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May 8, 2025
In 2015, JAM Project made the Opening theme for the anime "One Punch Man", "THE HERO !!". They probably received a list of specifications and made that Opening. In 2019, the same JAM Project made the similar, but worse "Seijaku no Apostle" for it's second season. That second Opening feels less of an original idea and more of trying to re-hash it's first opening.
That's Lazarus from it, Adult Swim trying to re-hash Watanabe Shinichirou's works without knowing why they worked, and ending up with something that borders self-parody made by ChatGPT.
Lazarus works on the structure that, at any point, they can finish the story in
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just two episodes, making the remaining episodes feel somewhat pointless and disconnected from one another, mostly existing to have some actions with no personal stakes that aren't even that interesting to begin with. It's structure feels less of an anime and more of a game of the Hitman franchise, with in most of it's episodes you learning almost nothing about it's plot, setting or characters.
It's setting, also, feels a bit weak, as it fails a lot at "show don't tell": Yes, we know that humanity may be doomed in one month because it's explicitly told to us... but if it wasn't, could you conclude that from what the anime shows us? Not a single character seemed to have change their lifestyle one single bit, save for one scene where a live-journal tells us that there are being riots somewhere and that the stock exchange crashed (Not that those things ever end up mattering, anyway). You could've changed the premise that the whole thing about Hapna being lethal was unknown to the general public and the plot would stay the same. One could think that such seeming discrepancy is intentional and is the show trying to tell some message via it but... I don't really think it is.
It feels like an inferior version of the Suicide Squad because, of the end of the day, what our characters are doing has no personal connection to them, it's not something that will make them have to come to terms with their past, the types of person they are nor something like that: They just got to do their job... and so they go there and do their job.
Cyberpunk and similar "dystopic sci-fi future" setting might be set in the future, but they're about talking about the present: Take an exaggerated problem in the future and use it to talk about a similar problem happening in the present, take a problem in the future and talk about it being a logical conclusion or extrapolation of a problem happening now or in the past, talk about the technology could be used to, instead of solving our problems, creating new ones or making the ones we have worse.
Lazarus does none of that, and it's social commentary is so bad that it feels it doesn't want to be there: When we learn about Doug being a victim of racism, it's the most generic type of racism possible, and one that essentially says nothing about the subject. It's like it's there only to fill a checkbox, and not because the person writing it cares about the subject. That same case of racism could've been in a story set in the present or in the 90's and it would need no changes to it. Same goes for the anime talking about homelessness or trans people, it's just saying "Oh yeah, homeless and trans people exist" without exploring nothing more of the subject or how the material conditions of it's society relate to it.
It ends up feeling that their view of Cyberpunk is "Woah, cool technology, and also humanity bad" rather than a study and reflection about society, it's systems and structures.
In the end, Lazarus just ends up being a pretentious "all style, no substance".
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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May 5, 2025
I decided what I would watch in the Spring 2025 season by watching the PV of every anime in it. At first, I didn't have much higher expectations, so I decided to lower my bar... then the PV for Kijin Gentoushou came like a blast and made me realize that good anime is good anime, no bar-lowering needed.
Kijin Gentoushou is an ambitious story, and I don't say that solely from it coming from a premise of being a very LONG-running story spanning a LONG time-frame, but from the fact that, similar to other anime nowadays such as Oshi no Ko, Re:Zero Season 3 and Frieren,
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it decided to start with a multiple-episode long "first episode" despite not having the recognizability of those three. That choice made sense: That story NEEDS to be long to establish the bases for the anime, but at the same time it does not represent what the story IS, so having it as two or three separate episodes could give people a wrong idea of what Kijin Gentoushou is trying to be, in a way that the official episodes 2-6, which cover the second book, do much better.
In part I speak of experience: Though I know that much of book one was cut and the source material is likely better, much of the anime's episode one made it feel... Korean? That mostly come from my negative image of Korean works, but once it started with the ultra-violence between demons while they acted in less reasonable ways than a Newtype in the Gundam universe, it REALLY felt that it was going into the "OP protagonist edgefest" realm. Luckily, I couldn't have been more wrong!
