Discover Top Posts Tagged with #6.5.19

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha - Series Review

The Lyrical Nanoha series has been on my plan to watch for probably over a year now, and after several occasions where I said I’d watch the entire series, I finally went and actually did it. Since before even watching the series, I had planned to do one big post that had a massive review for the entire anime, so I’ll be covering every season of the anime, duh. I know there are manga and video games and a bunch of other stuff which I believe is canon so I’ll check those out one day probably, but for now, this is all you’re getting. The way that the writing process for this worked is that I watched the season, wrote the thing, and then watched the next season, so for example I wrote the entire section on regular Nanoha before I started watching A’s. Don’t know how relevant that information actually is or if it’ll even appear that way to anyone reading but hey, I felt like sharing. All that being said, letsago.

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha

Of every season of the Nanoha anime, this first season probably had the biggest shoes to fill. In the same way a first episode gives you an impression of a whole show, the first season gives you an impression of the rest of the product. If I didn’t like this first season, why would I check out the rest of the show? You know I did like the first season, because if I didn’t then this post wouldn’t be a series review, but I think it’s important to make it clear that my first impression of the Nanoha franchise has to come from this first season, because duh.

So yeah, big shoes to fill. But did it fill them? Yeah, I’d say so.

Nanoha gets off to somewhat of a slow start, the first 5 or 6 episodes being somewhat generic mahou shoujo stuff with breadcrumbs of something greater scattered throughout. Though that’s not to discredit these first episodes, for even if they’re not the most unique in the world and are definitely a bit on the slow side, I still enjoyed them a good amount. Nanoha is exactly the right amount of fun that a protagonist for this needs to be, and Yuuno is pretty interesting as the talking animal companion because it establishes the later-very-important-fact that other worlds exist in this show. If my initial reaction to Homura Akemi is anything to go off of, I always immediately fall in love with the mysterious other magical girl rival that mahou shoujos sometimes have, and this show is no exception – Fate was my favourite character the moment she appeared. Nanoha’s family are really sweet and I really love how her older sister dresses, she’s got casual style down to a T. I think Nanoha’s friends provide her with some important character development and make some of the series’ later moments involving Nanoha and Fate feel truly earned, so that’s a plus for them. And of course, the show’s visuals and soundtrack are super fucking good, so even though these first few episodes do end up making you wonder when something bigger will happen, they’re still quite a joy to watch, the action especially good fucking god it’s great.

But again, while the first episodes are great, they felt a bit, lacking in something. Like, Nanoha is 5 seasons and shit tons of manga and drama CDs and some video games and various other things – how did it all spawn from what’s otherwise just a standard albeit pretty solid magical girl show? Well that’s because in around episode 7 or so, the plot starts to really pick up, and fucking hell if it isn’t wonderful. Best girl Fate starts to become more and more interesting as more about her is revealed and that whole thing about Yuuno introducing other worlds to this show becomes relevant in a big way. I’m not generally fond of like, interdimensional patrols in stuff because I feel like they all kind of blend together, but while this interdimensional patrol weren’t much different on their own, the plot points they introduce as well as everything to do with Fate’s mother by extension was just a blast to watch. Fate’s mother’s a really good villain actually, and the reveal of who Fate actually is was so painful to watch because fuck Fate’s so good and deserves love from everyone but her not-mother just keeps tearing into her and like, really driving home the point to Fate that she’s a worthless imitation of her much more valued and actually loved daughter. When Fate’s mom is like “Alicia was so much kinder to me” I wanted to punch the hypocritical bastard because you don’t get to criticise Fate for not being kind when you literally actually torture her you evil bastard. God she was a great villain. One of the best abusive parent villains I’ve seen, probably. And it’s not like Nanoha takes a backseat to the plot either, because lots of that stuff about friendship and loneliness that was touched on earlier with her conflict-with-friends plot point becomes super relevant here and in the way she tries to both open up to Fate and get Fate to open up to her. And then we get Arf, Fate’s familiar, who while I initially disliked because I ain’t fond of her character design, grows into a decently strong character in her own right and has a lot of good moments with other characters, particularly Fate, obviously. And the best part? When all this brilliant and really interesting plot stuff reaches its climax at the very end, they manage to accomplish the very very difficult and not fuck up the ending – it’s so nice when that happens. By the time the show ended I was perfectly content with the conclusion we were given – there wasn’t even a single shred of “oh the show was good but the ending could’ve been better”. And the scene where Fate and Nanoha swap their hair ribbon things was so great too, fucking hell I loved Fate so fucking much she’s such best girl material (do I even have any other blonde best girls? Who knows) and I was so happy with her character development. What a brilliant character.

As already said, the visuals were great. I actually expected the direction to be a bit wilder since I know this first season was directed by Shinbo, and my only other experience with the man’s work is the very visually wild Madoka and like 5 episodes of Bakemonogatari, but the direction here is a lot more conventional than in those shows, but I still liked it all the same so you know. Don’t know why I expected this show to be 16:9, maybe I saw something from before it that was, so I was surprised when this turned out to be 4:3, but that doesn’t mean shit, so whatevs. I really liked Nanoha and Fate’s character designs, though lots of the other designs were kinda just perfectly passable, with the exception of Arf whose design I didn’t really like, and Nanoha’s sister who I already praised for her good fashion and stuff. I did find myself weirded out with some of the fanservice – there’s not a lot of it so it’s already usually pretty weird when it does appear, but I also found myself confused by how they went about it sometimes. Because like, Fate’s outfit design lends itself to being prone to ass shots, which is fine so I didn’t really care when those happened (except for this one that happened after a scene where she’s heavily abused by her mum – that timing felt inappropriate), and there’s also a hot springs episode which is fair enough like fanservice there makes sense, but then there are also a fair few unnecessary and unusually timed pantie shots on Nanoha that always felt bizarre – one of the eyecatch animations even gave us some pantsu in her mahou shoujo outfit which was weird because it’s so long and I never expected to see up it. The fanservice wasn’t a big deal and there’s not even enough of it to where I can call it a legitimate issue, but I did think it was worth mentioning.

