Girly Air Force

I intend on this being a completely spoiler free review. Girly Air Force is about the definition of mediocre. If it was to be personified, it would be the guy in the room no one remembers because he is so incredibly average.

The art is nicely done, and CG isn't obtrusively done like so many other action anime. That alone gains it points in my book.

The audio was nicely done, but not so much the music. The music only seemed to really hit a high note (forgive the pun) one time for me... and it was in episode 12. ... This anime will not leave you humming any music from its intro, closing, battles, etc... it's just musically underwhelming.

The characters were pretty flimsy here as well, though I admit they were stronger than I'd have expected from something named "Girly Air Force"... so I guess that's a win?

Now the story was SUPER slow. And feels like it should have been a 24 episode season, that they cut in half. And all we got was the slow mood setting half of a season. The final episode is OBVIOUS it is now supposed to finally be entering the interesting story arc. Then... it ends. You get one episode of actually fairly fun enjoyable story, then you have to wait for what MIGHT be season 2 (or might never occur).

Anyway, TL:DR... mediocre, even by young girls personifying war machines standards. And it ends the moment it finally gets interesting.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel....with Jet Fighters.

LA was expecting Girly Air Force to be the Kantai Collection of Jet Fighters type anime, yet nope, we have full blown harem with our main protagonist Kei Narutani voiced by Ryouta Osaka being separated from his family in China and forced to live in Japan due to an attack by mysterious beings called the Xi, fornately his childhood friend Minghua Song voiced by Lynn is with him. but with a chance encounter of an "Anima", a human manifestation of a jet fighter, he gets dragged along into defeating the Xi so that he can return home, but of course, ... more Anima comes in the battle and in lies the harem.

Girly Air Force does develop both it's characters and the world for such a harem anime.

In terms of characters, well..they are kinda boilerplate unfortunately. from Kei being the typical dense main male protagonist who can't take a hint, Gripen voiced by Yuuka Morishima being the aloof shy type but also having problems in flying (thus needing Kei's help), Minghua is your typical "childhood friend" stereotype, but also an annoying one to say the least with her berating and clinginess of Kei, though due to a running gag of Kei getting dragged off before she and Kei can spend time together, LA can see her annoyance, but it doesn't outweigh LA's annoyance to her either way. Eagle voiced by Hitomi Ohwada is your typical genki but with the hint of superiority inferiority complex and finally Phantom voiced by Shiori Izawa, the pessimistic stoic one but in a ways one of the voices of reason of the Anima outside of Kei for the humans. Gripen of all the characters gets the most screentime and development as a character due to her also growing with Kei in the battlefield as a result but Eagle and Phantom are interesting additions to the harem, but still cliche to some extent.

World building is the more interesting aspect of Girly Air Force, such as what is the Xi's motives and what's their goals?, we also find out more about the technology of the Anima and the mechanics of the Daughters, the jet fighters that inhabit the Anima and their namesakes. We get little doses of world building that makes the world much more fleshed out and believably in an alternative world kind of way, but of course the main reasoning LA says this is why the Xi are attacking humanity in the first place.

The animation done by Satelight was decent enough, with some decent character designs, vibrant to say the least but expected from Satelight with their animation, the CGI use on the dog fighting was decent enough being quick, flashy and explosive to some extent. but it's the level of being "decent", nothing that exactly wows LA and coming from Satelight, ohhh well they must be saving their budget for Symphogear XV is LA's guess for the mediocre animation.

Voice acting was fine overall. Yuuka Morishima as Gripen was great though, like she nailed her shy demeanor yet stoic at the same time, while Shori Izawa went smug all the way as Phantom while Hitomi Ohwada as Eagle was almost childlike yet hyper genki to say the least. Not bad voice cast but not much to write home about.

Girly Air Force is intriguing with it's world building but man does it suffer with it's boilerplate characters, mediocre animation and the harem aspect and that is really the best LA can put Girly Air Force. Not horrible, not great either, just mediocre.

