天下制覇

  

With girls on missiles shooting more missiles with girls on them.

Impressions:

I had to chuckle a little bit when Classroom Crisis built up to a space capsule crashing, and this began with that. Then someone shot a missle at it filled with magical girls who shot further missiles which they then rode the rest of the way to rocket-fart the spaceship back down to a safe entry speed, except that a mountain was in the way so they had to shoot more missiles at it and then punch through it, and then sword/punch a few cliffsides to steer the rocket to a safe landing taking out half a village in the process, only ending when one of them suplexes it against a building. And therein we find the difference.

Although considering the way that the last two Symphogears began with characters messily dying and orgies of violence, I can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed by the initial struggle being super powered girls fighting against the power of physics. It did set things up plot-wise much better than… everything else I can think of so far this season, making creepy murdering flamenco vampire robots along with inklings of backstory and hints to new pantsless good girl, but the fight at the end with Flamencobot vs Maria/Tsubasa were… not good, and largely done in that awful “It’s hard to draw two characters moving at the same time, so here’s one of them waving their weapon at the screen” style with stills picking up the slack every time the script called for an attack to hit or be blocked. Furthermore, after making a big todo about Hibiki singing and transforming, all she then did was punch some walls and kick a ceiling. Good for you, Satelight, that you understand how to create a hook in the opening minutes of the show and reintroduce the characters and what they do with only a little bit of exposition, but about half the effort spent on the opening sequence really should have gone to making the action at the end look good. You want to ramp upward. Not downward.

I guess there was also some middle bit with more exposition and ‘cute’ scenes where Chris blushed and they go to muggle school to do muggle things too, like lounge around in their nighties, flounce around in bathing suits, and dance dressed up like starlets who had been savaged by amorous peacocks. Yawn. Wake me up when the Flamencobot murders a few more people.