Overall, I really enjoyed this first season. The plot was good and well-paced and the characters were great, and the solid audiovisual presentation throughout plus adorable characters kept it fun to look it. It does start a bit slow, and episode 7 is a long time to wait for the actually really good stuff to start, but those first 6 episodes are still enjoyable enough, and the constant mystery that is Fate’s character will probably keep you too intrigued to stop watching even if you are really bored by the rest of it. I think for score I’m content giving this an 8/10 – it’s definitely way too good to be a 7 but I don’t think I can give those first 6 episodes a 9 and that’s like half of the show so, yeah, 8.

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A’s

So when I was looking up the watch order for the show, I saw A’s being described as the high point of the franchise, in fact the exact description was “nigh unanimously seen as the best part of the franchise”. So following season 1 I was really curious about what to expect from A’s – if season 1 was so great already then A’s must be really good to be the franchise’s high point.

And it was!

A’s wastes very little time compared to its predecessor in getting into the meat of the plot, the first episode actually introducing us to an entire 5 new characters who are all super important throughout the rest of the season. And I’m not gonna lie, I was initially predisposed to disliking them, because despite the fact that they’ve all got pretty strong designs, I tend to get like that when a bunch of characters are introduced all at once in a new season. Now thankfully, they’re all actually really great, and while their individual development isn’t brilliant, the development they get as a collective group and how that relates to the other characters and the central narrative is done super fucking well. And the main character that this development relates to, plus the biggest newcomer of the season, is Hayate. A girl who is totally impossible to not love. She’s kind of got a flat character arc thing going on where she’s pretty much just really nice and kind to everyone and most of the changes in her character are because of the Book of Darkness corrupting her, but she’s one of the best examples of the flat character arc I can think of and also her design when she becomes a magical girl in the second last episode is by fucking far my favourite design in the entire show and one of the best magical girl designs I can think of I love it so fucking much it’s so aesthetic oh my god. Hayate kicks a lot of ass but tbh Fate still best girl.

Speaking of Fate, all of our returning characters are great as well! Now that Fate’s kind of had her big major arc from the first season completed, she’s able to exist as kind of just a girl in the world now, and she’s exactly as wonderful and lovely as I could have hoped for. I did feel that she didn’t get too much development this season, and the same actually goes for Nanoha and some others too, but I really didn’t mind their individual character arcs taking a backseat when they still have so much weight and impact on the main plot and stuff. And it’s not like they’re entirely flat either – Fate gets to adopt Nanoha’s philosophy of trying to actually talk to her opponents, develops a cool rivalry with Signum, and to make a long story short her attachment to the Space-Time Bureau thing and specifically Lindy was really sick and made me like this specific Bureau a lot more than some other Bureaus in fiction, even if it’s arguably still just as generic. Nanoha doesn’t get as much as Fate but she does the unthinkable for a mahou shoujo show and tells her friends about the whole situation, plus her family? There’s no actual dialogue in the scene so she could’ve just been saying “yo Fate’s getting adopted” but she might have also said “yo I work for the Interdimensional Police” or whatever. Again it’s not that important – Nanoha’s still just as fun this season as she was in the last. Yuuno didn’t have much development last season and the same is true for this one, and he also has even less screentime, though he has greater presence in the scenes where he does appear, being far more useful in combat and actually pushing the narrative forward, rather than just shouting “Nanoha!” for a whole season. Chrono and the gang feel a lot more fun this season, which as already stated made the Bureau feel a bit more likeable. Not a returning character so doesn’t fit the rest of this paragraph but still related to the Bureau so it works – didn’t really care much for Graham or his two familiars the hot nekomimis who transform into attractive blue haired dudes. I feel like some of my confusion regarding the Book of Darkness (which is probably me not paying attention tbh I assume the logic is consistent) is linked to the weird motives and methods that these guys ended up having so that was weird. Plus when Lotte jumped on Chrono and later got up saying “that tasted good” I thought she gave him a good old suck of the cock really quickly somehow so that was weird.

Of course, being a second season, every aspect of the production was improved. The already great visuals are even better, with a lot more motion in the already pretty dynamic fight scenes, improved character art and animations, better backgrounds, better character designs, the like. There are a decent amount of pretty beautiful locales that we visit as Hayate’s gang are hunting for pages that I really liked, and they encounter some pretty cool looking monsters as well. I expected this season to be 16:9 but it wasn’t, but again that really doesn’t matter and I don’t care anyway – it’s not like a videogame where aspect ratio is linked to visibility which is linked to ease of play so hey. Soundtrack is good and the OP fucking slaps good god – all of the insert songs were brilliant as well. I also felt like the voice acting and sound design were better this season too, which is neat.

The show does end on a 6 year timeskip and god is it weird seeing these characters I’ve gotten so used to seeing as tiny 9 year olds being way taller – not a problem or anything the designs are still solid it’ll just take me some getting used to. The specifics of what happens to all the characters post-timeskip I was perfectly content with, so no complaints there. I don’t even have much of a sense of “how did we get here?” that timeskips usually leave me with because the actual progression that the characters make is all super reasonable and in I think every case actually hinted at throughout the series, which is just swell.

