[justsomeguy]

The Good (mostly characters and their interactions):

* Kaito is a likeable alpha male protagonist. He acts uninterested but is actually always helpful, and is pretty good at getting things to go his way, without coming off as a jerk.

* Akiho has an pretty good backstory to explain her obsession with robots: she has an inferiority complex regarding her sister. As a character, she's pretty good at passing along her enthusiasm and slightly desperate optimism and ideals. The relationship between her and Kaito is built up and concluded well.

* Frau/Kona was obviously written to appeal to the otaku audience, but I found her oddly likeable compared to pandering characters from other shows. Maybe because she was written to be a nonsocial slob, rather than a perfect miss goody. She also has her own part in the storyline, which unfortunately did not get a conclusion. It would really be nice if she took more action to find out the truth, considering that she had a strong connection to the conspiracy side of the story.

The Bad (mostly the story):

* I marathoned Steins;Gate (as well as Chaos;Head), and that was very tightly written, with everything revolving around time travel. This show on the other hand, had too many elements in the plot.

* multiple plot devices and deus ex machina:
1) Magnetic monopoles randomly falling out of the sky and conveniently into the hands of the protagonists, who use it for their own ends and don't reveal it. This is used to solve problems relating to the robots' weight and lack of mobility, rather than the robotics club coming up with something new on their own.
2) The Noah IV conveniently ending up in Kaito's hands, and the club being able to modify the machine they've never even known existed to decoy missiles and trigger Kai's ability.
3) Aki's attacks contribute nothing to the storyline.
4) Brainwashing never sits well with me, especially when used haphazardly rather than consistently. And in this case, said brainwashing is accomplished via a computer ghost with no good explanation of how it's actually done.
5) The protagonists also get a lot of lucky breaks when faced with gun-wielding enemies (or for almost everything in the story really).

* There's nothing wrong with Kaito being tricked into helping out Kimijima all along, but all the time he was obtaining the memos was basically a separate storyline until the final third of the show.

* The conspiracy makes no sense, and felt written for the sole purpose of having an antagonist to defeat. What was the point of getting Kaito to find all the memos, instead of Kimijima leaking them himself? What was the rest of the Committee of 300 doing while he was clearing the conditions (hopefully they have a backup plan in case the kid decided to give up)? And when they finally do get underway, the manpower they have is too little compared to their (insane) ambition. If SERN was able to build a black hole bomb in secret, then they should also have been able to build their own rocket too. Oh, and there's also Kimijima showing up to explain his entire evil plan, which got uploaded to the internet for everybody (other than cops and military) to see.

* Based on how much the protagonists got from the conspiracy, it feels like the conspiracy had a greater contribution to its failure than the actions of the protagonists.

* Junna felt like the weakest of the protagonists, since she's only there to help develop Fujita (and take out Subaru and the robotics club).

* Subaru was slightly stronger with his rebelling against his father's wishes, but that plotline is not developed at all. His father showing up to support the completion of Super Gunbuild-1 was basically out of nowhere.

* Service robots are obviously prevalent, but despite that they aren't shown in the show that much.

* The epilogue needed a bit more, like the rest of the conspiracy collapsing, its members being arrested, Frau's mother being vindicated, meeting the real Misaki, that giant AR tower disappearing to symbolize the end of the villains' plans, etc.

Final score: 7/10. The characters are likable and fit their assigned roles in the story. The plot needed more focus, less devices, and less obvious favoritism toward the good side.