Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha

I recently bought the first anime and A's. Are Strikers and the other series as good as those two?

The Protomen enhanced my life.

Personally, I read the final fight of Vivid as Nanoha throwing the match. Vivio got one good hit in, but did so in a way that was insanely dangerous, even with the safeguards in place. So rather than continuing to attack her reckless and defenseless daughter, or disappoint her by forfeiting without fighting back, she just... didn't get back up after that one good hit and took the TKO.

On Force: it's some decently interesting ideas mostly marred by poor execution. The early stuff is trying way too hard to be edgy, which basically just means adding lots of blood and tits. They do realize how dumb this is eventually and try to course-correct, and things were generally improving right up until it got cancelled put on indefinite hiatus. I'm honestly not even sure why they canned it — my understanding is that its sales numbers were pretty similar to Vivid's. Maybe Tsuzuki just couldn't keep up with writing both of them simultaneously?

Generally speaking, I would say that A's is the best entry in the franchise. The original series has a lot of heart, but is also janky as hell at times and the pacing isn't great (the stuff that really makes Nanoha unique doesn't show up until like seven episodes in!). A's fixes both of those problems, while also introducing a new and interesting cast and further developing the existing characters.

Strikers goes whole hog on the military scifi, so if you liked the more magical girl Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World aspects of the first two seasons, that's gone. Strikers also introduces a boatload of new characters, and does just enough with them to keep them from being entirely flat, without actually successfully completing an interesting character arc for most of them. There's some great scenes and the climax of the story hits hard and is very satisfying, but the whole thing feels a bit half-baked. It was pretty good, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it could have been amazing if it'd gone through another round or two of editing.

Vivid is half slice of life and half sports manga, focusing on Vivio and her friends in a magical combat sports league. It's also got absolutely zero focus, and sort of lurches from one thing to the nex without any coherent plot or character development. It's also got a much larger amount of fanservice than the mainline Nanoha stuff, which... isn't great. Forced I talked about above — there's not a whole lot else to say about it. There was an anime-original spinoff of Vivid called Vivid Strike, which takes place after Vivid and features two new characters — it mixes the Vivid setting (it's basically a sports anime where the sport is magical MMA) with a more old-school Nanoha conflict (the plot is about the protagonist's attempts to connect with the antagonist by fighting her). Some people were disappointed in that it doesn't feature much of the series cast (Nanoha et al don't appear at all, the only returning cast members are Vivid characters, and they're generally supporting cast for the two new girls), but it does its own thing pretty successfully, IMO.

The newest entries in the franchise, Reflection and Detonation, are a pair of movies that take place between A's and Strikers. They sort of steal the best bits from the PSP games (which are an alternate "what if?" continuity where the end of A's turns out differently) and Force and then proceed to do their own thing with those individual plot elements. Reflection was fantastic, probably the best thing in the franchise since A's, and does an excellent job of introducing and setting up the new characters and conflict while also having some great fights and some solid character moments. Unfortunately, Detonation more or less completely drops the ball and wastes all that great setup. It's just kinda... bad. You can see the conversation on the last couple pages for more details on that, if you want.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If Vivid is finished I should probably get around to reading it.

I'm normally not the biggest fan of military sci-fi but I really liked Strikers for some reason.

Also wow this thread is suddenly more active than its been I'm ages.

"But if that happened, Melia might actually be happy. We can't have that." - Handsome Rob

Vivio definitely landed more than just "one good hit" on Nanoha in that fight. Heck, they practically spent one entire chapter having her just go full Ora Ora on her mama, who really didn't seem to have any other option than to just take those hits right to the face. Nanoha also seemed just generally unprepared for the entire battle, despite supposedly spending a long ass time studying countermeasures for the Ancient Belkan style for the very purpose of finding ways to deal with her daughter's martial arts. All we really saw from her were the usual tactics long-range fighters have been employing against Belkan-style fighters since forever, and she even seemed genuinely surprised when Vivio actually broke her binding spells, despite the fact that Einhart already did that sort of thing against her way earlier. The previous seasons have always treated Nanoha as this kind of combat genius who had more than just her raw magical talent going for her, but it looks like the writer decided to just conveniently forget about that here in order to hype her daughter's Awesomeness by Analysis instead.

