(Dis)Abilities

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.

V: The Five-Part Collapse

In the second part of Break Blade, a running golem has its leg shot out. So great is its momentum that after initially sliding face-first into the ground, it enters a catastrophic bouncing roll making, by my count, five distinct contacts with the ground. (I found the ground itself unconvincing when I looked hard at it, but I suppose savings had to be made somewhere. Or else my amateurish sense for animation’s off, as usual.) Quite a departure for a robot which had performed so efficiently up to that point, but then we have a foot in the shot reminding us whose mecha is the really cool one.

Break (or Broken, maybe) Blade as a whole is a strange thing. Outside of the finely-detailed robot-on-robot violence, and the elegant super-real reversal built into the manga’s premise, it all feels a bit plodding to me. So it’s good that these guys can make a golem falling over look impressively nasty.