From the end of episode one, we already know that our protagonist is still very human and didn't give it to his most base desires. In a way, this fact makes the next episodes, which are there to explore a journey of him "getting back his humanity" to feel a bit different: Though the closest story in that regard would be Berserk, Jinya never "lost as much humanity" as Guts did, so in his "quest to regain his humanity" he's... already starting from a very high baseline.
That might feel "off" to a few people: Book two mainly explores his questioning of what truly means to be human, and that some demons can be more "human" than some humans, though those are the types of stories you would expect if Jinya had some form of hate-boner for each and every demon, which he never did, being very level-headed ever since episode two.
While I would prefer that such character development had happened on-screen rather than between books, it also made it possible for the episodes to be how they were.
Kijin Gentoushou is "efficient" with it's characters: It could have easily been a(n inferior) story where characters only appear in one episode, and never again, but it truly makes a nice re-use of them in various different occasions, which ties back to Jinya's "return of humanity": A human must live in society together with people, don't they?
The story has multiple opportunities to "fall to some vices", but never does, with even a scene of Jinya killing rapists feeling less like a power-fantasy and more like him fulfilling a promise to people he knew deeply, almost as if he had "lived through their memories" ;).
It truly is a story about killing demons, it just happens that the focus is on killing the "inner" ones.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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May 2, 2025
I often joke that "Isekai is when an author is too lazy to write fantasy", coming from the fact isekai stories forego having to write a character's backstory and how they relate to that world — "they just came there, have superpowers and are the chosen one, now let's jump to the actions scenes!".
Of course, good isekai will go out of it's way to write not only backstories for their characters, but also spend a lot of time having them acclimate to and become a part of that world rather than simply being an outside force which is there to change it.
The mere possibility that
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Teogonia could be an isekai made people jump the gun in initially give the anime a score less than 6.5 (Which at the time of writing this review, has gone up by 0.3 points), but in reality it is a fantasy story, though one which picks a setting much closer to the Bronze Ages rather than being fully medieval.
Indeed, "Bronze Age: The Anime" seems like a fitting description: Tales of local gods and their avatars, life-energies, body-painting, gods who reward their loyal servants and are wrathful towards those who offend them, a humanity which lives in villages and garrisons and, most important of all, a deep connection to the land.
Indeed indeed, that might be the aspects were Teogonia distinguishes itself the most and is able to say "I'm a fantasy, not an isekai": Our characters are villagers, not a warrior caste. They protect their villages next to the people they grew up with, and where they will later go back to plow the fields for their own food, marry the lasses who tend to the animals and continue the cycle.
Our protagonist, our "avatars", are not ones like in isekai stories which travel around the world, but are those who tend to and protect their lands and vassals. Those who distinguish themselves are rewarded, yet at the same time become targets of those who want to distinguish themselves even further.
Teogonia might be far from being the anime with the best artstyle or animation (Though the one it has isn't bad either), yet it is the sum of a plethora of small details in it that bring a sense of "uniqueness" to it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 26, 2025
"The Illusion of Choice"
There's a term I coined called "The Valley of Mediocrity", it stems from the fact that a lot of webnovel stories are born from one very interesting idea, but once that idea gets exhausted (Sometimes it's after it's first volume, sometimes after it's third-fourth... sometimes after it's first chapter) it essentially becomes a boring and generic story... until the author has a second idea (Which in normal situations would've been another webnovel), though that's not guaranteed to happen 100% of the time.
Katainaka no Ossan, Kensei ni Naru is like that: Sure, the flashback sequences for each of the characters are interesting, we're
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really sold in the idea that he's a DILF, he met quite a bunch of interesting people in his life... but after that, where do we go? If I had to base myself in the fight against the griffin, I would say we're likely going in a very generic route, since so far it has not sown any seeds for a greater, overarching plot.
So why "Mixed Feelings" and not "Not Recommended"? Well, a couple of reasons: There's some good work being put into some spots — the CGI by YAMATOWORKS is top quality, some character designs are interesting, it isn't an isekai about an OP protagonist (Low bar, but hey, that's where we're at nowadays), rather choosing to go for the route of someone with realistic sword skills, and the poses/forms are quite nice to look at.
