Reviews

This would be the third season in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha with the end title of StrikerS. The first two seasons each spanned 13 episodes by Studio Seven Arcs and director Keizou Kusakawa. Seven Arcs prior to this third season at this point was very young with basically only this series and an ecchi show called Sekirei under their belt. StrikerS broke from the usual 13 episode format and created this show to be 26 episodes. The first two shows in the series were actually pretty good and the later movie adaptations were even better, so high hopes stood on this third iteration of the tv show.

Our setting is set ten years after the events of the second season, and runs through the basics of the world and characters establishing quick that the first two seasons are not needed to jump right into this show. The show focuses and brings back the cast from the previous show with Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate now working full time at the Time-Space Administration Bureau. Each character is around 19 and has taken on roles fitting to their brand new character such as Nanoha is now a super powerful combat instructor. She is deemed with being the captain of a specialized task force ready to deal with issues regarding ancient dangerous artifacts called ‘logia.’ New characters are introduced to be part of the task force.

Now, the show suffers from a slew of negatives. Presentation is done by having exposition included into the fighting and going over strategy accordingly, but the pure amount of talking and standing around does not help constantly repeating exposition. Second, the plot is a mess and suffers from extremely slow pacing away from the main plot consistently. 75% of the show is about life lessons, side missions, and repeated sequences over the new team of characters without much actual backstory and zero character development. StrikerS has an issue with Nanoha and Fate basically becoming mom’s to the new cast and it gets old very quick. Also, there are too many characters in the show now for overload causing the new characters to basically be a side task to the main plot. Third, there are limiters on the main characters preventing them from using their true power. They need permission, so when the enemy comes it causes convenient issues for the sake of expanding the story. There is even way too much to get into with more characters and interaction constantly happening just to expend ‘moe’ for the sake of cuteness. Animation and production are all over the place ranging from inconsistent character designs within the same episodes to fight scenes being choppy and images being slid across generic backgrounds. Music is sub-standard and has the equivalent of old generic video game sounds from the early 90s.

Everything in StrikerS has the definition of budget issues and probably would have been miles better as another 13 episode show. Character overload and half the show being introductions is unforgivable. Action and battles which made the previous shows so good are put aside here for more moe/feel good moments. This anime was a severe disappointment.