Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha is a franchise
I didn’t think I would enjoy, I wasn’t really into magical girl shows at the
time but I’d heard good things so I gave it a shot. I love Nanoha now, it’s a
great series, I even like the less popular StrikerS season quite a lot.
So when I heard they were adapting the
manga Nanoha Vivid into an anime, I was pretty excited, more Nanoha couldn’t be
bad right? Oh boy, here we go. Where do I even start with this thing, one of
the most disappointing sequels in my recent memory?
One of the biggest complaints about Nanoha
StrikerS was that the title character herself, Nanoha, was reduced to a
supporting roll while it mostly focused on new characters. Oh what I wouldn’t
give for her to have StrikerS level of involvement, while in that show she was
mostly secondary, she was still story relevant and drove the plot along, even
having a major scene in the finale.
In Vivid she’s a housewife.
Yes, Nanoha, one of the most powerful
magical girls in any series has been reduced to a housewife. Outside of
a single training fight in the midpoint of vivid, she has done literally
nothing else. This show is now about her adopted daughter Vivio, something that
I’m not totally against in concept, but it continues to get worse. As of
episode 10, the last I’ve been able to watch as I wait for some brave soul to
subtitle it (no fansub groups bothered picking it up) Vivio herself, the new
title character (Vivid) has also turned into a supporting cast member.
Sure, the first season has a dual protagonist
dynamic with Nanoha and dark magical girl Fate Testarossa, but those were the only
characters in focus. A’s managed to add new cast without detracting from the
fact that Nanoha was the lead character, and StrikerS is slightly infamous for
it’s lack of nanoha. But at least in StrikerS Nanoha is actively training the
cast in focus, making their victories a victory by proxy for Nanoha, their
trainer.
In Vivid it’s as if they realized that
Vivio is a super boring character, she’s almost instantly sidelined by her
Chinese knockoff Fate-chan, Einhart Stratos. It gets worse as the show
progresses, with episode 10 featuring less then 30 seconds of footage of Vivio
OR Einhart, as it shows us a completely irrelevant tournament fight about
characters we know almost nothing about. That fight was a joke, they built up
one of the girls as a threat, but she’s totally wrecked by somebody we’ve
barely even seen before, making it complete filler for a series with a very
limited episode count.
This show is boring, I mean really,
really boring. There hasn’t been a single exciting event of note in 10 out of
12 episodes, because nothing has any consequences. Gone are the first season’s
world effecting, galactic level crisis events. Now we have hotsprings, loli
fanservice (not that we had none of that before, but there’s more now), and
tournament battles with simulated damage. That’s right; nobody is even
in any danger of getting hurt at almost any point in this show, if there’s no
threat then why should I care what happens? It’s not like they developed any
characters into somebody I would want to root for in a sports competition.
I guess if you want a fluffy slice of
lifish story with magical girls you could enjoy this. But the almost completely
different tone of the series is extremely off-putting to me, a fan of Nanoha
for its darker take on magical girls. And don’t even get me started on Vivio
and Einhart’s magical devices, some of the dumbest shit I’ve seen in years.
Nanoha’s magic device is a necklace that turns into a staff; Fate’s is a
wristband that turns into a poleaxe. Vivio’s magical device is… a STUFFED
RABBIT!
How am I meant to take any of this
seriously when a goddamn cartoon rabbit is involved in Vivio’s transformation
sequence, where she also turns into a more adult mode (when Nanoha was able to
kick ass as a loli, I guess Vivio just sucks). Oh yeah, Einhart’s device is a cat,
not a stuffed animal cat, an actual, normal cat. Her device is just a cat,
what, why?
On the animation side of things, A-1 Pictures
does an adequate job of animating the fight scenes, though there is no standout
animation like you might see in an Ufotable or Madhouse production. However I
do have a problem with the style of the show, and I’m not sure if this is a
problem with the manga which I have not read, or the adaption. That problem is
the setting backgrounds, Nanoha as of season 3 is set on an alien world full of
magical technology, and Vivid is set in the same world. So why does it look
like Japan?
Did they forget the setting was no longer modern Japan or something; everything
looks so standard it barely feels like the same show anymore.
The music is so utterly unremarkable that I
have nothing to say about it, other then it’s not offensively bad so I guess
that’s a plus! But no really, I don’t know much about music, nor do I really
pay attention to it unless it sticks out in a big way, like Gurren Lagann’s
soundtrack.
Now, this part is just personal theory, but
let me try and explain what went wrong. Seasons 1 though 3 of Nanoha were all
written to be a TV anime, they have a distinct beginning middle and end paced
for their episode counts. Vivid however, is an ongoing manga, adapting only a
fraction of the content. This would certainly hurt the concise, well planned
pace of the other three seasons. It still doesn’t excuse the baffling design
decisions and lackluster characters however.
I was going to write here “this is an anime
I’d only recommend to hardcore Nanoha fans” but no, a hardcore Nanoha fan would
probably be even more disappointed then I am. This is barely a sequel to
StrikerS and almost feels totally disconnected to the rest of the series thanks
to this far more lighthearted tone, I really can’t recommend this unless you’re
desperate for some magical girls, but you’d be better off watching a different
magical girl show instead.
