Review of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS

Yeah who doesn't love anime time-skips? It's a cheap and easy way to do lots of character development and not have to the leg work of actually showing it. Avengers Endgame did it and it made the most money of any movie ever so it must make for good storytelling, right? Honestly, though, I think this is the best entry in the series so far. There was a lot of boring stuff to slog through still but the ending had a strong emotional core thanks to the introduction of one character: Vivio. I think without the addition of a cute, young anime girl you immediately wantto protect there wouldn't have been nearly as much investment in the villains boring generic evil plan.

I think there's no measure of how effective a villain is greater than how good it makes you feel to see them get brutally murdered. When the smug glasses girl gets blasted through the whole ship by Nanoha's biggest energy attack and she's actually freaking out and has that look of dread on her face I almost actually did a guts pose air fist bump of happiness. She was the worst.

Nanoha and Fate being lesbian moms together is an interesting direction to take the show. Sorry ferret boy, you had your chance. I didn't really like how many characters the show tries to introduce and make you care about, ensemble casts are hard to make work well when you have limited time to spend with them. You have to introduce them sparingly a few at a time or the audience won't have time to really care about who they are because you're throwing like 20 new characters at them all at once. There were just a lot of people to keep track of and my attention span is so short I kept having to go back and watch sections of episodes multiple times because I missed some line of exposition or something.

Anyway overall it was good enough for an 8/10 magical girls.