It has a mixture of things that make it go just BARELY above the line that I want to give another episode a chance. Since this is Preliminary Review, this "Low 6/10" isn't the rating of the four episodes so far, but rather something that also takes into account the "potential" for this anime to become something bigger, as in "If things go right, this can become a 6/10 anime".
Granted, "potential" wanes after every episode if it isn't used. Since contrary to some other reviews, I have not read the original manga nor Light Novel, this comes from a place of thinking that maybe, just maybe, with one or two good episodes it can go to a nice direction.
Is that optimism? Maybe, but one can dream.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 19, 2025
It's quite likely that this will become a "Recommended" when it finishes, but so far I have to go with "Mixed Feelings", but my 7/10 is a recognition of it's potential.
This anime has a pretty nice first episode, some nice energy to it, the music jam scenes really feel like something that would come from an experimental short trying to convey a single emotion. Not the top spot for best CGI of the season since that spot was taken by "Katainaka no Ossan, Kensei ni Naru", but it's likely right after it.
My complaints are from the somewhat unwise use of it's time: At list 2/3's
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of it's second episode could've been cut, it mostly being repetition or reiteration of points already conveyed to us in the first episode (There are also some repetitions in episode three, but to a much lesser degree). For instance, the fact that Lilisa's adoptive sister despises her is already conveyed in a short pouting scene in episode one... but if you didn't get that, there's another scene in episode two conveying the same thing... and if you STILL didn't get that, she explicitly tells the audience this at the end of episode 3.
An anime doesn't HAVE TO advance it's plot every episode, but it has to show us something NEW, something INTERESTING every episode. It's first three episode being reformulated into two episodes would've made the anime feel more tidy, more concise.
This review might seem overly harsh, but the reason for that is that the anime has all the tools to be great, so failures call even more attention than they naturally would. While it's true that the "three-episode rule" is more of a "heuristic" than a proper rule, the reality is that the anime's story only feels it will start from episode 4 onward, it's first three, while setting our long-term objective of playing in a rock festival and looking for more band members, don't really tell us what the structure of the anime will be, something you usually do have by episode three.
As from the rest... well, a review (Words, essentially) is a bad way to convey art (Something created because words weren't enough): The musical part of it is good, it has fine character designs, and it has nice scenes, but those are things that are supposed to be EXPERIENCED rather than explained (So go watch it).
TL;DR: It's a box full of potential. After three episodes it was shown that was a lot more potential than initially imagine, but so far it's still only potential, we'll have to see.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 8, 2025
Princess Tutu is a 2002 anime starring (At the time) fairly new seiyuu, some who would eventually become fairly big in the industry. It existed in the context of the post-1997 anime industry which, due to the massive success of Evangelion, began to bet more into shorter (One to two cour) anime with more experimental stories while also embracing the innovations of digital animation - and in that regard, Princess Tutu's artstyle wouldn't feel out of place were it released five or even ten years later.
This anime is WESTERN, but not western in the sense of "Anime largely based on western cinema ans sensibilities" as
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one would call anime made by Watanabe Shinichirou, nor western in the sense of "A cowboy story", but western in the sense that it not only is about the western cannon of theater, ballet, fairy tales and opera, is also structurally shapes itself around those aesthetically: The anime episodes not only represent an opera, THEY ARE, themselves, an opera.
That in itself makes it a bit hard to analyze it, as it is something that is best "felt", rather than "described with words".
It's arc structure is a bit unorthodox: It's first 13 episodes could themselves alone, with little to no changes, be a complete anime, and one that I would likely give a 10/10. It's second half isn't as strong or concise, but it still found interesting ways of expanding the story.
The anime is strongly episodic, with the episodes (Mainly in it's first half) having little to sometimes no epilogues to them (Sometimes the credits rolling right after the end of the climax), but it still manages to have some sense of progression via the relationships between the characters and the "heart shard" system, which brings visible change to our male lead, Mytho/Myuuto. The "abandonment" of such system in it's third quarter makes it a failure on trying to emulate it's first quarter, as some of it's episodes might now feel a bit repetitive and could easily have swapped places without anyone noticing, the stories themselves also feeling weaker, as they're not based on any specific emotion theme anymore, and it takes a while to get accustomed to that slower pacing after the aggressive spectacle of it's second quarter.
