Rinne no Lagrange Impressions

Girls fighting with robots. Something that always works.

This show is a good example of how you can’t judge a series based on the first few episodes. If you had asked me what I thought about Rinne no Lagrange after three episodes I would’ve said it was the best robot show I’ve seen in years. That opinion quickly changed after the two episodes that followed it as they were quite a bit worse. Still, if you want a robot show that feels much more modern than something like Aquarion Evol then I’d recommend giving this a look.

The story follows the very familiar robot show setup where our main character, Madoka, has to pilot a robot, despite being a high school student, and fight off aliens. What made the show feel unique is how Madoka responded to everything happening around her and how it, in some ways, felt like it was poking fun at the genre tropes. Like many aspects of the show it feels like a modern show made for people who have already seen these kinds of shows a million times as it, especially in the first three episodes, skipped many of the boring bits we’re used to and just cut straight to the good stuff. Taking place on some picturesque island, the series makes good use of colors and music to create a futuristic feel about it. Robot designs have a good sense of art direction to them with swoopy lines and there is an emphasis on blue, green and teal colors.

I enjoyed pretty much all of the action scenes whenever they happened.

What really makes this show work is Madoka. She’s basically insane as she takes whatever happens rather well. Doesn’t matter if it’s robots or aliens, really, as she keeps her cheerful attitude and requires only a minimal amount of persuasion to jump into the robot. Her main motivation is protecting the town and all her friends in it. She knows people on sort of a friendly acquaintances level rather than as close friends since she’s so busy helping everyone all the time. She’s not lonely or anything as she’s too busy for that. Still, it seems inevitable that the other robot pilots will naturally gravitate into those closer friend roles for her over time.

What all the fighting is about is pretty vague as it’s a conflict between two different alien factions that just happens to take place on earth. It’s not even obvious who the good guys are as you just kind of have to take their word for it that it’s something that matters for humanity. For Madoka it does since the fighting risks destroying her home and for a while that motivation for the story was good enough for me. Right now though the story is trying to make things more elaborate and I’m not sure I like where it’s going. I’m still curious, though, to where it will go so it still has my interest.

A male pilot clearly overcompensating.

The weakness of the show is whenever it stops following Madoka and focuses on the politics behind the conflict and side characters. They’re all fine I guess, but they don’t do that well when you’ve got such a strong lead and whenever she wasn’t on screen the magic of the first three episodes started draining away. I could see what the story was trying to do and that it had some purpose for building up the story to pay it off later on. It should’ve been done quicker or differently because the side characters just aren’t interesting enough. They are too “normal” compared to the main character and the few moments she showed up on screen that became obvious, as she appeared to be insane in comparison to whatever character the plot was following at the time.

Madoka and the useless commander saying something nobody cares about.

That said, some of the side character were pretty fun as my favorite is the human commander of the base where the robots are stored. He tries to be as important as his role suggests that he should be, but he’s basically useless. The entire alien conflict is kind of out of his depth and he has no real control or authority over any of the robots and can only stand there shouting orders that ultimately nobody listens to. The other people in the control room sometimes give him a sympathetic look as they feel sorry for him being the most useless person in the entire show despite all his efforts not to be.

Rinne no Lagrange started out very strong and kind of fizzled out for a while, but it has plenty of potential to get back to the good stuff. It just feels like a bit of a waste to me that it had to go down in quality given how much I enjoyed the first three episodes. I want to be able to recommend shows with full confidence and not have to list all the bad things that might ruin the show for you. But “perfect” shows are extremely rare and as it turns out this isn’t one of them. I still highly recommend it though!

There is an actual plot reason to why her ass is examined in detail here.