel, and just as much of a big deal. They certainly aren't the kind of thing you throw in as a handwave for something else. Even having the robots powered by cold fusion or something would sound less absurd to me.

Edit: Also, it's not like there weren't other competing robot companies who would presumably not be in on the conspiracy. I doubt they all had monopoles, nor would they have been necessary for all giant robots. I felt it was just thrown in to give a group of high school students an unbeatable edge since we can hardly expect them to have a full R&D division.

edited 22nd Mar '13 4:07:05 PM by Clarste

Episode 22: Uh, yeah. It certainly happened. Fight scene was decent, but what I really wanted was more epilogue stuff. Would have liked to get a glimpse of what the Robo Club did after they graduated. Kai supposedly became an astronaut, would've been nice to expand on that.

So, there. No feels. Overall, the show's a decent watch. Decent fun factor, decent mechanical value.

Needed 24 episodes.

Would have helped, yeah.

Hopefully they will make the conclusion of the plot suitably... Ahem, impacting when they get their shot at Super Robot Wars.

Jokes aside. I heard that the author himself said there would be no SRW to R;N. Can anyone confirm that?

Well, the Gun Pro 2 or whatever certainly doesn't make sense for SRW, but I could see an actual Gunvarrel in SRW-though, that seems like a cameo/walk on type of thing.

Dai-Guard is already in there. Close enough, right?

Well, sheesh, am I the only person on this site who actually really liked this show? I mean, sure, I can't compare it to Steins;Gate because I've never seen that, and I can't compare it to the original VN because I've never played that, but still...

I mean, yes, the show did leave loose threads hanging, and it's not at the level of my "outstanding" shows, but for what it did show, I thought it was fantastic. Not to mention, I really liked the main leads; they both have surprising depth and their relationship is much more complex than it may seem at first.

Or maybe I'm just weird.

I liked it, monopoles aside.

I thought it was good, but not "fantastic" as you deem it.

I thought the story could have used a bit more polish, personally.

edited 15th Apr '13 4:25:24 AM by fillerdude

On a technical level, Robotics Notes was indeed very well done. What I found disappointing was that, from the Expo thing on, the story seemed to focus on one goal alone ("let's defeat the villain with a Giant Robot"), smothering most of the other story lines that were set up (the relationships of the man five characters, the story of Kona's mother, the relationship between Aki and her sister); the only plot thread that was really picked up again during that time was the Official Couple.

Admittedly, that main plot taking centre stage is only natural, but it felt very unsatisfying to be left hanging with so many unresolved plot threads. Overall, I found it a fairly good show, but definitely not excellent.

edited 15th Apr '13 4:14:29 AM by jkbeta

It's finally here.

Finished watching the series, posted my thoughts. Thought the leads were strong and likable though not groundbreaking. There's definitely some jarring tones and plot threads and while there is a theme of community, it does come a bit out of nowhere. For me, the premise of just building a giant robot could actually be interesting on its own. The conspiracy thing in hindsight ends up hampering the flow since at a certain point the villain is just "there". Then again, it seems to be convention in the Sci Adv series to have it.