Welcome to my fourth review. This review is about Girly Air Force, an 12 episode anime animated by studio Satelight. Satelight is a studio that hasn't been in a focus for the anime community like in ever. Although, by just browsing through their anime you can spot some pretty big and great anime. So they certainly can pull off a great anime. Is Girly Air Force one? Well, first off the name is terrible. I don't know why the author chose that name but I do not approve. So let's talk this show.


Plot/Story: Right of the bat we have a quite common story point. Extraterrestrials ... named Xi are attacking earth, but this time they are in form of planes, or more imaginatively resemble dragonflies. The story follows Narutani Kei who directly witnessed a Xi attack some time ago and began to hate them from his very heart from that day on. Perfectly natural. Hating aliens who attack and kill humans, nothing wrong here. Now the story starts with another Xi attack that Kei and his female companion Song Minghua are directly witnessing. During that attack Kei sees a pink glowing jet that shoots down a few Xi but then crashlands. Kei runs to the pilot to help him out (while not questioning that the jet is pink and glowing). The cockpit however opens itself and Kei finds a girl inside with glowing hair. It later turns out that the girl is called Gripen and with 2 other girls is part of a special unit of female 'young' pilots who have certain abilities that makes them able to shoot down the Xi. What, well that's a spoiler. Watch the show. While the plot isn't something outstanding, it is not bad per se and definitely can have room for a great plot and characters and all that.


Art: Art is pretty...standard. Nothing bad really. Of course the Xi and planes are in CGI because every vehicle has to be done in CGI, apparently. Luckily, the CGI isn't terrible and isn't repulsive like some CGI in other shows.


Sound: You would think that a show with planes should have plenty of good sound...I don't remember particularly impressive sound and BGM so it probably was standard as well. Opening and ending are also nothing special. What you would expect for such a show. A pop song for the op and a more calm ending song.

Characters: This is where I have the most to talk about. Starting off WITH Kei and Minghua. When I saw them the first time I thought we had to do with Chinese siblings which would be pretty cool and uncommon. However, I was disappointed in that regard. Minghua is obviously Chinese, if Kei is Chinese I already forgot. Most sadly though they are not siblings, they aren't even in any particular relationship. They just...live together. Kinda dull. Minghua strucked me as a character who could have had a very broad range of characteristics, but no. A bit love here, a bit jealousy there, sprinkled with some cutout-traits and voilà you have yourself a female character that is just one in thousands. And Kei? I also hoped for good things but he turned out even more generic than his not-sister. Everything you would imagine a generic Mc for such a show to be, he is it. Very uncreative and dull. The key selling point, apart from the planes are obviously the main girls, the pilots. Since I also watched the first 4 episodes I haven't seen the third pilot and only briefly the second, so I will be focusing only on the main pilot girl. The other 2 are probably just fill-ins anyway. So, Gripen. Since I can't go into spoilers and don't want to, I am going to keep it as short as I can. Gripen knows nothing of the world and any customs. She has a good appetite, but that is also a trope that has just been copy and pasted onto her. While I found her interesting at first she became boring and stagnant quite fast. There isn't much to her, now that might be because of her not going outside at all but that in itself is problem of the author for relying on this aspect of her just never going out. This is a problem of the character's writing and this happens much too often, especially in modern anime.


Overall: Girly Air Force is....an anime. It's an anime that I dropped and stopped watching. Why? I had better things to do, my time just wasn't worth spending on that series in my eyes. It's a painfully mediocre anime that falls flat on most things it does and just stays at one point. I do not recommend this anime because you can do much more productive things like eating or tidying up your room. And with that I will leave this anime.

See you in the next review.