That said, upon further thought, I suppose that another mitigating factor for the result given here is the fact that the entire arena was designed in a way which negated or at least reduced the natural advantages an aerial mage would have against a primarily ground based fighter. And even then, the narration made a big deal about the importance of Vivio never actually letting Nanoha properly take flight, since otherwise the whole thing would turn into a Curbstomp Battle. We didn't really see her use the cartridge system either, which is kind of weird since she had no qualms about activating the even more powerful Blaster system. Maybe it was against the rules or something? Whether they were using the Crash Emulate for this battle was left kind of ambiguous too...

But yeah, it's starting to seem like I should just skip Force entirely and just watch the new movies instead. Maybe I'll reconsider whenever the manga comes out of hiatus or, even better, it gets some kind of reboot that does away with the unnecessary baggage.

Edited by BackwoodSlav on Jan 7th 2020 at 4:16:36 AM

I was spoilering mostly because there were multiple people going "oh yeah, I should read Vivid if it's finally complete" and not spoilering the end fight in face of that seems a bit rude. Especially because it's not exactly difficult to throw something in a spoiler tag.

On the fight itself, I didn't say that Vivio only landed one good hit in the entire fight, I was referring to "that one good hit" that knocked Nanoha down (as opposed to the combo spams that Vivio likes to do). But more to the point, the entire time that Nanoha is down, she's worrying about Vivio, she's not even trying to get up. She seems to be aiming for a draw, where they're both down by TKO, but Vivio gets up at the last second and Nanoha just lets it go. Then after the match, when Vivio admits that she would have had to forfeit if Nanoha had stood back up, Nanoha sort of goes "oh... I thought she was looking at this as a growing-up thing where she wanted to assert independence from her mama, but no, she just really likes strike arts". It's not a straight-up "lol I guess I didn't have to throw the match after all", but you can definitely read it that way. Of course, you can also read it as she legitimately lost. Because Tsuzuki is a coward and didn't want to risk alienating any of the fans by having a definitive end to the fight. Hell, Vivio even says that because her transformation cancelled, in a regulation match she'd have been out by KO immediately.

On Force, I'd tend to agree with your assessment there — I think the best hope for it would be to get an anime adaptation that just strips out the dumb crap in the early sections, though I don't really think that's likely to happen, unfortunately.

Edited by NativeJovian on Jan 6th 2020 at 11:30:08 AM

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Well a background illustration for the 15th anniversary◊ and Lily being featured in another◊ means that Force hasn't been completely forgotten about. So something may come up during the Lyrical Party later this month.

At the risk of sounding prissy, considering the Franchise's heavy tendency for Improbably Female Cast I don't think Force is going to be animated any time soon.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.

Eh, there are plenty of other good reasons not to animate Force.

They're named the Huckebein.

And they are a disgrace to the good name of the Vanishing Trooper.

The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!

Rent free

Yeah, sorry, that was a bit of a brainfart on my part. For what it's worth, they're spoiler tagged now. Hopefully nobody minds too much.

I suppose that is true. Even if we chose to interpret this as Nanoha being genuinely down for those 10 seconds, there's no way anyone could take that as a victory in a "real" fight, considering that Vivio was completely out of magic while Nanoha was still capable of casting spells and managed to stand up just fine after catching her breath. I still think that it was more than little unrealistic things even progressed to that point, for reasons already stated, but considering all the special circumstances at play here I suppose I can write this off as some sort of shonen-style willpower miracle on Vivio's part. It's still pretty bad writing though. And personally, I think giving Vivio even this sort "conditional" victory, especially with such poor justifications, was a far more risky move on the writer's part compared to the alternative. I sincerely doubt that anyone who actually bothers to read Vivid until the end hasn't also watched the previous series, and I can't really see the long time fans not calling BS on this. But that might just be me, I guess.