I don’t really have much negative to say about this season – I’ve already said most of my criticisms. The fanservice was toned down as well so I don’t really feel the need to talk about that any longer. Honestly with pretty much every element being improved and it not suffering from a slow first 6 episodes, yeah it really is fair to describe A’s as the best part of the series. So far??? I’ll see what I think of the other seasons. To be honest though, looking at my other 9s, I feel like A’s is still just an 8/10. It’s definitely better than it’s predecessor which was also an 8/10, though for me personally I don’t quite think I can give it that 9. Still really really good, and if you’ve not watched A’s then you really should – in fact if you’ve not watched Nanoha then you should watch it just so you have an excuse to watch A’s (jk season 1’s great too). If this is the best part of the franchise, then boy am I excited to see it go all downhill from here.

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS

Alright, where on earth do I start with this one?

No, I mean, seriously? The first two seasons were just so good that I could just kind of easily start writing – I had a good place to start for each of them and worked from there. There wasn’t that much to say other than lots of good things. But StrikerS was so all over the place in terms of quality that I really don’t know how I should start this, and the addition of new characters into the mix as well as lots of returning ones makes that decision even harder.

I guess I’ll start with the new characters because that’ll better contextualise how I talk about the returning characters. Frankly, they’re all quite terrible, for a smorgasbord of reasons.

Subaru is in essence the main character here and she doesn’t have an arc whatsoever. Her character is that she wants to be strong like Nanoha, and beyond that she’s only defined by the fact that she’s a cyborg and has a sister that’s a cyborg and is Tia’s friend. I’m not fond of her design really and I hate how when they reveal that she’s a cyborg they also give her a generic rage powerup. She’s really the same character at the start and the end and yet she doesn’t pull of a flat character arc well either because she’s not even got much narrative impact. She only really has two pros – the first is that she’s voiced by Chiwa Saito (explains why the generic rage powerup scene was at least a great vocal performance) and another thing that I’ll touch on in a bit.

Tia fares better than Subaru in that she does actually have something of an arc and it even impacts other characters in seemingly meaningful ways, but I thought it kinda sucked, and it links to a problem that, guess what, I’ll talk about later! Tia’s arc is that compared to not just all the other forwards, but everyone else in the entire Sixth Sector, she feels completely average and like she has to put in significantly more effort than everyone else in order to keep up with them since they’re all prodigies, so she starts training late into the night and early in the mornings. Nanoha doesn’t like this, Tia goes a bit too seriously in a training battle, and then Nanoha kicks her shit in, people tell her that Nanoha once got fucked up from overworking herself, and then Nanoha herself tells Tia not to overwork herself. From there on, she’s a completely flat character without a flat character arc and she isn’t even as important to the plot as Subaru. I’ve seen this arc be done better by other shows and the fact that it only really occupies like 2 episodes of time, 3 tops, just makes it feel even more undercooked. And then even her surface level personality is just that, she’s a person I guess? She has a backstory but it’s just “my brother used gun so I must use gun” and I did not very much care for it or her.

The other two big newcomers are Erio and Caro, and I really had to think to remember their names. Caro’s cute, but beyond that their entire characters, arcs, developments, narrative impact and all that jazz can be summed up with “Fate looks after them, and since they were lonely at one point in their lives, they relate to a villain later on and try to talk to her”. I mean there’s one part of one episode where they go to town and follow a plan devised by a carer that seems to want to hook them up and neither of them even realise it? So I guess the show wants to joke about the fact that they don’t really have romantic chemistry? I’m not criticising that as a plot point or anything but it’s telling that it’s pretty much all they get. I like their designs less than the other two and they totally fucking cop out in Erio’s first transformation sequence because where all of the girls obviously get naked his entire outfit just transforms straight from business formal to mahou shounen – no nudity at all. They’re the embodiment of “just there” and that really annoyed me.

See the one appeal that the newcomers really have, particularly Subaru, is that they have a lot of cool moments in both concept and execution. Subaru rollerskates for example, and punches things, both of which are really cool, and she has a fun fight with her sister who has the same abilities. She can also conjure up magic roads to rollerskate across and those look sick – think Frozone. And then in the final or semi-final episode or something she conjures up a magic road so that she and Tia can motorbike out of a helicopter into an airship – which is one of the coolest things a person can do. And then Caro can just summon this massive god-kaiju dragon thing that she only does twice but it kicks ass so. Tia’s of the more standard magic dual pistol type but they also turn into magic lightsabre dagger things that are neat, and then Erio actually just sucks. The thing is though, all of this is just surface level cool stuff. None of it means anything. It’s just like “oh isn’t that kinda cool” and then nothing else. Maybe you’ll remember it but you’re not amazed by the brilliant character writing or dynamic relationships or anything like that. And I’m a colossal sucker for cool stuff, trust me, but I still like when cool characters are also good characters, you know?

Speaking of good and cool characters, the returning cast! I’m very mixed on them. Most of the cast do actually return, though Nanoha, Fate, Hayate, Vita, Signum and Reinforce (kinda) are the only ones that are actually important. Yuuno appears for all of 5 minutes, Chrono exists to occasionally talk in exposition scenes, Zafira and Shamal are still here but don’t get as much screentime as the other two, Arf is mysteriously a loli now that Fate is apparently raising? You know, general stuff. I don’t really mind them barely appearing to be honest – in some sense of the word this season is about passing the torch to the new generation so relying on all your old characters would feel cheap. Which uh, they do anyway, because it doesn’t commit to doing anything with the new characters and so the returning ones get the most screentime and development. Really makes you wonder what the point of the new characters even was. Anyway, I’m way off topic – we’re supposed to be talking about returning characters.