Well, it's a simple anime with a different proposition, but it fell into that cliche of harem, with ecchi and in that old story of something wanting to dominate the world, in this case they are the ZAI, a type of technology still quite mysterious. It could have been better, if they had developed better the characters, nothing happens between them, it seems that the winding that is seen in an end of harem anime, an example of this was the friend of the protagonist having no relevance, she existed only to have more girls on the screen.Overall, it's an anime that is minimally watchable

This is a review of the entire show and is filled with spoilers, and I repeat everything twice (most likely). With that said, we're diving right in.

I gave this show an overall of 5, which is probably way more than it deserves if I'm being honest.
The show goes off the basis that something called Xi (Or Zai) has invaded China and has begun attacking the rest of the world, and blah blah blah. I'm Sorry, if you were looking for a synopsis please refer to the anime's page.

There a couple of main points that for Character review seems to be quite off. We have ... Kei, who has a rather shallow character backstory, as he only gets to refer to being from China and something about XI with nothing else. He has a very close female friend-note- not sister- who follows him around with literally no development other than she (You ready for this?) basically would follow him anywhere blah blah blah for some reason I'm sure that they explained somewhere but it was quite forgettable as she is literally nowhere to be seen after the first few episodes with a few minutes here and there until a random ass anima pops up (We'll get to that in a second) almost like they didn't care about her after Kei met his new wife to be (literally). She has this annoying trope of basically only seeing her at home and for some decent 'supporting' roles at the start but the suddenly disappears towards the end of the anime as previously mentioned due to Kei being busy with his 'part time job'. (Two side notes for him: A) He's quite fluent in Japanese for someone who just ran away from China and B: Never actually tells his childhood friend ((I think?)) that he's actually in the military)
And Now to the Anima, who unless plot foreshadowing call for it, get no backstory. Gripen, who is basically so monotone I might have thought she was teaching my science class for a hot second. A failure until she is paired up with him and they never bother getting around to explaining it with other than we're still looking into it like your Comcast customer service provider. Pretty much all the anima can get away with no backstory and development due to the excuse of 'machines'. I won't touch on them too much except for Rhino who you'll have to watch the series itself to understand
Purple Anima-- I don't even remember her name due to being perhaps the biggest mishap of this series- randomly interduces a new anima into the show, promptly makes her Minghua to cause confusion- and disappears. We get some BS explanation for why she looks like her blah blah blah.
Eagle- Stays the same throughout the entire anime (no joke)
Phantom--Ummmmmmmmmm ok then
Jokes aside, she seems like the most interesting character (I did say jokes aside so I'm not joking :^) due her abilities and willingness-- however is quickly thrown away due to a cliche for Kei (Hahaha that does the word sounding the same thing I think but you'll understand when you watch it)
Animation---Animation was decent, however, OST and CGI were a big out of places and will most likely cause this show to age badly.
The sound was average, neither bad nor fantastic.
AHhahaha, the plot, where we rip on that and tear it to shreds.
My First major problem is the pacing of events. I mean, think about it. You go from struggling to not get scrapped to full-on operations in just a few episodes. Characters are done weirdly with a purple girl and Mrs. Song, who is ditched constantly and only appears outside of the first 2 episodes whenever the producers decided Kei needs, um, love problems? Purple girl gets a quiccc appearance with no explanation except for her appearance and thennnnn never see her again ahahaa.
We get this weird sort of Kei in a dream vibe around episode 9 that plays no effect onto the ending of this story what so ever.
This could have been a half decent show had the producers decided to dedicate a first half of a 24 epi show to character development and there training, rather than saying Kei knows how to fly, stick him in an airplane, and say good luck and send him into missions and operations with an anima thy quite literally were almost going to scrape a few episodes or so ago.
They keep throwing wrenches into their plot which don't help at all, and with bad character development with a half-assed almost harem basically, I gave this show a 5.
With all that said, this is my first review so all feedback is wonderfully accepted. I feel bad for you, the reader, as I mainly focused on Characters due to them pretty much being the focal point of this show with a few airplanes mixed in. Again, thanks for reading my shitty ass review.