Saturday 2 February 2013

Robotics;Notes - Episode 15

Even though the robot uprising in Tokyo was prevented before it went too far, things aren't still looking too healthy in the world of technology in the wake of the latest solar flare to hit the Earth - at the centre of all these issues is the Iru-O system, which is glitching all over the place and having more long periods of downtime for maintenance than PSN.

Whether its related to these glitches or not, AR avatar Airi is also playing up and acting strangely as she incessantly talks of the wather and jumps around excitedly in the anticipation of snow that will never arrive.  With news of another round of Iru-O maintenance which might cause all of the system's data to be deleted, such an occurrence could also mean an end for Airi - although for Kai's part, he's more worried about unlocking the final Kimijima reports before his tool to do so disappears.


Ultimately however, Airi and Kai's drive to nab these reports intertwine somewhat - having unlocked the sixth report thanks to a spot of surfing, it's revealed that there are no flags to unlock the final report, leaving the only question to be resolved that of where the report can be found.  With Airi adamant that she wants to go "home", Kai makes a shocking discovery in the building where he first discovered her, which brings us a view of Airi's back story as a living, breathing girl with a terrible illness, put into suspended animation by Kimijima until she can be cured.

While there can be no doubt that "stuff happened" once again in this week's episode of Robotics;Notes, it remains hard to really get excited about any of it - the revelations regarding Airi were interesting enough but wasted by Kai's reaction to them (just calling the police is the sensible thing to do, but not the good anime story-telling thing to do) and the rest of the episode was trying to get us to care about Airi in a way that did little for me, possibly because it's a minor twist on something we've seen umpteen times before.  But hey, maybe we can get back to focusing on robots and the possible fate of mankind properly sometime soon?

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