Nanoha started out kind of boring. She’s still got her kind air about her as you’d expect, but all she really gets to do at first is train the newbies, and her first actual development – when she has her reaction to Tia going overboard in the mock battle – felt oddly melodramatic to me and even if it did kinda make sense, Nanoha ended up feeling somewhat out of character for me at that moment. So I’m not really liking her, but then they give her a kid and the kid has no dimension beyond being a kid, but I thought she was cute and Nanoha worked quite well as a mother. And then in the final episodes Nanoha gets to be a mahou shoujo badass and it’s great. She does start out kind of boring (isn’t this the exact same wording I just used) but as the season goes on, she does get to be more and more fun, so thank god for that.

Fate-chan, oh my dear Fate-chan. She’s kind of just “cares about kids” for the entire show. And like I get it – the way they justify that by bringing up her own history as a child makes sense to me as well as her being adopted by Lindy and stuff, so I see why Fate would end up this way. But they just make her really boring for most of it. And I really don’t like her new outfit either. I think when she’s parenting Vivio with Nanoha she’s fun, and she has good moments here and there throughout the whole season, as well as some actually badass moments in the finale where she even dons an outfit that doesn’t look like shit, but idk I feel like best girl Fate-chan got shafted hard this season.

Hayate’s squad are actually pretty great, but everything I can say about Hayate requires me to finally address something I’ve neglected to address so far. The setting being the Administration Bureau where all the characters work was uhh, the source of a lot of problems for me. First, the shitty ugly ass brown uniforms that every fucking character wears. The lack of variety is annoying and it doesn’t help that the uniform itself is, you know, shitty and ugly. Second, it means all the characters are constantly talking formally and referring to each other by full titles all the time. Nanoha calls Fate “Fate-chan” like 2 or 3 times maybe and every other time it’s like “Fate-kaichou” and it got really annoying. None of the actual character relationships mean shit anymore because everyone talks to each other in the exact same way. “Oh it’s been a while since I last saw you” says every character to every other character every time they first meet like fuck off. The military-esque setup also means a whole lot of “requesting permission” and “sending backup” and other such vapid dialogue that completely drained everyone’s individuality constantly. Also not that they were ever that big a deal but the limiters given to Nanoha, Fate and Hayate are so fucking arbitrary and the limiters given to the forwards are also arbitrary but not as much and I don’t want people to think I was as bugged by the limiters on the forwards because I didn’t care about them anyway so. Anyway where I’m going with all of this is that Hayate is effectively just “the commander”. She commands people. She talks to important officials. She only ever gets into like 1 or 2 battles where she just sits back and does nothing herself but commanding others. Her personality is that she’s approachable, and good at commanding people. Hayate, the commander, who is good at commanding people, is the commander. Commander. Commander. Hayate the commander. I really couldn’t stand Hayate, if it weren’t clear, or the military setting that made everything feel arbitrary or contrived. God, from season 1 I was worried about the Time Space Administration Bureau and here is the culmination of my fears – an awful generic military organisation that only serves to limit the amount of fun things the narrative can actually accomplish.

So speaking of fun things the narrative can accomplish, good god this narrative was messy. For the first like entire half of the show, it’s fucking dominated by boring ass training arcs that mean fuck all because the forwards are a waste of time anyway. And the way they talk about team roles and shit during these training arcs made it feel like a really bad sports show. When it actually picks up the villains are just… just awful. Season 1 had a really good villain because of her connection to Fate and A’s had even better villains in that the moral complexity of their motives and actions was actually super interesting (and not in a “morally grey villains are inherently better” way) but the main villain in StrikerS is just… a generic evil scientist. His minions are way too fucking many numeric cunts that all suck ass and aren’t even remotely comparable to how incredible Hayate’s knights were in the last season. Also not a criticism but the villain’s reincarnation plan of putting clones of himself in all of the numbers’ wombs was fucking weird holy shit what that’s so weird dude what. There are 3 other villains that are less directly affiliated with the scientist and more so work as something of a trio – they were actually pretty good. Not quite Hayate’s knights tier (can you tell I forgot the little German group name they had by the way) but still solid and fun to watch at times.

And then the other big obstacle in the plot is, just my favourite thing to have in a magical girl show – politics. “Uwu we’re this branch of the military founded to do this but that branch doesn’t like us so they’ll be holding a conference meeting to discuss all of it” fuck off. I did not give a single shit about any of the politics in this world and they’re so fucking much of the narrative holy shit the worldbuilding here felt awful. That’s this show, folks, training arcs and politics. Just what I want from magical girls. Seriously the politicians in this, which ends up being everyone kinda, can all go fucking die oh my god.

Literally none of this is helped by how bad the exposition can get in this season. It’ll be something like the numbers literally asking the main villain what his plan is because they “don’t understand it” and then he just drops the entire thing for us. Or the time some brains in a jar that are apparently important just talk amongst themselves with no observers about how they came to be brains in a jar and founded this societal model or whatever. Or Tia pretty much fucking Googling her helicopter pilot, going up to him and being like “so you used to be a sniper”. It was hard to watch this at times because everybody’s speech prioritised exposition first, sounding military second, and being actual dialogue last.

I think the season gets kind of fun near the end when all that large scale finale stuff where everyone gets to be badass happens? But even though that’s like my favourite trope in all of fiction I don’t even think it was done that well here – they drop two arbitrary time limits for separate yet related events on us that tick down large amounts at the end of episodes, so it’ll be like episode 22 ends and says “2hrs 26 mins remaining” and then episode 3 ends and it’s now like “1hr 44 mins remaining” for example. But here’s the thing – these sorts of finales always have a lot going on simultaneously, like X character fighting Y villain in Z location, but then it cuts to A character fighting B villain in C location somewhere else, and we know the events are occurring simultaneously they’re just shown in a way where the pacing works in a storytelling medium. This is a long ass explanation but the point is that you can’t do that but also have the timer, because the way that appears when you’re presenting me this story is that it means two characters who were about to fight might literally wait around for 40 entire minutes so the plot can progress, all because of that dumb timer. That was one of my main problems with this finale, but also with like all of the forwards being engaged in different conflicts as well as the numbers being the main enemies but being so shit meant that there were way too many battles going on at once that I just did not care about for even a single second.