Another thing that annoys me about this whole thing is the glaring double standard about the portrayal of Vivio's suicidal stunt here compared to how things were handled earlier. In Strikers, Teana playing with her own life just to achieve a victory on a training exercise was treated as an extremely bad attitude that had to be curbed with extreme prejudice, but now a mere 10 year old does something far more dangerous in similar circumstances, yet everyone has nothing but praises for her? So much for responsible life lessons then.

A heavily edited Force anime would be pretty dope, but with the franchise's current track record, I'm also pretty skeptical. The creators seem to have mostly abandoned the post Strikers continuity by now, at least when it comes to the original main cast, focusing mostly on remakes and the movies. Maybe in response to the fan backlash or something?

Edited by BackwoodSlav on Jan 7th 2020 at 5:43:09 AM

I just think the writers don't want to shake up the main cast because for them Strikers is the end of their story and they would rather leave it a Happily Ever After from there on than introducing an element that could lead to a Happy Ending Override.

Nanoha and Fate are happy and raising their daughter, Hayate and the Wolkenritter have their lives, Chrono and Amy have their children and Arf, Subaru and Teana will keep rising and Vivio has Einhart and her friends. The only one of the original cast who could be given another role is Yuuno because he has enough distance with the main cast that anything that happens to him won't overflow to the others.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.

While I mostly agree, Vivio is not a soldier, and thus will not be endangering her squad. Yes, suicidal training shouldn't be praised, but applying Teana's scale of punishment to Vivio is also not right.

Heavily-editing FORCE would more or less require rewriting the entire thing. There are a few fanfiction attempts to make Eclipse work reasonably, but even those require to essentially retcon half of its properties.

Edited by NHunter on Jan 7th 2020 at 9:57:27 AM

One of Vivid's problems is that it keeps relying on Dangerous Forbidden Technique shenanigans in what should be a fun low-stakes sports anime story. It happens once in an unregulated match and Nove tells Vivio "okay, now never fucking do that again"... and then it happens three or four more times at various points in the story. It could have been an interesting way of showing that Vivio has her mama's drive to succeed and stubborn willingness to risk her own health to win, but reframed as a bad thing because it's literally just a game, but instead it treats Vivio's reckless disregard for her own safety as a virtue, because it lets her win even when she's outmatched.

But in terms of storytelling, it comes off as a cheap trick, because everyone knows they're not actually going to end Vivid by having one of Vivio's all-or-nothing gambles come up short and have her blasted into a smear on the floor of the ring, even though they keep insisting that those are the consequences if she fails.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

So we've got some sort of new project in the franchise coming.

"Yup. That tasted purple."

I hope we get some concrete info soonish. I'm happy that we're getting more Nanoha, but "a new project is in the works" is like literally the least informative possible announcement you can make. We don't know when it is, what it's going to be (TV series, OVA, movie, etc), who's involved, etc.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I finally got around to finishing Vivid over this weekend.

Looking a bit further up this page it seems like I planned to do so about a year and a half ago. I knew it had been a while, since I had it on my list of stuff to do for ages- but I didn't realize it had been that long.

It took me a few attempts to start it properly. I'm pretty sure soon after I watched the first three anime 5+ years ago I read a volume or two. Plus I'd also watched the Vivid anime a few years back.

I wouldn't say I loved it, but it was alright.

By the mid point I felt like I was only really enjoying maybe 40% of the manga - in part due to this being the third time I'd gone though the start. But I think it got a bit more entertaining in the last half. I don't think I'd have read it if not for the Nanoha connection.

Starting with the negatives - the fanservice was pretty obnoxious. Although I suppose not as bad in manga form as its easier to skim over compared to anime. But it gets pretty ridiculous at many points.

Connected to the enjoyment of the manga, I found myself getting a bit bored in the longer fights than took more than 2 chapters. Some were interesting, but I generally enjoyed the climax or the shorter fights more. Especially since it was mostly back and forth with the easier rounds.

Cast bloat was also a huge issue, I felt like it could have been easily cut in half.

I did find the theme about being chained to the past a bit interesting in how in intersected with the shipping. Despite knowing from the start Vivio & Einhert shipping was a big thing, it really cooled off by the end and was replaced with flustered moments with Miura and Yumina.

