English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Attack the Multiple Grid”

Robomaid Vs. Robololi! Who will win?

Spoilers Below

Courtesy: Funimation

Alright everyone, huddle up! Here’s the plan. Using some of Marie’s contacts with the meisters’ guild, we’re going to hack into the central control tower and make it look as if Naoto is a terrorist causing mayhem from the deep underground. That will draw the military into a confrontation with the doomsday weapon, and hopefully, they can take it out. In the meantime, RyuZU is going to be on a floor several levels up. This will draw AnchoR away from the battle, and up where they can free her from the control of those crazy glasses. Sound good? Sure! Let’s do this! RyuZU has one small request, however. She’d like Marie to come along to help. The former meister agrees. After Naoto’s supervillain act, they come under the attack of the military, and RyuZU leads them down below. Just as predicted, AnchoR shows up to do battle with her big sister. The duel takes place in Imaginary Time, a sort of dimension that occurs during time stop. Here, we find that the big, three-dimensional grid we saw during RyuZU’s last time stop is a physical phenomenon, and the young combat automation continuously gets tangled up in the white beams.

Courtesy: Funimation

One other conversation that took place, however: RyuZU isn’t sure if she can beat AnchoR. Worse yet, she isn’t sure she can save AnchoR, even if she beats her. It is just as likely that if she beats her younger sister, she’ll only end up destroying her instead. Naoto has a strategy to get around that, and he revealed it all to her before Marie came up with her supervillain plot. He tells RyuZU to use him as a shield. He noticed during their previous fight, AnchoR would not target him or Marie, and only went after Halter when he attacked. His guess is that her Asimov programming is still in effect, and she won’t do anything to hurt humans intentionally. Using him as a shield would stop the little robot in her tracks, giving RyuZU a chance to destroy the mask that controls her sister. The battle in Imaginary Time rages on, with AnchoR’s cube-o’-doom even warping the space-time around it like a black hole. Finally, Loli-Robo throws herself headlong at the older android… And comes to a screeching halt. RyuZU has stepped aside, not to hide behind Naoto, but Marie. This was why she asked for Marie to come along. As a sacrificial lamb should Naoto’s plan not work! Fortunately, it does. The mask gets sliced in half, and the battle is over. With Imaginary time dropped, nobody was the wiser that RyuZU used Marie as a shield. They take the little robot to their base to get fixed up. She registers as Naoto’s property as well. Thankfully, we don’t have the same registration process RyuZU used because we don’t need that kind of awkward again.

This episode tried to do something dramatic with how it presented its plot. I have to give it to them there. The plan was revealed to us in bits by flashback as it was unfolding before us. This gave us the feeling of in medias res, while still getting the exposition out of the way. The only problem here was the number of overlaid plans and different scenes made it a bit difficult to pick out which scene was where in the timeline. Doable, but more effort than I wanted to go into. This leads into a fight with the military, and it’s the exact same fight we saw in episode one! From a plotline perspective, this is almost always fun. I like it when writers telegraph a scene from early on in the series. This time, however, wasn’t as cool. It was merely a re-cut of content from the first episode. They didn’t do any new stuff in the scene, and just reduced a previous scene and repeat it. That’s wasting storytelling time. In fact, the original cut was more impressive and impactful, though no better animated.

Other animation was… there. I guess. Really this episode’s main battle sequence used as many animation shortcuts as they could. Two Y-Series duking it out should have unveiled the true animation potential of this series and it really didn’t deliver. There wasn’t anything happening enough to hold my attention. RyuZU would dodge. The anchor would get stuck. She’d break herself free and go after RyuZU again. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Oh, something happened? RyuZU just lost a scythe? Oh, that may have reduced her fighting ability, but it didn’t change the pattern. Rinse. Repeat.

The voice acting felt off to me. Almost as if the voice actors weren’t actually watching the footage they were acting for. Skyler McIntosh’s reading for Marie in the early portions seemed far too chipper for a girl explaining battle plans. Even though Marie was smiling, the voice said “I’m so happy!” and not, “I’m confident in my plan, and I know it will work.” Which is how it feels it should be said. Other points were very similar. The characters just didn’t sound in line with how it felt they should be emoting. The best voice acting we got in this episode was from Monica Rial, playing as AnchoR. Oh, and that character spent most of her actual lines acting like an emotionless, will-less robot. What little acting we got during the end was more in line with the character’s emotional state than anything else in the episode. Furthermore, I would like to ask what happened to Holster through the whole thing? His part in the military fight was cut down considerably, and in the fight against AnchoR, he wasn’t even present. Did he get sent after the doomsday weapon, and I just missed it?

So, all around, this episode was a bit of a let-down for me. It wasn’t as terrible as some others, even in this series, but it isn’t the best I’ve seen. I give it five human shields out of ten.

SCORE
5.0/10