Roving Thoughts archives

Re-rating Senki Zesshou Symphogear

I tweeted:

It's taken me a while to finish it, but I can now declare Senki Zesshou Symphogear to be the best show I watched in the Winter 2012 season.

Ever since I started hanging out on Twitter, I've been hearing praise and enthusiasm for Symphogear (and there was also enthusiasm from eg Evirus, who is on Twitter but I read directly). Back in winter 2012 I wound up 'suspending' Symphogear for various reasons, but a couple of weeks ago all of the Symphogear enthusiasm (coupled with a somewhat weak season) talked me into catching up so I could watch the third and current season, Symphogear GX. And the end result is what you see above. Looking back, the original Symphogear beats out even the ultimately somewhat disappointing Moretsu Pirates in terms of my enjoyment.

(I was originally tempted to skip straight to GX, but I'm glad that I didn't. It just wouldn't have been the same to have missed all of the great bits on the way there.)

Looking back, I think that it really helped that I was marathoning Symphogear and that I knew a lot more about what the show was like, including that the show had another two seasons. The first episode of Symphogear is very heavy on the doom and grimness (we open being told that the protagonist is dead, and then a stadium full of people die in a flashback), and the show aired the year after Madoka. Looking back at my notes from the time made it clear that I believed in the doom-laden air it projected and that simply wasn't really attractive. Now, of course, we know better; the show is really all goofy cheese and cheerful endings (even if it does kill a lot of bystanders).

(See also 1, 2, 3 for more of my Twitter comments on the misleading doom and gloom impression.)

As for how I feel about Symphogear G, it's even better than the first season (partly because the show got rid of pretty much any pretense of doom). It wouldn't rate as high in its season, but that's because it would have had very strong competition. It has an interesting feeling ending that seems like the production team wasn't entirely expecting a third season.

PS: Synchrogazer is the best Symphogear OP. Maria has the best hair, at least so far.

Sidebar: Symphogear and death

Let me try to do a simple take on this: Symphogear is a cheesy show in a decidedly non-cheesy setting. A lot of devastation has happened and does happen over the course of the show and a fair number of bystanders die, often more or less onscreen. Although the show does not show blood all that often, it does show a certain amount of unpleasant deaths that happen to terrified people. I don't think the show particularly dwelled on any of this unpleasantness, but I'm a jaded anime watcher so I'm not sure I'd have noticed short of it being fairly blatant (I have to admit that my standards are not normal).

For some people this will be a strong turnoff to the show and I won't blame them for it.

Looking back at the Spring 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for my usual look back at the shows I watched this season to see how my early impressions and my midway views stacked up in the end.

Excellent:

• Sound! Euphonium: This stayed excellent right through the end, although much of the real emotional climax was in the second last episode. I said a lot in my midway commentary and recently wrote some more about Euphonium and sports shows. There's so much to praise here that it's a bit daunting; the show pleasantly surprised me repeatedly.

  (Sound! Euphonium will not be to everyone's tastes because it is a character drama and as such it can be cruel from time to time in the way that real life is. Sometimes good people lose out.)

  I wouldn't mind more Euphonium but at the same time I don't think it's necessary. There is more story that could be told but this season has reached a satisfying conclusion on its own in emotional and character terms.

Hard to rate:

• Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: I think that you should watch the OVAs instead (in order) and then watch the last two episodes, but if you don't the TV series version is a perfectly good way to absorb what is a decent iteration of GitS. I was less enthused about the two new for TV episodes than I expected but I'm still mulling over my overall views (and even what they are).

  On the whole this is no GitS SAC and the last two episodes are not particularly outstanding or up to the standard of the earlier OVA episodes.

Okay:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront: I was partly holding this writeup back in the hopes that BBB's final episode would come out, but not so far. In the end that delay is a decent metaphor for what's happened with the whole show; it's pleasant and stylish enough but in the end it has not delivered anything substantial. Basically everything we've gotten is a stylish slice of life action show; this is not terrible, really, but it's unambitious. I suppose there's only so much you can do with an ongoing manga.

  Yes, I wound up disappointed in BBB. It's okay but not outstanding.

• Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: This had a decided dip in the middle for a long run of harem antics and fanservice where nothing very much happened, but the start and the end were the great Sidonia I'm used to. The final episode gave us a solid capstone to the whole show; they could make more (the manga is ongoing), but if they don't the show ended on a solidly triumphant note that feels right.

  (As far as the harem antics, well, I have to accept that the show is what it is and live with it.)

  Sidonia once again took home the prize for what was clearly the best OP of the season.

• Punchline: In the end this ended well and I'm happier with it than I was midway and I expected to be. It wisely didn't try to fully explain things and it never hit the crazed heights of the first few episodes, but the whole thing was pretty fun and managed to be reasonably touching by the end.

I finished it:

• Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: Sometimes this show could be quite good. But too much of the time this season it was terrible, including a long run of episodes just before the climax where too many people spent too much time spouting stupid philosophy at each other. The movie is unquestionably better just because the scriptwriters had to have the characters shut up; watch it instead.

Overall I think of this as a good season, but that's pulled up by the outstanding performance of Sound! Euphonium. Outside of that there's nothing I feel deeply inspired by on a consistent basis, since I've already seen the GitS Arise OVAs. The other shows I watched were either uneven (Sidonia veered between great and making me sigh) or merely decent.

(And then there was Unlimited Blade Works. Let's not go there.)