Most of the parts with Vivio & Einhert were early on, and the framing of the final chapter was also not at all romantic. They basically just resolved to keep moving down their respective paths. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if the author wanted to frame it differently it would have been easy to add in a bit more talk about doing it together. And given the themes in Einhert's arc, it would make more sense for her not to end up dating Vivio in alignment with her losing her past memories and accepting her current life.

That said they're like 10, and realistically anything could happen when they actually grow up.

Speaking of subtext, I did notice that despite a bit of Nano Fate at the very start, from the early parts to around Chapter 70 Fate is pretty much excluded from the narrative as part of Vivio's family, with her mostly just referring to "Nanoha-mama". Then it suddenly changes and aside from the very end Nanoha and Fate almost always appear together framed as parents, and Vivio explicitly refers to them together as her parents/mothers multiple times.

I have to wonder if maybe an editor changed at some point?

It was also a pretty interesting choice with the Inter-Middle spanning the whole series despite the whole main team dropping out in the first third. I know a few people have complained about it really taking the focus off Vivio as the protagonist, but I don't think that particular decision was a bad one.

That said it would have been nice to see a bit more focus on the fact Vivio's magical potential was crippled by Nanoha. It doesn't need to get dark or anything. It just seems like an important fact that really could have been explored more in either the Lufeng arc where Rio's grandfather talks about her ill-suited nature to her style or the final arc with the Nanoha focus.

The ending was alright, like a couple of others in this thread I also think Nanoha probably threw the fight. Which was maybe a bit weird given how both of them were approaching it (with Nanoha's misconceptions about what Vivio wanted from it).

Edited by 32ndfreeze on Aug 8th 2021 at 3:54:00 AM

"But if that happened, Melia might actually be happy. We can't have that." - Handsome Rob

I kinda felt Vivid ran a bit long, as a manga. Was OK but....

Yuri fanfiction writer! http://www.fanfiction.net/~shanejayell

The real problem with Vivid (besides the annoying fanservice, which I could really do without) is that it doesn't really have any overarching themes or coherent character arcs. It's just sort of a bunch of stuff happening. Sure, most of the stuff is fun enough on the face of it, but at the end of the day Vivid feels a little lacking as a whole because it's never really doing anything deeper than the surface level.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

The issue with ViViD is that I don't think it was ever meant to be more than just a cute magical girl series.

After the...mixed reaction that Strikers got, I think they did ViViD as a way to give people the magical girl stuff that was at the heart of the series, and Force was supposed to be the series that focused on plot, worldbuilding, etc.

But then Force died and then ViViD had to pull double duty, which it tried to do, but it couldn't really properly.

Edited by Chaosjunction on Aug 8th 2021 at 8:12:44 AM

Searching for meaning in meanings

I don't think "Vivid has a simple fun slice-of-life-ish story" would have necessarily be a bad thing, but the stuff with Einhard about her ancestor memories and the problems they cause her are present from basically the very beginning, so I don't think it was a case of "they weren't going to tackle anything serious until Force got canned and then Vivid had to pick up the slack". It's less of a problem of shifting focus and more that Vivid's writing just... wasn't very good.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

The stuff with Einhard was very reminiscent of Fate and the confusion about whether or not she was Alicia or not and how Precia dealt with that, so really, that was more of a homage to the original series.

Some of the latter arcs, like MMA league being filled with Old Belkan related people or the Infinity Library arc were more serious than anything that happened before.

Searching for meaning in meanings

Yeah I think Native Jovian puts it well about the arcs and theming.

Einhart has an arc, and Vivio gets a little bit of one. But in her case its mostly just resolving to keep doing what she's already doing.

A few others like the hair girl from Lufeng and Nanoha get small mini arcs. But those are just one issue brought up and resolved over a handful of chapters.

I'm not sure "cute magical girl series" is the best way to describe Vivid.

I don't think it really has that feeling at all. It's more a slice of life show with a dash of sports & shounen manga.

"But if that happened, Melia might actually be happy. We can't have that." - Handsome Rob