天下制覇

I’m tired of the moon now. Let’s fight Martians.

Impressions:

This was a bit of a bizarre ending. Granted, it’s not far from how the show’s been recently, which is unfortunately more like Guilty Crown than the early episodes. Phine summons swarms of Noise, which the team spends a few minutes beating up before she calls them all back to be a giant swordship for her until they grab the magic widget sword from her and destroy it. Then instead of bowing out gracefully, Phine uses her chain to just yank the chunk of the moon she blasted to the planet so it’s off to space for the trio to fight crime destroy a giant chunk of rock as the big final super special teamup. That way, they can ‘die’ in an explosion at a very far distance! That’s always fatal, right?

At least they gave the normal schoolgirls a break and let the main characters have the show back. It was certainly action packed, mind you, although I can’t say that I like that Hibiki’s death from the very start of the series just turning out to be a big screw at all, although given how she just pops up alive again in literally the last 5 seconds of the show, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was executive meddling and fishing for a sequel at all. That still doesn’t excuse it. The Noise still randomly wandering around at the end also seems a bit… out of place. What they did with Miku at the end was almost kind of clever too. I got the parallelism there between her and Hibiki/Kanade, but there was nothing really building up to it and ending on "and they returned from space to fight crime" was… well… let’s just leave it at "the show’s writing has certainly been better."

Final Thoughts:

Symphogear’s first half was definitely much stronger than the second. The characters were never particularly well-written or developed, but they weren’t bad enough to become obnoxious and the story kept moving every episode regardless of how much clumsy infodumping might have eaten up half the episode. The cheesiness was actually endearing at a lot points since the show just took the premise and ran full steam with it instead of stopping to try to explain every single little aspect of its strange song-fighting premise. Would that Shana had managed even a quarter that. It also helped that the show was mostly competently made, barring the not-as-infrequent-as-they-should-have-been artistic collapses, and it was unmistakably an action show from start to end. Characters actually fought. With decent animation and choreography usually. That shouldn’t be as rare as it is in Japanese action shows.

Unfortunately, things do take a sharp turn downward in the second half. Kurisu’s was fine, but just about everything else ranged the gamut from terrible (anything having to do with Hibiki’s muggle friends) to inexplicable (Ryoko is housing a Babylonian witch that wants to kill the moon). Removing Kurisu also left the show floundering for a while without an antagonist while they went back to killing the same things they’ve been effortlessly dispatching since episode 2 in order to show their newfound ‘awesome’ teamup skills.

All in all though, it’s still a decent watch and easily my favorite action show for a season full of them. Solid direction, budget where it counts, good music, things actually happen most weeks (that really shouldn’t be as rare as it is), even if more often than not half the episode is wasted on info dumps. The flat characters are a big weakness though and one that only gets worse as focus drifts from weak to worse and the overall plot suffers in kind too. Otherwise though, it was a fun watch and definitely one of the better shows of the season.