So yeah, despite some decent moments scattered throughout, I really did not enjoy the story or characters of this season.

Thankfully the show still looks really good and has solid animation to boot. I felt like they used the “long distance phone call” shot where the left side of the screen is one character, there’s a split in the middle, and the right side is another character a lot, and it looked kind of bad, but I guess since we’re finally 16:9 they wanted to get their use out of the additional screen space. And that’s the only directorial thing I feel like commenting on. That being said I didn’t really care for most of the transformation sequences this time around, not helping is that they happened a lot more frequently and with a lot more characters who had way worse designs. All your audio stuff’s still good, and actually the voice acting is probably at its best yet. You know, it’s still Nanoha. Even if this specific season loses lots of the appeal in terms of plot, characters, pacing (why is this even 26 episodes), various other things, it still looks and sounds good.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about StrikerS. From start to finish it’s kinda just boring. The embodiment of mediocrity. Very few things were actually egregiously bad, instead mostly just bland or something that I specifically just hated anyway. From start to finish it still has good moments, Nanoha and Fate work decently well as parental figures for example and even though I said Fate was boring here she’s still hella best girl. It’s like peak 5/10 material, which is the score I will be giving it.

I’ve heard ViVid Strike is just lolis beating the shit out of each other so I’m really looking forward to it if that’s what it ends up being, but first of all, I have to watch ViVid. Let’s hope that one’s better than this was.

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid

I feel like I might have come across as very dismissive of ViVid at the end of the StrikerS section, primarily because I presumed that after StrikerS, the main Nanoha content would just have gone downhill, and I just wanted to get to ViVid Strike to see lolis beating the shit out of each other. In retrospect that was not a good thought process for me to follow, because not only is ViVid significantly uphill from StrikerS, it’s also lolis beating the shit out of each other!

ViVid is very, very heavy on the moe compared to anything the Nanoha series has had up to this point. The star of the show this time around is Vivio, and while I’d like to say she’s got more going on here than she did in StrikerS, she doesn’t really? StrikerS Vivio was kind of just a kid, with her only real development being that after Nanoha wrecks her shit with the Starlight Breaker, she gets up on her own like Nanoha told her to do when she tripped. In ViVid, Vivio is still kind of just a kid, but now she’s an anime kid, and also older. She loves making friends, being alive, and fighting, and that’s actually it. Her entire character begins and ends with those three facts. She is an adorable moe loli and nothing else.

The rest of the newcomers fare largely the same way, being adorable moe lolis without much going on. Einhart hints of a plot but it doesn’t really mean anything and her entire backstory could be cut out with minimal difference to the plot. Beyond that her arc is pretty much that she learns that she can have friends to be an adorable moe loli with. Vivio’s friends Corona and Rio are here too, both being one dimensional moe blobs with surface-level appealing personalities for most of the show but Corona does actually get something of an arc towards the end where she feels way fucking weaker than all of her friends and has to push herself ridiculously far in order to stand a chance at beating Einhart – it’s actually a pretty badass fight to be honest. There are some other new characters I’ll touch upon in a bit but for now let’s turn our attention to the returning characters.

When it comes to its use of the returning characters, ViVid actually ends up making the most use out of, of course, the already covered Vivio, but also the numbers and Lutecia from StrikerS. These characters that meant very little back then are now pretty major characters here and manage to be a good amount more endearing as a result. Nanoha and especially Fate take a major backseat here, and hell even Hayate’s in it for all of 5 minutes where she’s just kind of an adorable moe blob and nothing else. Subaru and Tia are in for even less time than Fate, where they mostly serve to make episode 6 – a mock battle between new and old characters – a fun viewing experience because Subaru’s abilities are cool and Tia’s not bogging down the fight with her insecurities. I feel like the way ViVid handles its returning characters is actually really interesting. Lots of the more interesting and developed characters are simplified to keep the moe feel of this season at the highest it can possibly be, but they don’t feel like they were flanderised or anything like that. Meanwhile, the less important and/or lacking characters from previous seasons have just been given more surface level appeal by being cute and moe and positive all the time, and as a result they feel more fun to watch. Subaru for example has significantly less character this time around than she did in StrikerS, which is saying something because oof StrikerS, but at the same time she was just a lot more appealing?

That’s the thing about the characters this time, every single one of them – new or returning – is largely on the same playing field in terms of how they’re actually characterised, they all kind of feel the same in a way. The only real difference is that, unlike StrikerS, it commits to focusing on the new characters and ones that didn’t get much focus in the last season. And it can very easily be argued that that’s bad writing or a disgrace to their development in previous seasons, and if you told me you hated ViVid for these reasons I’d completely buy it, but like, it’s so extremely fun? ViVid has moe down to a fucking art and even if every character is so much the same that I literally can’t choose a favourite character from ViVid specifically, they’re all just really good fun to watch and easy to enjoy? I know it’s probably hypocritical of me to be critical of StrikerS new characters for being surface level cool and nothing else while letting ViVid pass with characters that are surface level moe and nothing else, but I think I’m just more lenient with ViVid because it’s fully committed to moe-ifying everyone whereas StrikerS had inconsistent characterisation quality all around. Everyone’s just so chill and fun to watch.