It had a fairly smart way of omitting and drip-feeding information, causing the audience to assume different things as different times (Such as the identity of the raven). Likewise, the decision to focus on different characters in different moments also leads to the relationships the anime will end up with to feel "natural" and "fairly earned".
It's somewhat funny that our "secondary protagonists", with time, end up becoming the focus: The character development of the mysterious Fakir, the tragedy of Rue, too weak to deal with sadness, falling to her darkest desires, feeling empowered by them... but alas, still being a human, we go back to seeing the fragility in her.
Being an anime of which one of the messages is using dance to convey that which cannot be conveyed with words, the series itself conveys with artistry in a way that can only be experiences, and not simply read in a review, it's a marriage between song, dance, theater and animation.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Mar 28, 2025
Despite the fact that, at the time of this review, Shin Cutie Honey only has positive or mixed reviews here, I've mostly seen negative opinions about it everywhere else. I do not understand them, however.
Shin Cutie Honey is a soft-sequel of the original, 1973 series, though in a way it makes more sense to refer to it as the "Turn A Gundam" of Cutie Honey, as it is set in a distant, dystopic future with different versions of characters from Nagai Go's star system.
It adds a lot to the original by having characters with more fleshed out personalities and episodes with more of a story
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to them.
We now have a Gotham-esque metropolis of "Cosplay City", a "hardened" Honey with attitude, a lovely side-cast (I absolutely ADORE the visuals and relationship dynamic between Akakabu and Daiko, Chokkei's parents) and a late-80's - 90's aesthetic that almost borders self-parody, from large shoulder-pads to glam-rock.
It goes harder in the ecchi direction, to the point that it would be very difficult to post a video about it on you tube without having to censor a lot of it, from Black Maiden's delicious flat chest to a Honey that, despite being made out of metal, really feels like a human made out of meat, bones, fat, muscle and sinew. It knows what aesthetic it wants, from the guitar rendition of the original theme song, from Honey's new forms such as a silver armor.
What might be a a letdown for many, however, is that Shin Cutie Honey is an incomplete story... sort of. It was initially supposed to have 12 episodes, but it only ever had 8. This is less of a problem since, due to it's unorthodox structure, the story technically "ends" at episode 4, with the remaining ones being somewhat self-contained episodes. If you found the (Equally incomplete) ending of the original series satisfactory, then this one shouldn't really be an issue for you.
I don't think that I need to talk about the artstyle or animation, it's the good quality you expect from a 90's OVA.
Give it the three episode try, at the very least, as I personally consider the third one one of the best.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Mar 18, 2025
Cutie Honey is an anomaly, and in a good sense.
Preceding Sailor Moon by nearly two decades on the idea of a female henshin-hero anime and preceding Minky Momo by one decade with having the idea of it's protagonist transforming into a new profession every week, Cutie Honey works as a parody of super-hero stories typically associated with Ishinomori Shoutarou: An android/cyborg/mutant fighting an evil organization with villain-of-the-week androids/cyborgs/mutants as well as their goons. This time, however, with a "female" motif and an erotic-comedy spin to it (Though the ecchi is very mild by modern standards).
Episodic shows live or die depending on how good it's episodic
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structure it is, while trying to avoid the sin of being repetitive. Perhaps due to it being only 25 episodes instead of 50, Cutie Honey succeeds on that by having a different transformation in every episode (As opposed to only using the same ones established at the beginning) and finalizing the weekly villain in a slightly different way.
While it would be expected of the male cast to simply be useless perverts trying to land a humor that is no longer funny, this is definitely not the case here, with them working as a pretty endearing and helpful side-cast to Honey's adventures.
The one thing that I would see as a problem are the usual early segments of Honey having to escape her academy while evading her ugly teachers: Sometimes the jokes land, but often I feel that they don't. They feel more reminiscing of Nagai's previous works with school erotic-comedy in Harenchi Gakuen, while in here they usually don't result in any consequence of Honey continuously eloping, don't connect to the rest of the episode (Anything would've sufficed, really, but there really is nothing) and the stories themselves could easily just start elsewhere, skipping those segments completely (Which is what happens later on).
