Alternative title(s): Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha EXCEEDS Gun Blaze Vengeance
Anime original by Seven Arcs
Streaming on Crunchyroll
Premise
For thirty years now Earth has been under attack by bad CGI monsters. With society teetering on the brink of collapse, Shiina Kuze makes her living hunting the invaders while trying to juggle caring for her little sister Setsuna.
Zigg’s verdict: Won’t Get Fooled Again
As a fan of the original Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, I’m always at least a little intrigued when these periodic attempts to revive the franchise pop up, and I almost always regret that instantly. It didn’t work for Vivid or Vivid Strike and unfortunately it really doesn’t work here either. While the idea of shifting Nanoha to a sort of post-apocalyptic survival tale is kind of fascinating in concept, in practice this just strips the setting of most of its original ideas and aesthetics for a bog-standard monster hunting setup.
I’m not really sure which of the myriad sins of this opener is the most egregious. The focus on weaponry and guns is extremely shallow and some of the most blatant otaku-bait I’ve seen in a while, the kind of empty-headed fascination with killing tools that Evangelion was ripping chunks out of three decades ago. Part of the appeal of Nanoha was always its slightly more militaristic take on magical girl tropes for sure, but without that interesting clash of tones you just have a combat anime that doesn’t even deign to give its fights fun or cool choreography. In fact, this is an ugly show overall, full of awful CGI and flat, lifeless direction. If you’re going to make fire such a big part of your aesthetic you should probably make it look better than the synthetic vomit that’s all over this episode.
The main problem here though is absolutely the story, which is just drawn from the deepest, most hackneyed wells of cliche. An exacerbating factor is definitely the need to fill a full 48 minutes in this double length premiere, which means not only are we treated to insufferable dialogue but it has to be drawn out and repetitive as well. Listening to Setsuna prattle on about her deep and meaningful relationship with her big sister is bad enough but then we have to get an eternity of the same thing in reverse from Shiina almost back to back. It’s absolutely possible to kill a character in the first episode and make you feel it, but it requres a great deal of skill and good character writing, not the witless whine that dominates here. Oh, and of course since this is a Nanoha show we have to get in some bad-taste stuff, namely putting an 11 year old into a combat bikini and then having her be eaten alive a few minutes later. Yuck.
There’s also the fact that Nanoha herself is *barely* in this double-length episode, showing up for 30 seconds at the end. While I’m sure she’ll put in a bigger shift in subsequent instalments, nothing I saw here makes me interested in coming back for a second bite of the cherry. Hard, hard pass.