Of course, to reflect the simplification in characters, ViVid’s plot is simple to match. Or “light” might be a better word to describe it. Einhart’s introduction implies that she’ll have more plot importance and development than she actually ends up having, mostly because the major plot elements are pretty much dropped after episode 3 anyway. And it’s not like they were especially prominent either – for the first 6 episodes we’ve pretty much just got a bunch of slice of life stuff where the gimmick is that our girls are in a fight club, I suppose. And during this time, it actually likes to bait us into thinking there might be a plot. Aside from the aforementioned Einhart stuff for example, episode 5 is called “Surprise attack” which might make you think some surprise plot stuff will happen, but instead we get surprise plot stuff in the form of a hot springs episode where the plot is fanservice galore and the titular “surprise attack” refers to the swimming number from StrikerS fucking around with everyone’s plot, even groping Rio’s little loli chest. And honestly, I found this really funny? Not the hot spring sexual harassment – that’s a very tired trope – but just the fact that the show totally wanted to bait me into thinking the episode might actually have plot stuff but instead it was just more cute girls slice of life. By the way episode 6, the aforementioned mock battle episode, is a team battle between 2 teams of 6, and there’s this awesome transformation sequence where all 6 members of each team get to transform at the same time, and hell even Erio finally gets to be naked for his. It was great fun.

It’s only around episode 7 where the plot decides to do something, namely letting our girls enter a fighting tournament – the Intermiddle Championships or something, for 10-19 year olds. And I found this fucking hilarious, because now it’s actually just a sports show. And not in the StrikerS way of contrived team formation bullshit, nah it’s just straight up sports this time. As a sports show though, we gotta have some villains, so episode 7 gives us a brief introduction to some of the more important opponents we can expect to face. However, ViVid commits to being as light and easy as possible, so when lots of these “villains” are actually introduced, they’re just more goofy fun moe blobs. For example, there’s this one ominous tracksuit wearing person in the OP whose face is never revealed, covered in their hood and hair. But when they introduce them in the show, it’s a really friendly and comfy moe girl, who’s only wearing the tracksuit to hide herself since she was last year’s champion and doesn’t want the attention – even the OP changes so that she shows her face now and we can see her big ass adorable moe eyes. Or another very serious Japanese-y woman with a sword who slices a fucking bus in half during her practice (absolutely hilarious by the way) and then nearly one shots one of the lolis we’re supposed to be rooting for (because she was trained by Zafira – so happy he has dialogue in this season) but the loli just barely survives, turns the tables and wins entirely, and then the serious Japanese-y woman with a sword is a really good sport about the whole thing. Hell two of the bigger combatants we’re supposed to take note of have a match and it’s literally a student council president versus some delinquent queen and the entire match is hilarious as hell. The only fight that I was a little more mixed on is the Einhart vs Corona one because compared to literally the entire rest of the show, it drops the moe and comedy elements and is instead just a serious fight about how hard Corona had to push herself, but I still had enough fun with it to not be that bothered by that and hey it still reinforces how great and important friendship is afterwards so.

What’s really bizarre though and might require me to do some research is that after this point, ViVid just ends? There’s a recap episode (which I gave a 2/10 because what’s the point of a recap episode after a show with no plot) and then that’s like, just it. ViVid Strike apparently isn’t an immediate sequel so in essence ViVid just abruptly ended with no fanfare to speak of. It didn’t feel like a last episode that we got, there’s no sense of “oh I know I’m gonna have to wait till the next season to see the conclusion” – it just feels like any other episode and like you’re gonna wait for episode 13 to continue the story. Apparently the DVD/BD release didn’t happen until over a year and a half after the show started, so I have to assume the production just went wrong in some way. The Nanoha wiki tells me that ViVid adapted the first 30 chapters of a 100+ chapter manga, but it has no explanation as to why it just stopped. Honestly this is a shame because I was really liking what I was watching.

I’ve already said “moe” about a thousand times now, so I guess I should actually talk about the visuals now. While every other season of Nanoha beforehand and even ViVid Strike was done by Seven Arcs, ViVid has the, *ahem*, luxury of being done by the iconic A-1 Pictures. But actually, it’s the best looking show I’ve ever seen from them. The girls are absolutely adorable from start to finish, I giggled with fucking delight when Hayate appears because god damn can A-1 Pictures make that already adorable girl look even cuter. And it’s not like the animation quality suffered so that the art could be given the overwhelming sensation of moe – ViVid looks absolutely incredible in motion. In turning away from the more magical battles of seasons prior into more physical combat this time around, A-1 really gave themselves the opportunity to flex their animation muscles, and I was delighted at how consistent the visuals were all around. I don’t think the designs for the new characters are brilliant, but I like them more than those of StrikerS, Corona especially had a really cute outfit when she transformed. Soundtrack’s still super good as well, lots of electric guitar that kicks ass in some of the later fights and amazingly doesn’t clash horribly with the hyper moe art style. It definitely ups the fanservice this time around, and the large amounts of lolis with very loli proportions are not exempt from this, so if that makes you uncomfortable then just quit fucking whining, dick.

Gonna mention it now because I can’t think of anywhere else to say this – but ririkaru majikaru ganbarimas finally made its grand return – its absence in StrikerS, though I never mentioned it in that review, really upset me, so it’s nice to see it return. Plus like every character in the entire show gets the opportunity to say it rather than just Nanoha so that’s nice.

