June 30th, 2020 
Charles Solomon 
High school seniors Kaito Yashio (Clifford Chapin) and Akiho Senomiya (Lindsay Seidel), the heroes of the offbeat sci-fi adventure Robotics;Notes, are the last remaining members of the Robot Research Club. But Kaito’s only interest is the video game Kill-Ballad: He’s ranked as the number five player in the world. He reluctantly helps his childhood friend, upbeat, enthusiastic Akiho, keep the club going.
As children, Kaito and Akiho went on a school field trip aboard the ship Anemone. A mysterious phenomenon that struck the ship left them afflicted with the “Elephant-Mouse Syndrome:” They’re subjects to seizures when time speeds up for them at a rate one second for one minute This weird condition helps Kaito score amazing moves at Kill-Ballad, but the attacks leave both characters exhausted.
Akiho wants to complete a project her older sister began with the club nine years ago: building a ‘life-size” model of Gunvarrel, the giant robot in an old TV series. She recruits Subaru (Jarrod Greene), a techno ace with a brutal father, and former karate club member Junna (Monica Rial), who’s fascinated by urban legends. They also draw in Frau Kojiro (Leah Clark) a teen-age programming wizard who wrote the Kill-Ballad game.
As Kaito explores the urban legends surrounding an abandoned museum, he meets the AI girl Airis (Appphia Yu). She helps him uncover frightening information: NASA has been concealing its discovery that after a series of major solar storms over the next few years, the sun will likely explode. The source of the information about the cover-up and the sinister plot behind it is the mysterious Kuo Kimijima, who created Airi and her alternate form Gezi before he was murdered. The filmmakers keep introducing new threats that complicate the tangled plot, rather than help resolve it.
Robotics;Notes is based on the third visual novel video game from 5pb. Inc. (now Mages), the creators of Chaos; Head and Steins;Gate. The original game was released in Japan in 2012; Production I.G’s broadcast series debuted the same year. (An English version of the enhanced Robotics;Notes Elite game is slated for multiple platforms this fall.)
Viewers who enjoyed the odd but engaging Steins;Gate (2011) will find parallels, as both properties involve amateur scientists who stumble onto world threatening problems. Robotics;Notes is interesting and even intriguing at times, but it lacks the outré appeal of its predecessor.
Steins;Gate centered on college student and self-proclaimed “mad scientist” Rintaro Okabe, who established the Future Gadget Lab to explore time travel. But for all his bluster and posturing, Okabe was a kind-hearted guy who won over the viewer, just as he did the characters he bullied into joining his Lab. Kaito’s one-note fixation on Kill-Ballad quickly wears thin, and his blithe indifference makes him hard to like.
The side characters in Robotics;Notes fail to gel as individuals or a group, the way Daru, Mayuri and the rest of the gang did in Steins;Gate. Frau’s demeanor lurches weirdly from too kewel for school disdain to leering sexuality. The Gunvarrel idea was clearly inspired by Gekiganger 3 in Martian Successor Nadesico. But the filmmakers didn’t research the old TV shows as meticulously, and the recreation/spoof doesn’t ring as true.
Season One of Robotics;Notes concludes with the menace from the sun hanging over the characters. The threat is somehow linked to the disappearance of Frau’s mother, the murder of Kimijima, the sudden appearance of the long-lost final episode of Gunvarrel, the sinister efforts of Akiho’s nasty older sister and, presumably, the Elephant-Mouse Syndrome. The filmmakers may manage to unsnarl all those plot threads in Season Two. In the meantime, viewers can have more fun re-watching Steins;Gate.
Robotics;Notes: Part One
Funimation: $48.74 4 discs, Blu-ray and DVD)
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