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Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS
Third season of the famous show Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, StrikerS was faced with the challenge of meeting the expectations set by the excellent second season, A's. To accomplish this, the producers decided to be wildly original, break totally from the Mahou Shoujo genre, and make their heroines working adults in a world where magic power is normal and totally integrated in society.
Now, what did they make of it?
The good
The setting is very interesting. We knew Nanoha, Fate, Hayate and the old cast were powerful borderline genius mages, and were going to be recognized as the best in their field. The serie begins on that note, with Hayate basically creating a Special Ops / SWAT force, concentrating all her friends in her unit, as well as many elite mages and prospects with potential.
The new cast has a lot of potential, with abilities that differ from the usual superpowerful artillery shots. The manga hinted at situations where conventional powerhouses like Nanoha, Fate or Hayate would be helpless alone, and this was a great opportunity to shoe-in the new recruits in the team, make the fights more team-oriented and tactically sound while still delivering the epic feeling fights such as Reinforce versus Nanoha and Fate had.
The old cast, in turn, also has a lot of potential. Of course, we already knew them from the previous seasons, but ten years passed by, where they would have changed, evolved, learned to master their abilities, entered relationships and at least developped their own personality. The timeskip made them adults but they are still at an age where they should be in first year of university, so it's not like they should be more serious than any University student, less, considering their superstar status.
The bad
Essentially, all this potential is wasted:
The worldbuilding is inexistant. You would have thought that being in a new world, we would have had some moments devoted to make it feel alive, so that we could care if it was destroyed or something, but no, what we get is rooms where redundant characters drink tea, panning shots over the capital where whole districts are still in ruin from an incident years ago, and an overdose of uninhabitated training grounds. Not even scenes where we could glimpse random citizens going about their business, or interactions with city facilities like bars, train stations or newspaper organisations. It is sad that it is in the manga that we get most of it, including mention that Nanoha is famous enough to be interviewed by magazines and called a genius.
Bad guys are underwhelming for the most part of the season. A's set the bar somewhat high, having the antagonists crushing the heroes with style in the first episode, none of that here: what we get is non-threatening drones without personality backed by a barely articulate loli with an uncomprehensible and ultimately irrelevant and shallow motivation.
The story was a rehash of the two previous seasons, oddly mixed together, to form a dubious compound, where at first it seemed to focus on relics (read: jewel seed) incidents, a loli working to ressurect her mother and project F (The Fate cloning project, shocking) to veer radically during the second part toward a Belka device destroying the world, complete with team to protect it and a friend becoming the ultimate bad guy. If you compare Jail to Signum or Vivio to Hayate, though, the new guys don't hold a candle to the old guard, except in the maniacal laughter department, of course.
The ugly
The first thing to mention is character development. You can forgive a ghost world if the characters are vibrant enough to make you forget about it, but in StrikerS development is a lost art. The old cast feels like only their body grew while everything else stayed the same or became worse, like in Fate's case, where she now needs help to cope with psychological dilemnas, or with falling rubble. The new cast, for all the training they went through, showed little personality beside the traits established at the beginning. Once again, the manga is the place where they get the most development, and the anime focuses on showing them training, again and again, and AGAIN... There is really a limit at how many times you can watch a good guy crush a soulless drone. If you compare it to the previous seasons, Nanoha's training was done offscreen, and the anime only gave us the real fights. Hell, even the Volkenritters blasting through weak opponents was done in fast forward, in half an episode, and only to develop their dedication to Hayate.
The storytelling devices. How clumsy can you get? The old guard was powerful, very powerful, so something had to be done to let the newbies shine and develop, so we got AMF and limiters, to restrict what adults could do. This was already a poor choice, however, since it clashed with fanservice AND common sense, they had to resort to something more drastic: shafting, in other words, inconsistency to whole other level. The old guard becomes unavailable when stuff hits the fan, and seem to have developped a whole host of weakness they didn't have before. Hayate is like the poster girl for this category, she has multiple devices, is more powerful than Nanoha, and should be as scary as Reinforce 1, yet the only thing she does is freeze an airport, blast drones and look out of breath. Not like she could have nuked all the numbers, or the summons in one shot, right? right? Wrong! but the newbies needed some spotlight.
The pacing. Oh god the pacing. When by episode 10 nothing more significant than Nanoha blasting Tea out of the sky during practice had happened, you just knew there was a problem. Half the serie gone and it was really all training, irrelevant infodumping and drones slaughter, the plot didn't move an inch. Even the incident with Tea proved to be worthless in the end... Tea did the thing she was blasted for immediatly after she recovered, and Nanoha's injuries or the implication that going full power could be dangerous was never mentioned again.
The fanservice. This one is really the worst offense. I have nothing against fanservice in general, but in StrikerS case, it destroyed the show. Most will mention Vivio at this point, but I think she really is the tip of the iceberg. Thing is, the animators tried to please everyone but without commiting themselves, so what we got was a lot of inconsistent hints, going in all directions, and animation time devoted to useless devices. Case in point, Nanoha and Fate's relationship... if you want them to be together, do it, don't give us these halfassed hints, and move on from that, the show shouldn't be about how you can imply something without actually confirming it.
In the same order of idea, if you cannot cope with a huge cast, forget about adding the moe loli or the boy. If you cannot develop it, don't give a unison with Hayate's own device to everyone but her. Noone needs to see Chrono sitting somewhere looking bored drinking tea. Noone needs transformation sequences taking half an episode and so disconnected from the story that they would fit more easily in a fighting game. Make some damn choices, stick to them, streamline your story and get going, godammit.
Conclusion
Some good ideas, a lot of potential, but a rehashed story with a very weak execution.
My rating: POOR (4/10)
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