Overall, I really did enjoy ViVid. Maybe it’s not critically the best, and it has almost none of the appeal that the rest of Nanoha has so I understand why hardcore Nanoha fans might hate this season (it’s got like a 6.7 on MAL or something like what that’s lower than StrikerS), but it’s a really enjoyable time from start to finish and had me laughing the whole way through. To be honest, and I say this as a massive slice of life fan with decent enough genre knowledge, but ViVid might be the single most moe thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing, and is some really good proof that, despite how critical I can seem (maybe? I don’t know how I appear to any of you) I’m actually really easy to please. I can’t in good faith give ViVid an 8 – the implication that it’s on the same tier as season 1 or A’s isn’t one I’m comfortable with, but I cannot possibly ever give this a 6 – it’s way too good. And so, I’ve settled on a 7/10. Which actually makes it the highest score I’ve ever given an A-1 Pictures show!

Last, but hopefully not least, it’s time to move on to ViVid Strike. Let’s hope I enjoy it. I realise these last sections must be kinda bizarre for people to read because for you it’s like you read it and then a second later you’re on to the next season but meanwhile I have to go away for 5 hours to actually watch it and then spend however long writing its review. What fun.

ViVid Strike

Wow. Where the fuck did I hear that ViVid Strike was just lolis beating the shit out of each other? Could it be that I heard that about ViVid and misremembered it? Or perhaps I heard it about ViVid but internally convinced myself that they meant ViVid Strike because ViVid still has Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha in the title so it must be the serious one while ViVid Strike doesn’t so it’s the more chill spinoff? Who knows? Regardless, ViVid Strike is absolutely not just lolis beating the shit out of each other.

If not that, well then, what is ViVid Strike? Well, it still has lolis beating the shit out of each other, but this time there’s a lot more actual plot going on. Continuing on like 2 years or something ahead of where ViVid left us, the stars of the show this time around are newcomers Fuuka and Rinne – a pair of orphaned childhood friends who, after the latter got adopted and had a bit of an interesting time, fall out after a fight. The plot here is essentially about getting Fuuka into martial arts so she can confront Rinne, who wants to be the best martial artist due to some personal reasons I’ll explore in a bit. Alongside them come most of ViVid’s more prominent characters, so Vivio and Einhart and their loli buddies, as well as Nove, and later down the line some of the minor-major characters from ViVid’s intermiddle championships, like the student council president and delinquent queen.

To start with the returning characters since I don’t have that much to say about them, they’re all done fairly well. Nove’s just as good if not better than she was in ViVid, Vivio and Miura have a bit more actual character going on this time around rather than just being moe lolis, and Einhart is also a lot more fun. Rio and Corona alongside the inermiddle combatants are kind of just cheerleaders this time around which is a little upsetting, especially in the case of Rio since she got like no development compared to Corona in ViVid, but I found myself having enough fun with the core cast to not really mind their downplayed involvement. ViVid Strike really commits to its dropping of the “Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha” in the title, for the likes of Nanoha, Fate, Hayate and her knights, even Subaru and Tia and shit literally never appear. Hell, they’re never even mentioned. Honestly I didn’t mind this. I already didn’t mind how ViVid handled it, and ViVid Strike is kind of just the next phase of that. It would’ve been neat for Nanoha and Fate to make like a cameo in the audience for one of Vivio’s fights but eh I’m not that bothered.

And about those new characters, they’re pretty great. Fuuka as a person doesn’t get a significant amount of development, but the way she actually impacts the plot, because again there is one of those now, is really neat, and I felt that the show and its characters really thrived when Fuuka got involved. She’s the type of main character who works really well for a sports narrative, and ViVid Strike is just enough of a sports narrative for Fuuka to work really well. Rinne, who was immediately best girl because of her pretty design, has a lot more development than Fuuka, starting on a negative character arc and ending up on a positive one. When she gets adopted she immediately really likes her adoptive granddad, who even gives her a Device, but when her school bullies take their “teasing” too far and kind of end up not letting Rinne get to hear the phone call telling her that her granddad died, she uh, has a negative reaction.

Brief aside here, I hate school bullies in anime because they’re always so unbelievably extreme for no reason, and while the three bullies that bully Rinne here are probably the least extreme of the extreme bullies I’ve seen, I was still kind of annoyed by their existence. So when Rinne is actually pissed off enough to genuinely extract revenge on her bullies, I was kind of excited. I was thinking to myself “yes, get your comeuppance, break her fucking arm!” but then Rinne actually does break her arm and I realised that excessive yet realistic violence against children, even animated ones, makes me uncomfortable! And Rinne doesn’t stop there because she slams one of the other bullies face first into one locker and kicks the last bully straight in the face knocking her out on another locker and Jesus Christ that’s a lot of blood. Ohhhhh my god that’s too much blood. Holy fuck these kids are 12. Nah this scene was fucking sick though, in both ways. It’s so cool to actually see a character like fuck up their bullies for once, but I was amazed by how quickly the scene immediately terrified me. I’m interrupting talking about Rinne herself because god this scene was good. And fuckin really insane like damn. Not that the first 3 episodes didn’t have plot or anything but this is what really sealed the deal for me that this show isn’t just lolis beating the shit out of each other.

Anyway! Back to Rinne! Following her utter destruction of the school bullies, one of their older brothers sees her in the street and kidnaps her to beat the shit out of her for revenge (and at one point he appears to like rip her shirt open slightly so I thought he was gonna try rape her and that was fuckin weird) which I felt was a little extreme but hey, and she’s saved by a former martial artist who saw the kidnapping and decided to help out. Thus the two start training together because Rinne’s sick of being weak and looked down upon, but of course in her narrow-minded pursuit of strength, as well as a mind slightly warped by her teacher’s firm belief in talent above all else, she herself starts looking down upon others as weak, on top of the fact that she hated herself anyway. It’s only when she loses to Vivio does she start to really question everything she’s been fighting for, and only when Fuuka knocks some sense into her does she realise that she’s been kind of a shitty person and isn’t even working towards her own self-improvement. And thus the two reconcile.

