Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha

Also Reflection blu-rays coming out on April 11th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTsTgvu4NsI

Excellent. And their homepage indicates that it'll have English subs like the previous movies. Looks like I'll be making another trip to Amazon

Here’s a partial Valentine’s Day chapter featuring the main characters of Nanoha and Cross Ange in my story, Angelic Resonance. Now both girls by Nana Mizuki got their first kiss. :3

Keep the fanfic updates to the fanfic thread, please....

So, I learned at the last minute that my local movie theater actually had a showing of the new movie, Reflection, tonight. There were only a half dozen people in the theater (I suspect there was a major lack of marketing — I only learned about it because it showed up in my Google "things we think you'd be interested in" feed on my phone), but the movie was really good. Like, no exaggeration, probably the best thing the franchise has put out since A's.

Not sure what the legal options for seeing it are going to be in the west outside the (very) limited theatrical run or importing the bluray (which is supposed to have English subs, IIRC), but you never know. You can watch the whole franchise (minus the movies and Vivid) on Amazon Video these days, and if you'd told me a few years ago that that would happen, I wouldn't have believed it. So who knows?

Yeah, the film was good. I saw it in theaters this past weekend.

Pretty much exactly the kind of thing I would have expected/wanted to see after A's, aside from having the extremely skewed Violence vs Plot ratio that you'd expect of a movie.

The pacing being maybe a bit too dense is one of my few criticisms of the movie — overall I thought they did a pretty damn good job of putting exposition and characterization in the fight scenes. Levi, Stern, and Dearche, for example, had an impressive amount of characterization, given that the entirety of their screentime was a brief introduction scene (shared between the three of them) and then one fight scene each. Levi in particular was a lot of fun. But yeah, the movie probably would have benefited from adding ten or twenty minutes to the runtime to give the viewer a little more time to breathe.

The plot really felt like it stole the best parts of the PSP games and the Force manga and smashed them together. And I mean that in the best way possible — it could have been an incoherent mess, but they absolutely nailed the writing and it ended up working really well. The characters feel spot on, too. They're not the kids from the original series and A's anymore (the movie takes place two years after A's), but they're not their fully-formed adult selves from Strikers, either — but they're moving in that direction.

Yuri-chan needs a hug. A big big hug.

edited 14th Apr '18 11:36:08 AM by NHunter

Not sure if it was a deliberate Nanoha nod, but the heroine of Gun Gale Online is 'the Pink Devil.' :D

Probably unintentional, because the White Devil nickname is a western fandom thing only. The Japanese side has a different name, which is something along the lines of making a pun out of "mahou shoujo" and a phrase that can be interpreted as meaning "demonic cannon girl".

The 白い悪魔/White Devil Fan Nickname came from the Japanese fandom as well after the scene with Vita. It's why it gets referenced a lot in Japanese fan works and even official stuff (such as Quattro repeatedly calling Nanoha a devil as she blasts her way through the Cradle)

EDIT: Hmm... Wiki code can't handle Japanese links it seems. See reference here: http://nanoha.julynet.jp/?%C2%AF%B8%EC%A1%A6%A4%BD%A4%CE%C2%BE#dcacf3c9

edited 15th Apr '18 6:14:15 PM by Servbot

"White Devil" is actually a Gundam reference in addition to being a callback to the scene with Nanoha backlit by flames toward the end of A's.

So did the DVD/BD release come with subs? I saw someone mention earlier that it might. I've only seen the movies and a bit of Vivid but I've been waiting on the third movie for awhile and if it does include subs I'll just go ahead and import myself a copy since it apparently came out on DVD/BD last week.

Yeah, the Reflection bluray was released on the 11th. It does come with English subs, but they're not great. Good enough to understand what's going on, but that's about it.

Which is especially odd given that the theater version had different (and considerably better) subs. Probably done by whoever licensed it for distribution in the US, I guess.

I see. Does that mean that we're getting a US release then?

Unlikely. The theatrical release was a handful of theaters, not a major release. As far as I know, the movies aren't even available to stream anywhere in North America (though the rest of the franchise, minus Vivid, is on Amazon Prime).

A good subbed release for Nanoha Reflection is now out.

Also the Nanoha Innocent S manga is now completely translated.

Innocents was fun, but didn't have enough depth for an actual sustained story. I'd say it was better to end on a high note than to drag it out for ages, but the delay in translation more or less did that anyway. Oh well.

Innocents Jail is still amazing.

edited 19th Apr '18 5:47:24 AM by NativeJovian

I saw those updates, but I didn't realize it had finished.

If I've got time I think I'll try and get though both this weekend.

Y'know, it might be a bit of an unpopular opinion considering where the attention are mostly at but...

I kinda miss the Wolkenritters.

The Wolks are great and had a nice group dynamic. The problem is that after A's they sort of split up and do their own thing rather than acting as a team anymore. It makes sense given that they're part of a larger organization now and their varying abilities means they're best used in different situations, but I agree that it's a bit of a shame.

Honestly, I'd love to see more stuff based on the standard four-man team mentioned in Strikers and Vivid but never really used. The Wolks fit that archetype pretty well, as do the Striker Forwards, though the original cast don't really fit. Nanoha is a definite center guard and Fate a wing guard, and you can make an argument for Hayate as a fullback, but there's no obvious fourth member and none of the main candidates (Yuuno and Chrono, mostly) fit the mold of a forward attacker.

I think in one game it was revealed that Yuuno did have good combat capabilities, the problem is that his powers border on the lethal the more powerful they get.

It's never mentioned explicitly in anything, but rather implied by his attack animations in the PSP fighting games.

His fighting style there is focused on Binds, Shield Bashes, and crushing people by wrapping them up in chains and then tightening the chains.

Very effective at crippling humans, but very bad at beating people without crippling them or fighting non-biological magical constructs (such as the various monsters created by the Jewel Seeds).

His more powerul attack options are chopping things up with magical chains or forcibly teleporting someone into a lethal environment.

Both of which, while effective combat techniques, aren't really good for anything less than killing your opponent. That doesn't really gel with the series tone.

edited 1st Jun '18 3:30:07 PM by DarkHunter

Makes me think that giving Yuuno a spotlight could allow them to do a Darker and Edgier spin-off without having to mingle too much with the core cast.

I'd rather they give the Huckbein a spinoff over Yuuno, tbph. Fuck, I'd go for a Precia spin-off over Yuuno.