Senki Zesshou Symphogear

Tsubasa Kazanari and Kanade Amou—the idol duo known as Zwei Wing—use their songs to power ancient weapons known as "symphogears" to combat a deadly alien race called the "Noise." While the general public is aware of the Noise's existence, knowledge of the symphogears are kept a secret. When the Noise attack one of Zwei Wing's concerts, Kanade sacrifices herself to protect a young girl named Hibiki Tachibana, leaving Tsubasa devastated and a fragment of her symphogear embedded within Hibiki.

Two years pass and Hibiki is once again dragged into a Noise attack. While rescuing a young girl who has been left behind during the evacuation, she awakens the power of Kanade's symphogear lying within her. Although Tsubasa still grieves over the loss of Kanade, both girls must now learn to work together using their powers to defend humanity against the Noise.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Tachibana, Hibiki Main

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Yukine, Chris Main

Takagaki, Ayahi Japanese

Kazanari, Tsubasa Main

Mizuki, Nana Japanese

Kohinata, Miku Supporting

Iguchi, Yuka Japanese

Amou, Kanade Supporting

Takayama, Minami Japanese

Kazanari, Genjuurou Supporting

Ishikawa, Hideo Japanese

Itaba, Yumi Supporting

Akasaki, Chinatsu Japanese

Ogawa, Shinji Supporting

Hoshi, Souichirou Japanese

Tomosato, Aoi Supporting

Seto, Asami Japanese

Sakurai, Ryouko Supporting

Sawashiro, Miyuki Japanese

Morii, Yuusuke Producer

Itou, Tatsufumi Director, Episode Director, Storyboard, Key Animation

Motoyama, Satoshi Sound Director

Yoshida, Tooru Episode Director, Key Animation

Reviews

Jul 11, 2012

pakin

Recommended

Since this was in storage for quite sometime I finally decided to watch, and finished this anime. This is pretty much action-y, but at the same time, it has a pretty deep story to it, and is kind of entertaining. For people that love action, I think you guys may or may not like this anime, since the action isn't really the main focus, cuz they focus more on the plot I would say..

Story 8/10
Started of pretty good on how they kind of went to the future, and then goes back to what happen to get there, like a lot of anime I know. It ... moves at a good pace, and that's good since in my opinion it explained to me more about what's going on. Mostly this anime probably wants the watcher to be sad when they watch it, but it turns out to be a pretty happy story after watching all the episodes.

Art 7/10
They could make some more improvements on the way the made the characters, since in some scenes, after they got beaten up pretty badly. They came back fighting looking fresh as new in so little time. Of course, they have quick regeneration skills, but still I don't think it's suppose to be that quick. Sometimes, the motion when the character walks seems kinda unrealistic and that's, for me, a disturbing thing.

Sound 8/10
Not bad at the sound. The pitch when the characters scream, sweep, or are cheerful is very good. The best part of the sound I liked is the part where they make the crying of some characters pretty short. In some anime they just made the crying very long, which is pretty annoying, maybe because they want to waste time cuz they can't think of anything.

Character 8/10
It's great to find anime were the character doesn't piss you off so much that you just wanna smash your head into your keyboard. The characters are well made. The way they act, and talk to each other seems pretty much like real life. On top of that, a character tries to make this anime sounds like it's really "not" an anime, and that it was real life for them.

Enjoyment 9/10
I don't really think I could say much, since I saw the rating on this anime, and it's not that good at all. For me, it was a nice experience watching this, and I don't really think a fan of a serious action would wanna watch this, since the action in this anime is not quite that great, and the moves the characters have are repeated a lot of times, and there a not a lot of new moves.

Overall 8/10
I guess this is my final say on how good the anime was during my time watching it. This is, I think, a pretty girly anime.... I say that cuz of the not so violence parts ( even though there was a lot of blood ) in this anime. Maybe if they increased the intensity of the fights, that might have helped to give it a higher rating..

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Apr 10, 2024

Infinite

Mixed Feelings

If you hate inconsistencies, stupid plot devices, a horribly flawed setting, and poor characterization, the first season of Senki Zesshou Symphogear is your worst nightmare.

The opening episode is deceptively good. We see a concert that's animated brilliantly, and it lays out a high-stake story; we witness Kanade die in the past, and Miku crying over Hibiki's grave in the future. This image the anime painted itself in the first episode is one of the greatest deceptions I've witnessed in any form of media.

After the first episode, the animation quality drops dramatically. Epitomizing this is a scene as early as episode 3 where Tsubasa is walking ... along the corridor with her manager, which looks like a GIF pasted on top of a moving background. It's obvious that most of the animation time went to the first episode, leaving them to cut back as much as they could throughout the rest of the series. In fairness, the consistency of the animation recovered in the second half, and it did not detract from the finale.

The soundtrack is quite enjoyable, and goes some way to make up for the animation. The songs they sing as they fight are solid and it can bring an atmosphere to fights that is otherwise missing. The Opening is fine and fits the series very well, but I personally preferred the ED, "Meteor Light" by Takagaki Ayahi. It took a while for it to grow on me, but it's a track that sounds dark and traumatic, which fits the atmosphere the series and the character it represents.

The characterization of the protagonists is done poorly, and their development is haphazard and oftentimes bizarre. There's an instance where a character hates another one so much she's tried to kill her, but her hate is instantly forgotten when the other character points out that her room is messy. However, whilst the protagonist is annoying, the majority of the cast are actually likeable, particularly as the series finds its identity along the way.

Unsurprisingly, the plot is also lacking. It's a very simple, the one plot twist the series has is so obvious that you can identify it 5 episode before. The simplicity works for Symphogear though, as it manages to avoid being too disastrous throughout most the series. However, in the final few episodes, the tone and scope of the story go beyond previous proportion to such a ridiculous extent that you will be blindsided. In hindsight of later series, this ridiculousness becomes a strength of the franchise, but in this first season where the expectations of a more serious and gritty tone have been set, this causes straight up whiplash.