Something that can be either a pro or a con depending on how you look at it is the fact that, other than the standard one-and-a-half-minute opening sequence, Cutie Honey also possesses a three-minute ending sequence, directly followed by a two-minute episode preview, which is mostly just straight excerpts from the next episode. If you choose to skip those, as I did, it makes episodes, an therefore the whole series, 20% shorter.
While Nagai's artstyle (And by consequence his character designs) feel "made to a flat 2D plane", thus not often taking "three-dimensionality" into consideration, only made to be seen in certain angles and certain poses (Which isn't a problem in a manga), the animation doesn't really feel "stiff", and other than the occasional weird-perspective shot or slight character off-modeling, it feels very good for an anime of the era.
While I complimented the anime for being innovative in every episode, sometimes this is done in the way of Honey having a new power or gadget never seen or mentioned before (The first episodes are quite fond of that).
The "transformation gimmick" is still very interesting regardless, as some transformations might have special skills (Such as being able to tame lions or be proficient in any vehicle) and others might be first and foremost be used as disguises, which adds the factor that Honey must first find an opportunity to change to her "combat form" before being able to win a fight.
Part of the dynamic is that Honey cannot transform in public, as she fears that she will be shunned and hated by all if people find that she's an android... but this fact doesn't have a lot of energy to it, as we never see characters expressing negative opinions about androids, so it's more something that you have to think "Yeah, I guess that would make sense" rather than something the anime will try to convince you. Maybe it was common trope of the era and it's supposed to be "obvious" for you if you've read enough similar stories?
The biggest problem would likely be that it eventually gets a bit boring, as a lot of it's "episodic episodes" don't have much in terms of plot, and the personality of a lot of the villains of the week doesn't differ much between one and the other.
While by it's latter half the story goes to an "around the world" route, it mostly seems random, as rarely is stated a reason for Honey & crew to be there or go there, and this is where I feel the anime would've benefited a lot of having a more overarching plot at that point. It also has a bit of an open ending.
It really isn't bad at what it promises, but the main issue is that it never promised much in the first place.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Feb 26, 2025
When we talk about the Nanoha franchise, the only constant is change.
The first two seasons were urban fantasy stories with loosely defined (For the best) magic systems, then StrikerS (Which many people disliked, but I liked) decided for a more grounded approach to magic and a bigger focus in it's Sci-fi elements in favor of the urban fantasy ones. Finally ViVid mixed things up once more, and as a long running manga suffered from issues such as a lack of a long term plot or motivations for it's characters, which made most of them feel "underutilized" or even "wasted".
ViVid Strike chooses to be it's own
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thing, so I'll review it under it's own merits.
It solves the biggest issue the ViVid anime had (Well, apart from not covering the entire manga), by not dilly-dallying and knowing what it wanted to do and where it wanted to go from the start (I guess Nanoha just shines in the short-form, after all): It's a story about Fuuka, Rinne, and their relationship.
While Rinne is an well explored character, Fuuka has an issue that most things about her seem to orbit around Rinne, not having much of a backstory to herself. The biggest issue for me being how it wasn't entirely clear how their personal conflict was solved via their fight (In that regard being very similar to Vivio vs Einhart fight that solved their conflicts in the volume 12 of the manga, which wasn't 100% clear either).
We always knew that, when it came to Nanoha, Seven Arcs had bit more than it could chew, so it really visible the comparison between ViVid, made by A-1 Pictures and that even though sometimes the art would be crooked, it did have animation to it, to ViVid Strike, with it's noticeable limited animation. Often there are uses of creative methods to compensate for that, such as only animating the effects of an action (e.g. light effects from a punch, water splashes, etc) to make us be able to imagine elaborate movements while still giving us a nice sense of impact.
If Force was supposed to be the edgier manga while ViVid was supposed to be the more light-hearted one, ViVid Strike grabs elements from both, a ViVid with sprinkles of Force: It has scenes that would never be in ViVid, it's violence feels more vicious in how it's strikes are portrayed, bones break. There isn't much fanservice to it, if something it's levels are pretty similar to ViVid's, but the main difference being that while ViVid's fanservice was rarely noticeable or even interpreted as fanservice, ViVid Strike's call some attention to them due to feeling "different" from all other scenes.