I skipped over a lot of details here but honestly these two are great – they’ve got pretty sufficient development in their own ways and manage to hold a lot of weight in the narrative without ever feeling like they’re holding anything else back. Compared to StrikerS’ awful new characters and ViVid’s decent new characters but they’re kind of just the exact same as the returning ones, ViVid Strike does the best job with newcomers by far. They’re perhaps a little on the extreme side, Rinne especially, but I really did feel like they had good character arcs and their relationships with others in the narrative as well as amongst themselves were really good. I’m really happy to be able to say that I loved the new characters this time around. Honestly, Fuuka and Rinne’s dynamic and roles in the narrative are not entirely dissimilar to Nanoha and Fate in season 1 – Fuuka having something like a flat character arc as well as being new to the world of fighting (magic) and trying to talk down her very jaded main rival who has a lot more experience in the world of fighting (magic).

“Not entirely dissimilar to season 1” is a pretty good way of describing ViVid Strike actually. It’s really interesting how despite the fact that ViVid Strike literally drops the “Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha” part of its title entirely, it does manage to feel very reminiscent of season 1 – it’s evocative of lots of the best elements of the first season without ever feeling like some cheap imitation that can only survive on nostalgia. It’s something entirely new, but not completely unfamiliar, just different. And I really liked that.

Visuals! ViVid Strike has really nice art – it’s kind of like a more modern evolution of the StrikerS art style which was itself a somewhat more modern take on the season 1 and A’s style, rather than just being A-1 Pictures cute girls like ViVid. I liked it. And I like the new character designs as well – shoutouts to the fact that the girls actually have musculature – it’s not there in every scene, or even most, but I appreciate it when it does show up. However while the art is solid, I did feel the actual animation was somewhat lacking. Lots of the fights are full of stills of the audience reacting, or whenever the fight actually is shown, there’s a lot of either A) like a black screen with some red magic looking stuff moving around to signify a fist or B) like, a shot of one character preparing to do a move, but like it’s a shot of the fist and not actually the fight scene, and then they’ll cut to a still of the character that got hit, with speedlines everywhere of course, and it’s not really animation at that point. Both of these things are really damn common and it sucks because the show still drops regular fight scenes of two characters just hitting each other here and there, so all this cheap bullshit they sometimes pull for the animation just feels really limiting and devoid of impact by comparison. Again though it still drops some sakuga moments so like, it’s not a big deal, but I’d probably say that this season had maybe the least impressive animation so far. I also didn’t really care about the soundtrack this time around, with some of the songs feeling really out of place and kind of bad, though OP and ED were still good.

With little else to say about the show, I guess it’s time to conclude. With the weaker visuals and weaker soundtrack, ViVid Strike has probably the weakest presentation out of the whole series, though it makes up for that with a good plot carried by great characters. It bears repeating that I really enjoyed ViVid, but I’m glad the Nanoha series returned to serious plots and character writing this time around, and that it didn’t suck like StrikerS. It’s interesting that ViVid Strike dropped the Nanoha from its title – because while I can respect that they wanted to establish that this isn’t quite Nanoha - especially after ViVid was so not Nanoha - ViVid Strike has a lot of the elements that made Nanoha so good in the first place. But it doesn’t really matter that they dropped the title. At the end of the day, all that matters is that ViVid Strike did a good job distancing itself from Nanoha without losing all of the good from Nanoha – it’s not a failed attempt to distance itself nor is it a cheap imitation of the original. It’s just fuckin’ good. 8/10.

Oh, the OVAs. Episodes 5.5 and 5.75 are pretty fun, at least watchable, albeit kinda superfluous, but then I like the characters so I can stand watching this sort of thing. Episode 13 is a beach episode, and who doesn’t love lolis on the beach? 6/10.

Conclusion

Conclusion? Final thoughts? Overall opinions? Don’t really know what a good title for this part is it’s just the best I could come up with. Well, I’m done with Nanoha. Kind of. There are picture dramas for like every season that I’ll watch in my own time, though I have no intention of talking about those. There are 4 movies, though only 3 of them are on piracy sites so when the fourth one releases I will watch all 4 of them and make a follow up to this post where I talk about them. I mean I could watch the first 3 any time but whatever. But to stop talking about the future, let’s talk about the now. I did it. I finished Nanoha. Probably well over a year after I first decided I’d watch it. And I’m really pleased. Not only does it feel good to watch a massive series like this, but it’s nice to finally knock it off the plan to watch since I’ve been wanting to watch more magical girl shows ever since I watched Madoka a year and a half ago. But beyond the whole “oh I finally did this” element of it, it was great watching Nanoha because Nanoha was so great. It was a series of ups and downs to be sure, the biggest down being StrikerS of course, but I had fun throughout. While I didn’t give any of the seasons anything higher than an 8, I still really liked those that earned that 8 and when it comes to the franchise as a whole, I can say I was a huge fan of it. I feel like I can safely explore fan content now and reblog fanart and stuff, and isn’t that just the dream? Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha was really good and is now my third favourite magical girl show ever, behind Flip Flappers and Madoka Magica, though to be fair I’ve probably only seen like 10 others, most of which are ass. Still, 3’s really good.

But of course, there is only one way to end this post.

FATE-CHAN STILL BEST GIRL

#sorry but i could not find the strikers cover art in high quality #i did my best for pictures but that was surprisingly difficult to do #josh reviews #6.5.19 #nanoha #pmmm #monogatari #flip flappers