Review of Girly Air Force
Arpeggio of Blue Steel....with Jet Fighters. LA was expecting Girly Air Force to be the Kantai Collection of Jet Fighters type anime, yet nope, we have full blown harem with our main protagonist Kei Narutani voiced by Ryouta Osaka being separated from his family in China and forced to live in Japan due to an attack by mysterious beings called the Xi, fornately his childhood friend Minghua Song voiced by Lynn is with him. but with a chance encounter of an "Anima", a human manifestation of a jet fighter, he gets dragged along into defeating the Xi so that he can return home, but of course,more Anima comes in the battle and in lies the harem.
Girly Air Force does develop both it's characters and the world for such a harem anime.
In terms of characters, well..they are kinda boilerplate unfortunately. from Kei being the typical dense main male protagonist who can't take a hint, Gripen voiced by Yuuka Morishima being the aloof shy type but also having problems in flying (thus needing Kei's help), Minghua is your typical "childhood friend" stereotype, but also an annoying one to say the least with her berating and clinginess of Kei, though due to a running gag of Kei getting dragged off before she and Kei can spend time together, LA can see her annoyance, but it doesn't outweigh LA's annoyance to her either way. Eagle voiced by Hitomi Ohwada is your typical genki but with the hint of superiority inferiority complex and finally Phantom voiced by Shiori Izawa, the pessimistic stoic one but in a ways one of the voices of reason of the Anima outside of Kei for the humans. Gripen of all the characters gets the most screentime and development as a character due to her also growing with Kei in the battlefield as a result but Eagle and Phantom are interesting additions to the harem, but still cliche to some extent.
World building is the more interesting aspect of Girly Air Force, such as what is the Xi's motives and what's their goals?, we also find out more about the technology of the Anima and the mechanics of the Daughters, the jet fighters that inhabit the Anima and their namesakes. We get little doses of world building that makes the world much more fleshed out and believably in an alternative world kind of way, but of course the main reasoning LA says this is why the Xi are attacking humanity in the first place.
The animation done by Satelight was decent enough, with some decent character designs, vibrant to say the least but expected from Satelight with their animation, the CGI use on the dog fighting was decent enough being quick, flashy and explosive to some extent. but it's the level of being "decent", nothing that exactly wows LA and coming from Satelight, ohhh well they must be saving their budget for Symphogear XV is LA's guess for the mediocre animation.
Voice acting was fine overall. Yuuka Morishima as Gripen was great though, like she nailed her shy demeanor yet stoic at the same time, while Shori Izawa went smug all the way as Phantom while Hitomi Ohwada as Eagle was almost childlike yet hyper genki to say the least. Not bad voice cast but not much to write home about.
Girly Air Force is intriguing with it's world building but man does it suffer with it's boilerplate characters, mediocre animation and the harem aspect and that is really the best LA can put Girly Air Force. Not horrible, not great either, just mediocre.