There's not much more to be said here: It sells itself as an anime of little girls putting their feelings on their fists, and in that regard I don't have any complaints, it does that well, despite it's limitations in the animation department, having impactful fights full of twists and a nice sense of energy. On average, it feels better than ViVid, but in a way, it is also JUST an anime about little girls fighting, not having the ambition to aim for more than that nor having resources to be the best at what it tries to do, so "Mixed Feelings" it is.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Feb 22, 2025
ViVid is a strange manga.
It feels less like a standalone story and more like the prequel of one due to certain unorthodox decisions it makes. I would have to guess those come from it being the first long story original manga from Tsuzuki Masaki: While I didn't like the reading flow of the manga very much, it wouldn't be strange in a Visual Novel, while I had problems with the "lack of commitment" problem in the manga, such problem wouldn't be there in a short anime.
Nanoha's storylines usually follow the structure of one of our heroes wanting to offer help to one of our antagonists
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in order to try to achieve a non-violent solution: This is the case with Nanoha and Fate in the original, Nanoha+Fate and the Wolkenritter in A's, as well as Erio+Caro and Lutecia+Garyuu & Signum+Reinforce Zwei and Zest+Agito in StrikerS. ViVid decides to flip the concept on it's had by asking "But what if our antagonist accepted our hero's help from the very start?", trying for a more light-hearted and low-stakes approach, but having problems in it's execution.
While it's first three volumes seemed a bit aimless, the start of it's tournament arc made it really seem like the series was finally taking shape in a way that reminded me of "Gunnm: Last Order", and that was somewhat true as there is a story that is somewhat completed at the end of volume 12 with a thematic ending... the problem being the strange spot the series as a whole is left after that, as there's no longer enough "time" to make some big arc, it's remaining volumes now being a sequence of small gimmicks, similar to it's first 3 volumes.
Here's why the definition of it looking more like a prequel: It introduces dozens of characters, but does nothing with them. While one could argue that StrikerS did the same, the reality was that StrikerS did so by being in the structure of a "large last arc", by having every character do "one last remarkable action", which is different from having a character do a single thing in the beginning or middle of the story and them be relegated to only being in cameos. This creates a vicious cycle where instead of reusing characters, we keep making new characters to be disposed after being used once (e.g. Chantez, Tao, Fabia) or never used at all (Yumina being the biggest example).
While this could be said to being a problem of the Nanoha franchise AS A WHOLE, it is something justified as it was done between three different series separated by time-skips. If you do it in a single series that's supposed to be coherent and happen in the span of a year, it becomes egregious.
Vivio is barely a protagonist for most of the series, that function being mostly divided between Einhart and Miura. There's also a constant problem (Could be because of editors telling the author to "wrap things up" or the author himself growing tired of a certain idea) of the manga doing "tell, don't show": If there are three fights, we will only be shown one of them and be asked to "imagine" the following two, being told what happened in it. If there is a five day trip, we see two days of it and are told what happened in the remaining three. The most egregious example being a certain tournament where there is a full chapter for the first fight, but them a time-skip and a single page for the semi-finals and finals.
Once again: ViVid does not commit.
While it fails on the macro scale, however, it does succeed in the micro scale: To present a character, make us care for them and having them have a motivation for one or a couple fights where it really is well executed (Once again, something that worked masterfully in StrikerS), the best example being the character of Corona, currently the top 3 ViVid original character with the most favorites, losing only to Sieglinde and Einhart.
There's also a curious case of "suffering from success": The new characters are presented as so powerful and having abilities so interesting that it makes it seem that characters from previous season (That should be stronger than them) are weak by comparison. StrikerS didn't have such problem by having a more "grounded" setting, where the powers of every single characters seemed simple, yet interesting, it was believable that Nanoha was a behemoth compared characters such as Subaru or Teana, but compared to the flashy powers of characters in ViVid such as Rio, Victoria, Sieglinde or even Einhart, the series fails to make her seem more powerful than a generic aerial mage even though, of those, only Sieglinde would stand a chance against her in a fight.
Talking anymore would've been just me repeating myself, so let's conclude: Don't be deceived by the high chapter count, this isn't a series that will use them to have many long, meaningful arcs or to work or develop most of the characters it introduced. If something, it's almost a gacha in the form of a manga, and this isn't changed by some very good moments it has here and there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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