I love how so many in this thread feels the need to say that A's was better, but StrikerS was still good, great actually. 7.5/10 8/10 9/10 1/1!!!!!!
Then at the same time also point at some glaring faults of the series like:
- how the new characters where pointless
- how it had bad pacing with more then half of the series being a so called "slow start"
- not being able to offer something of great enough worth to cut the screen time of Nanoha and Fate
- too many villains
- too many characters in general
- confusion as to how they could just drop important characters from before
- confusing vagueness of Nanoha and Fate's relationship
- it grew on me(growing used to the awfulness)
- boring and pointless episodes
- cringe, meh and really? moments
- boring corporate behavior for most of the characters
- confusion about the magic limiters
- let's not forget the best one; struggling motivation to keep watching, but still glad they finished it. (I believe this is the kind of feeling you get when you have been taken hostage, but you where then very glad once it was over and set free)
Now that sure sounds like an 8/10 to me, I can hardly imagine something better then StrikerS, a true example of what you can do with low effort animation and main characters we don't know what to do with anymore.
Come on fellow shounen-action fans, lets join hands and all agree on that it okay to sit though 20 episodes of boredom if it gets us to an "epic" action fest conclusion. We don't need to have any meaning behind the action or even understand whats going on. Storytelling is an outdated concept, just have Nanoha and Fate clean everything up and thereby completely undermining the point of the new characters, why where they being trained this whole season fighting boring robots, so that they could fight some random goons obviously, such richness of character, truly StrikerS strong point.
Now if I can stop my irony for a second, is my observation here correct? Because I have not seen a single person here even hint at what the climax was about and what terrible implications it has for what used be heroic characters like Nanoha and Fate. There is also a big lack of honesty in what 80% of this season is about, some has mentioned the training, but who do they fight for most this season. They are fighting boring looking robot drones that pose little threat, that's what StrikersS is about and if that doesn't sound like what you want then stay far far away.
This is the main enemies of StrikerS:
Let me debunk a myth about how StrikerS has great character growth, as far as the new chars go, nope, characters growing through some sort of struggle or adventure that would be good character growth, characters just talking about their back story and for that to have little bearing on the plot is not good character growth. As for the old characters, they have grown up and become more mature sure, you could maybe call this good growth if the purpose was to tell a story about how adulthood and business life will inevitably corrupt you and make you loose the passion you once had.
The story here is that Nanoha, Fate, Hayate and everyone she dragged along with her are now working for a corrupt government and organisation. These corrupt leaders gets bitten in the ass by one of their own corrupt schemes and it is now up to Nanoha and co to protect said corrupt leaders against what they have conveniently labeled terrorists.
Nanoha and Fate does this without question, without ever having grown vice to the conspiracy and they ARREST the political opposition, thus fulfilling their role in this political game.
During these events Nanoha had happened to form a bond with a synthetic being called Vivio which her cold heart wanted to get rid of as soon as possible, having someone else adopt this potentially dangerous little creature. However Vivio manages to melt Nanohas cold heart just a little bit and she gets upset when she is kidnapped, aka returned to the people who made her. It is then that Nanoha says that her biggest fear is that she will not be given a mission to bring her back, which seems to indicate that Nanoha would give up on Vivio if the committee meetings did not approve of it. What if the church of this planet didn't very much like that Vivio was a clone of their "sankt kaiser" that they worship, maybe they would see it as a blasphemy and use their political power to convince people that Vivio must be destroyed. Maybe the 6th Mobile Unit would get the mission to find her and destroy her, them being the strongest team after all, then what would Nanoha do? I hope she would have kidnapped Vivio for herself and say screw it to her corrupt leaders and escape back to earth or something and then she would have to give earth magical technology so that we could prepare and fight against the evil space-time organisation and end their tyrannical rule, now that would have been an epic conclusion. Maybe Nanoha and Fate then would once again see themselves as enemy combatants as Fate feels a sense of loyalty to her step mother who might be a powerful player in their corrupt government, then Nanoha would have to fight to make her see the truth once again, such drama!
Or maybe Nanoha would simply do the adult thing and not piss her career away by following orders, kill and destroy Vivio and deliver her head as sign of her unquestionable loyalty to their corrupt system. Then she would be given a place of power, she wouldn't have to live in the company apartmenst anymore, she could buy herself a space villa and an even bigger bed for her, Fate and Hayate, now that she is rich and can support a same-sex-polygamist family. After all this is a planet that gives no crap about how people live their lives, in this series they are using 10 year olds, Caro and Erio, as child soldiers to fight so called terrorists on the battlefield. Before them they also used Chrono at that age, that didn't seem so strange in the first series, but now we know this time-space empire regularly and officially uses children for their combat tasks.
Why did Nanoha feel like this is a planet she wanted to move to and protect? What is keeping her there even after the events of StrikerS? Go back to earth to the family and friends who love you and don't just see you as a power to exploit. One can wonder now if Fate's stepmom only took interest in her to empower their organization being well aware of what they do with children who can use magic, use them as soldiers, how is that much better then the abuse that Fate's mom put her through.
All of these stupid questions are a product of the poor story telling of StrikerS that has set up a space world that is devoid of a civilizations complexities and character growth that is actually character ruination.
It's a mystery to me how people could have thought this was good when it came out, but I wasn't there, I can't speak to that, I saw it now in 2020 and I can only judge it on how well it did it's job as story telling which was terrible. Maybe there was other animes in 2007 that was so bad that it made this seem good by comparison. Maybe it was the SW-prequels effect that fans just couldn't see it for what it was until years later. Strange in fact how similar they are in some ways. I also got to wonder if they where trying to bank on the popularity of Stand Alone Complex with this political conspiracy plot, but unfortunately that doesn't work when you put the setting in space in an alien environment where we can't put our own culture and conflicts on the things happening. Not unless you do an awesome job of world building as opposed to a super lazy job at it. |