So I read a complaint that (in part):
ONLY Rygart can pilot [Delphine], [. . .] it’s a bit absurd to have a piece of military hardware be so closely associated with one person, particularly when that person is very untrained and the piece of hardware is better then anything else (IE a super prototype).
For me, these remarks crystalise that thing about the ‘elegant super-real reversal’. The quiet joke in Break Blade is that Rygart’s ride is a super prototype by virtue of being more real-robot than the supers that surround it, just as Rygart is special because he is (to us) more mundane. Rygart and Delphine are both ‘broken’, like that one character/weapon/build queue which never got playtested and like something which doesn’t work.
Sorry if you’d thought that up already. I liked it enough to post it.
Animanachronism 
Brilliant. It didn’t occur to me, at least to this extent of distinguishing the reversal.
It’s really funny how a lot of advanced prototypes in real robot anime are like that. Dragonar is basically this joke (noob pilots locked to prototypes) stretched for 40+ episodes.
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And why is this a problem for BB? I thought that was a pretty cool aspect of the story, and besides, as schneider noted, it’s not uncommon in anime (see DRAGONAR). Hell, in the US comic MECHA (from the 1980s) it’s a factor as well.
Just my 2-cents…
I don’t think it’s a problem for Break Blade, I like it. I suppose I somehow didn’t make that clear enough.
What I like isn’t just the idea of the rookie locked to his machine (which is, I agree, common, and I wouldn’t bother posting about) it’s the way that the machine in question is implausibly powerful even though its technology is more plausible than its competitors’ technology.
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