RobiHachi Review Episodes 2 + 3

Ground Roots Space Tourism?

Episode 2

Want a giant robot that doesn’t have real weapons and then a visit to Mars where the people are octopuses only maybe they aren’t? This anime continues to be weirdly amusing even if the main conflict ended up being resolved by an incredibly heavy handed parody of the standard ‘be yourself’ message. I mean, they pushed that hard enough it almost went straight past parody and into the realm of not knowing whether or not they were actually being half serious.

Alright, so we pick up from last week with Robi and Hachi inside the transformed robot and bickering about who is the lower and who is the upper half. Somehow or another they escape, though when they tried to fire their weapon it just made a really bright light which seems a bit odd but is explained by the end of the episode. Then they run away but because of fuel issues they land on Mars which works in their favour.

The debt collector is really obsessed with getting Robi and is prepared to chase him to the ends of the galaxy and kind of figures where Robi intends to head and goes to head him off. What the debt collector didn’t count on was Robi having to make a stop so the end result is that for now at least Robi and Hachi have a bit of breathing room. I do find it interesting though that Hachi intends to follow through on his job of collecting the money from Robi even if he doesn’t appear to be in any rush to do that.

This one is really just easy, if bizarre, watching as Robi and Hachi do the tourist thing on Mars and weirdness follows. Hachi ends up arrested because he learns the secret about the octopus people and Robi goes on a date that takes a turn for the strange. Ultimately they meet back up and the episode ends with them heading off for what I guess will be their next random adventure and if the episode title is anything to go by we’ll end up on Pluto.

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Episode 3

Alright, from Mars to Pluto with the debt collectors a whole leg of the journey behind in RobiHachi this week. Now, neither Robi nor Hachi want to be on Pluto, however apparently they were so successful at helping out Mars tourism, the representatives of Pluto decided that forcing them to help with their PR was a great idea.

There’s a lot of silliness here involving old-time mascots, Robi’s general gullibility when it comes to girls and breasts, as well as a giant robot battle that essentially amounts to kids in a playground shouting their super-secret moves and counters at one another because no one is actually game to fight. As stupid as it all sounds, it actually works and ends up being pretty funny.

The favourite moment of the episode though has to go to the inhabitants of Pluto fiercely objecting to having Pluto downgraded from a planet to a planetoid and their argument that a day of the week should not be named after a moon but rather after Pluto. Either that or listening to the representative and his daughter try and list the actual appeals of Pluto which amount to not very much given it is a frozen hunk of space rock and in this case inhabited by the ugliest Penguin you ever did see.

What I do like is that despite the skit like nature of this anime where so far each episode has kind of had its set up and then finished it off, they keep making it clear where the journey is going next. At the end of this episode Robi and Hachi are about to leave the solar system and it turns out someone other than Robi’s debt collectors are tracking them. I’m betting it has something to do with Hachi given they were tracking his credit and we know Robi doesn’t have any, but I guess we’ll have to wait and find out who else is after them and why.