The setting is also so tremendously flawed that whilst you can happily ignore it if you so wish, even minor probing will expose questions to which there are no answers. For example, with the frequent attacks by the Noise, which you cannot defend yourself against and kill everyone in the areas they attack, why do people go outside so casually? Much as I like the outdoors, I can't hep but think that I like living more. Also, much as I love my current house, if there was constantly the threat of death, I think I'd move.

With this all in mind, this is a very bad first season. However, there is one thing that works in Symphogear's favour that saves it from the worst, and that is that it's earnest in it's stupidity. Whilst at the beginning it has pretensions of being taken seriously, by the end all pretention is lost, which means it is very hard to hate. The characters that I hated at the start of the series grew on me, to the point I liked almost all of them. Take the girl who's lines almost solely consist of failed meta-comedy attempts like "If this were an anime" which infuriated me at the start, towards the end I almost found her habits endearing.

It's a strange quality of an anime like Symphogear, which whilst terrible, is still enjoyable to the extent where I looked forward to the last few episodes. I wanted to see if the episodes could outdo themselves in their silliness, but more importantly, in their fun. In future seasons, the franchise found it's identity as a ridiculous tongue-in-cheek show, with plenty of characters to root for. It's a shame that the first entry so badly mistook the tone it should be going for.

So, if you are happy to ignore all that is wrong with this anime, then you will be able to enjoy it. Despite the amount that is wrong with this, it's all surprisingly easy to ignore. However, if you cannot ignore the technical details in anime then avoid this like the plague, unless you wish to see how badly executed an anime can be.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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Dec 2, 2013

Asfaria

Not Recommended

Senki Zesshou Symphogear is an odd musical, action anime featuring girls in colorful sci-fi battle suits who must fight against monsters called "Noise" in order to save humanity. In order to use the relics that power their Symphogear suits, the girls must sing certain songs. The different songs they sing give them different powers ranging from charging up their suit to unleashing their strongest attack which has a recoil effect on them when used.

Despite a visually promising concert scene in the beginning of the first episode, the story falls to pieces almost immediately. It seems almost as if the organization working with the Symphogear girls ... expected the Noise to attack the concert where the girls were singing in order to revive a powerful relic. So why risk the lives of thousands of eager concert-goers who get caught in the fray when the Noise do show up? This may seem like a minor plot problem (aside from the hundreds of carbonized dead bodies), but similar plot issues like this build up after a while and become difficult to ignore. The two girls, Kanade and Tsubasa, who had been performing then change their songs and begin fighting the Noise in order to save the frantic mass of people who are all scrambling for the exits. However, our main protagonist, Hibiki, gets trapped while trying to get away and ends up getting injured despite the singers' efforts to save her. Since mentioning some things that happen in the first episode would be a spoiler, I'll stop the initial summary there.

There are many more problems with the story, but most of them occur with several sudden changes in characters' personalities in addition to the nonsensical ending. The characters in this show get over their anger at others in the most illogical ways ranging from having someone clean their room to just deciding out of nowhere that they should be friends again. The Swan Songs (which are the girls' ultimate attacks) also deal less and less of a self-damaging recoil every time they occur in the anime for some unexplained reason.

As for the characters themselves, they are hardly unique at all. Hibiki is basically a weaker and more annoying version of Kaname Madoka who accepts her power a bit faster (they are also both voiced by Aoi Yuki). As for the other main characters, they are a girl who likes to fight alone and dislikes Hibiki for reasons in their past and a tsuntsun girl who has a hard time understanding other people's perspectives of the world. The villain is just an annoying sadist who enjoys being nude and has no appeal aside from her excellent voice actor (who still couldn't save her from being annoying).

Being an anime with a heavy focus on music, you would expect a great soundtrack. While this is the strongest category, it's only barely above average. For much of the earlier episodes, the music plays almost non-stop switching from track to track with hardly any break. It got to the point where I was grateful for some of the scenes later on when they finally paused the soundtrack for part of a scene. None of the tracks stood out much either aside from one hard rock track that was used to accompany Yukine's fights. Much of the rest of the music consists of the j-pop/techno combinations used for both the songs sung by the characters' as well as the background music. There were also some problems with the volume of the music/singing when used while characters were speaking at times.

Oh, and this anime has some of the worst Engrish I've ever heard to the point where the subbers provided subs for it and even fixed the grammar at some points to make it more understandable.

The animation is the most inconsistent category. It looks like a quarter of the entire animation budget for this show was used during the two concert scenes. Compared to these scenes (especially around episode 3 and 4) the animation takes a nosedive. That's not to say it's all bad aside from those two scenes, however there are some moments where a single motionless shot will stay for almost twenty seconds or the animation just looks like a couple gifs pasted on top of each other. There is also one scene where a character is looking down out of a library window and sees two characters in a hospital room, but when you see out of the window from the hospital room, there is no library (or any buildings at all) in sight. Similarly to Evangelion, this anime also reuses the same shots of the main organization's headquarters many times.

Story - 3/10
Animation - 5/10
Sound - 6/10
Characters - 3/10
Enjoyment - 3/10
Overall - 4/10

The many faults in this series build up over time and prevent it from being very enjoyable. It's uncreative premise of saving the world from mysterious creatures which has been done much better hundreds of times doesn't allow for much right from the start. The bland characters, mediocre soundtrack despite being a music anime, and the inconsistent animation don't do much to save it either. I recommend skipping this anime and watching something like Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, or Madoka Magica if you want something similar but much better.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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