June 23, 2007

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's (season 2)

Finished rewatching this earlier than I was expecting to - used it to kill time today while the co-worker was late, and he got in right as the last episode's credits were rolling.

I've been trying to keep spoilers out of the reviews, but it's hard to talk about A's at all without spoiling some of the first season - just throwing around a couple of names lets you get a really good idea of how the first season turned out. If you haven't watched any of the first season, don't read below the fold - just scroll down to the season 1 review, and keep in mind that everything that's good about the first season is even better in A's.

Or, if you're like me and spoilers don't ruin a show for you, you could actually watch an episode or two of A's -first-. Total accident - downloaded the wrong episodes, started watching, said, "Hey, this show is throwing a lot of characters at me like I should know who they are..." "You're watching A's, stupid." "Ohhhhh..." With many shows, this would be a major turn-off; with Nanoha, it was something of an advantage, because the start to A's is VERY strong, especially compared with the first season. But a little confusing, so ideally you should watch it the right way around.

The good:

- Sympathetic antagonist syndrome, turned up more or less as high as it will go. The first season had Fate, and an unstable nutjob behind her; this season has no unstable nutjobs. Everyone's acting with more or less good intentions, nobody's doing anything especially stupid, and it all fits together quite well, which is a triumph of writing when there's so many...

- Great fights! The tradition of energy beams and property damage continues and then some. They don't fight every episode, but when they do, it tends to pack a good amount of punch. And every fight is a character versus character - there's few monsters or wimpy mooks to take up screen time.

- Very good job with fast pacing. Does a good job of keeping things moving without seeming rushed anywhere. Keeps the slow explication divided up and separated by solid action. The fast start is a big plus - saves the introductions for after it's set the hook. ;p

- The ensemble cast works well. There's now enough characters where we see characters who are not Nanoha and Fate interacting with each other, and it works well. The slice-of-life stuff with the antagonists goes a long, long, long way towards humanizing them, without turning them into objects of ridicule.

- Fate! Moe characters don't normally resonate with me, but for some reason I really, really like Fate as a character. She went through a lot in the first season, and it's really good to see her back and okay, with things going generally well. The show COULD have overdone the whole "okay, now she gets to be a normal girl" thing, and maybe someone else could see it that way, but I enjoyed it greatly.

- Weapon design. Even better than the first season. Taking the whole "magical girl wand" concept and making them machines was pretty good; adding ammunition to the mix makes for more "punch" in the fights. And the designers actually thought about the implications of that, so Fate has some speed-loaders lying around, for example... way better than I normally expect from a Japanese writing staff, much less one working on a magical girl show.

The bad:

- Lots of characters. There are a lot of characters from the first season who get shuffled into the background (especially Nanoha's family, who go from a big part of the show to being only nominally present). Big crowd of new characters to keep track of, especially some of the lower-ranking TSAB personnel. Antagonists are pretty easy to keep track of, and the important cast of protagonists you already know, but even still...

- The show does a few flashback sequences, so pay attention to things like calendars to keep yourself oriented.

- Animation can still be inconsistent. Again, it's a matter of bad individual shots rather than low quality in general, but occasionally there's a shot where you just sit there and wonder, what were they thinking?

- Transformation sequences. This is better but still bad, on the principle that the day that a quantity of "naked little girls" greater than zero ends up in the "good" column, I will need to go into therapy. But overall, the show is much, much lighter on the whole idea - Nanoha's old sequence appears once, Fate and Nanoha each have a new, not-so-servicey sequence once, and after that, no problem at all. There's a few scenes with Hayate doing the whole no-clothing-floating-in-unknown-space thing as well. But overall, I never got the "dirty old man" feeling, or that the show was actually trying to appeal to people who wanted to see more of that.

- There's still some inappropriate fanservice here and there, though not tons of it or anything. No onsen or beach episodes. (No TIME for them!)

- Last fight is kind of bleh. Boom boom boom boom, okay, it's satisfying on an emotional level, but pretty lame from an aesthetic one.

- One gets the idea that the writers didn't really think about the whole Time-Space Administration Bureau before they got this far in the show. Some of the organizational shortcomings start showing up in this season, and it's clear that it's a semi-military organization being written about by someone who has no clue about the military. I can live with a little nepotism, okay, but there's still way too many admirals swanning around...

The ugly:

- When you finish, you'll want to go on to the third season right away, but A's is -way- better than the next season so far, even if things are looking encouraging. Not really a shortcoming with A's - it's good enough that it's a very hard act to follow.

- Finally, Engrish! (And, I'm told, "Jerman"?) The weapons don't speak Japanese. When we're talking attack names, the English works pretty well, but when they're conversing (especially Raising Heart, who's a lot more talkative this time around), they tend to be a bit bizarre to the English ear. Definitely some use of English loanwords that are really false cognates ("don't mind", for example), and some word choices, well... let's just say that the writer's English isn't up to par. One would think the voice actress would have clued them in, but evidently not...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 06:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1107 words, total size 6 kb.

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
14kb generated in CPU 0.0138, elapsed 0.141 seconds.
28 queries taking 0.1355 seconds, 48 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.