Ryoko’s Case Files 5: Finally, A Crazy Seemingly Indestructible Knife-Wielding Robot Killing Machine

Just what every anime series needs.

Summary:
Two workers are driving in a seemingly normal transport vehicle which is carrying its cargo to its destination in Fukui. They unfortunately get into a car crash and in the process they end up jarring the luggage, which appears to be some sort of machinery which proceeds to activate. Outside of a cafe, Ryoko sits with Izumida and his loli cousin, Mana. She claims its to stop him from being close to a grade-schooler if its for… unsavoury reasons. While Ryoko acts all jealous and spiteful (of Izumida’s gradeschool COUSIN) she explains that she’s here because her mom overreacted to the fact she was being teased by a friend (though I’m not sure why that would warrant heading to Izumida). Mana’s annoyed at Ryoko’s presence and asks what she’s doing here (calling her old in the process), and Izumida explains she’s a career bureaucrat, which Mana interprets as an egocentric, lazy worker. Which is half-right for Ryoko, at least. Ryoko helpfully points out the time and Izumida offers to take Mana home.

The drivers have stopped over at a random building to get a new truck. Suddenly, something bursts out of the back of the truck; it’s some sort of weaponized machine, and it starts killing anyone who’s holding a weapon. They manage to close the shutters to the outside world and stop the machine from escaping, but bullets don’t affect it and one of the transportation people calls for reinforcements. Just then, the machine hits the switch board and turns out the lights. All that can be heard is gunfire…

While walking to Mana’s home, Izumida asks what she was being teased about by her friends; she very hesitantly replies that it was just normal photos. Ryoko tells Izumida she’s heard gunfire and she rushes to the scene; Izumida of course follows her, and tells Mana to go back to the shop where they were previously. Inside, they discover the dead men, and Ryoko identifies the the fact they died from knives and also the transportation personel as part of the Japan Private Police force, rival to her father’s very own JACES company. They hear something moving in the darkness and back away slowly to the lift. The doors open, Ryoko draws her gun and suddenly a knife on a chain shoots towards them. Izumida dives and saves Ryoko, but as the door closes he hears Mana’s voice come from the darkness.

Izumida’s unable to open the door, but when it finally does, they’re at a different floor being held up by armed soldiers, who won’t let Izumida do anything about Mana and meanwhile the robot approaches the girl. Upstairs, they continue to refuse Izumida’s pleas and send a group themselves to take out the robot. As they approach to save Mana, it coils itself around her as they raise their weapons and fire. All their commander can hear is screams over the radio. He decides to take things into his own hands, and Ryoko hits it on the head when she says that they’re just keeping her and Izumida there so they can clean up the mess.

Ryoko comments on the dark nature of the Japan Private Police and tells Izumida that if her theory is correct, then Mana’s probably safe, all while easily escaping from being tied up. The Private Police get the electricity back on and go after the robot again. With some clever planning, Ryoko and Izumida escape and while the two make their way downstaris, Ryoko explains that the Japan Private Police had been given complete control over the nuclear power plants in Japan as they had built the automated defense robots, which were secretly also weapons agains terrorists. It’s gone berserk due to the accident and this is the reason why it reacts to anything wielding a weapon. They find the robot (which has pretty much killed all the soldiers by now) and the commander tries to get rid of them when Ryoko reveals she knows too much, but is killed by the robot before he can do so. When they show that they aren’t armed, the robot leaves them; it registers them as survillians and is programmed not to harm them. Izumida finds Mana safe for the same reason. Ryoko starts shooting at the robot and manages to hit it in the camera lens so it can no longer distinguish between survillians and armed people and is forced into an emergency shut down as a failsafe.

Afterwards, Ryoko explains that mostly this was for her own selfish means, as now JACES can most likely gain control of the nuclear power plants in the place of the Japan Private Police. Ryoko sends away Izumida to talk to a police officer while she has a girl-on-girl talk with Mana; she’s figured out she was teased about liking older men as she had Izumida’s pictures with her. She gives Ryoko a little gift of a picture of Izumida as she “doesn’t want to be indebted to her rival” and heads home in a taxi while Izumida has his usual banter with Ryoko, inclusive of talks of a massage o_O. As Mana heads home, she looks thorugh the other 6 billion pictures she has of Izumida.

Next Time:

The maids return from their holiday.

Thoughts:

Well, another anticlimactic conclusion to what could have been a great story. Once again, everything was building up so well; killer robots are always a good thing, throw in an enclosed space, a doomed team of soldiers, an innocent survillian and a couple of agents and you should be golden. First I’ll talk about the good points. The setting was great, as was the antagonist (i.e the robot). Izumida finally getting really emotional over something was nice to see; he’s been so stoic and sarcastic so far, so for him to freak out over Mana like that was showed a deeper side to his character. That’s pretty much it.

And now, rant time.

There was absolutely no reason for Mana to be there; she was just a plot device so that we could see Ryoko jealous (of a little girl?!) and so Ryoko could get a picture of Izumida for her private collection or something. She showed up, got captured, got saved and left! What other possible use could she have other than showcasing a cute little infatuation with her older cousin (which actually just seemed stupid in my eyes) . And she looked surprisingly cheery afterwards (even blushing!) after hearinig around ten people being brutally murderd and most likely seeing the dead bodies all over the place; children today are ridiculously desensitised to violence.

What was the point of having those impersonal, unamed soldiers there? At least give some sort of character to the reinforcements, rather than just making them cannon fodder for the robot! The commander was a completely incompetent tactician as well; rather than taking into account what he had heard, he did the exact same thing as the previous squad and got killed for his stupidity, as he was too busy thinking “If we shoot it, it will stop”, when that obviously hadn’t worked with the other soldiers. Shouldn’t he know about the details of the machine if he works for the frickin’ company who made it?!  If he was willing to kill Ryoko over knowing about the secret function of the robot, he’d know it was meant to kill terrorists and that bullets OBVIOUSLY WOULDN’T WORK AGAINST SOMETHING SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO NOT BE SHOT DOWN! And what the hell was he doing focusing on Ryoko while a deadly machine that had just slaughtered all of his squad was right behind him?! That’s just fucking stupid.

What the hell is with these rushed conclusions?! After there was a great, steady build up with the robot and Izumida and Ryoko getting captured and even Mana becoming a hostage, they basically have all the soldiers rush to their deaths to clear the way for Ryoko and her detective hax. I mean, seriously, I can understand her knowing about her rival company’s plan, but the part where she just shot the damn thing in the eye and it stopped working was stupid. Hadn’t any of the hundreds of bullets fired by the soldiers hit it there? And why would you build a machine that could be stopped so fucking easily, it’s meant to go up against BLOODY TERRORISTS and it can be stopped by one bullet to the camera lens?! The writers were also extremely subtle in demonstrating that if you hold a weapon, it classifies you as a threat and will kill you, especially as it kept saying “WARNING WEAPON” constantly on the screen. Did they really think people would be surprised when they learnt about it?

They also keep cramming a bunch of information down our throats in a last minute scramble to explain what’s going on before the end of each episode, which is annoying, I would’ve been fine with a steady trickle of info throughout the episode rather than that.

Well, that episode was just disappointing, not only were there NO hints to an overall plot (why the hell doesn’t Ryoko just do something instead of being sly all the time with Izumida? And what happened to Izumida’s dream where he sees Ryoko shooting herself?) but the show took a killer robot and completely wasted its potential. What’s worse is the next episode looks boring as hell compared to this. I’m so frustrated the killing machine didn’t get more showtime -_-.

Presenting Yakushiji Ryoko, an incredibly deductive and intelligent mind.