Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS is the continuation to Nanoha's story from the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. In this third season of the Nanoha anime series, 10 years have past. Nanoha and her friends and family gave grown up and are now working for the Time-Space Administration Bureau in different capacities.
At the start of the 26-episode anime, Captains Nanoha and Fate have joined a newly setup division under Hayate. Section Six was setup due to an unknown impending threat. Knight Carim, who has the power to predict the future, has forseen an impending attack which could destroy the Time-Space Administration Bureau. Unfortunately, her predictions are difficult to interpret and its accuracy unproven. Which is why Section Six was setup to gather powerful mages together under the umbrella of being an experimental unit.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS is by turns confusing, boring and intriguing.
The confusion arises from the introduction of many new characters in the series as well as the loopholes in the story. We not only have familiar faces from the earlier series like Nanoha, Fate, Hayate, Hayate's knights, Chrono and Yuuno, but many new additions to the team. There's 4 new young mages being trained by Nanoha, the Section Six support team members and those who supported the creation of Section Six. Aside from this, there's also the enemy they are fighting which consists of a mad scientist, his team of combat cyborgs and the mages who are cooperating with him for reasons of their own. 26 episodes is too short a time to introduce all the new characters properly that it becomes a chore to keep everyone straight. And with all the gang here, it's also strange to find Fate's familiar Arf missing for most of the story. She finally makes an appearance in the last few episodes with everyone behaving as if she's been there all along. She also looks much younger than her original self. Why she has regressed in age and why she isn't fighting, unlike in the 2 earlier seasons, are never explained.
As for the boredom. Well, there's a certain predictability that accompanies Nanoha's story after 2 seasons. From the first, we already expect that the enemy will have reasons for what they are doing and will become allies in the end similar to Hayate and Fate. True to that, we have quite a number of the crew repenting at the end. The only difference this time is that someone actually dies while there are those who refuse to turn over a new leaf.
What remains interesting for the story, is that combination of science and magic. Their use of Artificial Intelligence devices to regulate their magical powers remains the draw for the Nanoha series. Rather than a team based story, it might have done better if it focused on 2 or 3 individuals at most.
My verdict : Better to skip this one and just watch the first 2 seasons.
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