Anime original by Studio Comet
Streaming on Funimation

Premise

Robby Yarge is a man with a weakness for women. This has led him into untold amounts of debt on get-rich-quick schemes. A chance meeting with Hachi Kita brings both characters to reflect on the nature of predictability. Later, it turns out Hachi is working for the very debt collector that is after Robby. After that point any semblance of reason is abandoned and it’s really dumb.

Marlin’s verdict: Space Nonsense, It’s a Nonsense Plot, In Space.

This show almost feels like a meta-commentary on the nature of unpredictability. The two characters devote a pretty lengthy dialogue sequence to their opinions about how reliable their lives have been. Hachi takes the inception of quantum-computing and its ability to solve problems like traffic and the weather as fact that there really is nothing surprising in the long run. Robby’s fast and loose lifestyle brings him to the opposite conclusion, it’s not outside events that you need to look at for unpredictability, but the actions of people themselves. As we progress through the episode, the sequence of events seem to become more and more unhinged from each other.

If this is truly the intent of the show, it’s a really boring way of doing it. In no way are the nonsensical elements funny or interesting, they simply just continue to confuse or frustrate your patience until you get to the end and feel completely unsatisfied. It isn’t helped by its characters, either. They throw out their lines about as fast as a Monogatari character, yet there’s hardly ever any substance to it. Robby is immediately unlikeable as someone born into privilege who yet even after squandering his advantages continues to act as if it’s owed to him to live a life of ease. Hachi, on the other hand, comes off somehow more robotic than the actual robot Robby owns(or is his roomate? They never really explain that part.) It’s probably the best of the three, and yet even it’s held back by being perpetually incredulous with nothing else to define it. All in all, a completely forgettable show.

Artemis’ verdict: Failure to Launch

I’m a little unsure what to think about RobiHachi. On the one hand, it’s clearly going for a comedic angle, and as such doesn’t feel like it’s trying very hard – or even trying at all – to be taken in the least bit seriously. On the other hand, even the most raucous of comedies need some kind of internal logic or consistency to be actually funny, and there’s nothing about RobiHachi that makes one lick of sense. A couple of alright one-liners aside, it seems to rely on its largely slapstick humour energy to draw viewers in, and while I can appreciate its energy, there’s only so long I can put up with anything quite so inane. It’s like Space Dandy and Double Decker! had a baby, but didn’t bother to teach it anything in the way of worldbuilding or proper satire. It’s certainly colourful, but that’s about all I can say in its defense; if the show is aspiring to achieve anything more than that, I completely failed to spot it.