So after Nanoha A’s comes Nanoha StrikerS. StrikerS is not A’s. In fact, StrikerS is barely Nanoha. It’s amazingly different from the two series that precede it to the point that it is repulsed on instinct by a number of people who were expecting more explosions and friendship. Before, Nanoha could barely be considered a very different sort of mahou shoujo. StrikerS is definitely not mahou shoujo.

Gone are the scenes of normality of school or Nanoha’s family. Instead we have military and political drama. Instead of going around collecting jewel seeds, we’re sortieing in squads and communicating with callsigns. Instead of a normal girl accidentally caught up in a sinister scheme, we’ve got a bunch of characters with tragic pasts. And most noticeable of all, the spotlight is taken off Nanoha and put on our bunch of rookie forwards.

What does StrikerS retain from the previous series? Well, explosions and friendship. We get more of Nanoha and Fate and the Wolkenkritter being awesome and unleashing devastating firepower.

Unfortunately, the series suffers from one big problem: the characters. There are way too many of them. For whatever reason, a huge number of the side characters play a role in the story. This also means that there isn’t enough time to properly develop all of them. Of course, the four forwards get the most attention and they’re probably the most well done. But, there isn’t any reason for sniper/pilot guy to have that backstory, there isn’t any reason for that bad military inside baseball, and there isn’t any reason for there to be so many Numbers. As a result, a lot of the show feels like a giant mess of characters, with the villains having very shallow motivations.

Is StrikerS bad? I don’t think so. Even though the pacing was weird and there were a billion different plot threads, it was still fairly entertaining. The main characters were alright, even if the villains were terrible. And we can’t forget the DIVINE BUSTER.

Nanoha is mahou shoujo, or magical girl. For most people, that’s enough to repel them away from the show. There were two things that managed to pique my interest in it enough to actually watch it. The first was the surprising amount of praise that it got and the promise of lasers and GAR that it actually contained. The second was Masaaki Endoh’s cover of ETERNAL BLAZE, the OP for Nanoha A’s.

The story starts fairly typical of these types of things. Nanoha’s a girl in the third grade and runs into magical creature that bestows amazing magical powers to her and she goes around collecting macguffins and sealing evil away. Most people will tell you that the typical-ness of the show goes away by about halfway through the first season.

So what is so great about Nanoha? Once we get past the ‘mahou shoujo’ parts of the show and into the second half, the plot becomes more like shounen. Nanoha’s awesome rival, Fate, is introduced, and they fight it out. Much like Naruto, Nanoha makes friends by beating them into submission. Unlike Naruto, Nanoha does it through superior and excessive firepower. The shounen themes and motifs are accentuated even more in Nanoha A’s.

And firepower. The magic and weapons in Nanoha are like something out of DBZ or Bleach. Crazy weapons, giant lasers, flashes of colour, and huge explosions. I’d heard somewhere that each character in Nanoha is supposed to be derived from some sort of mecha, with Nanoha being the RX-78-2.

Also awesome are the weapons themselves. Nanoha’s Raising Heart is the most awesome, because of its specialty for ridiculously large lasers and its hilarious Engrish: “LET’S SHOOT IT STARLIGHT BREAKER. I CAN BE SHOT. I BELIEVE MASTER. TRUST ME, MY MASTER.” In fact, all the protagonists’ weapons (in A’s) have awesome Engrish, while the antagonists all have awesome German. Other than that, the weapons are just plain cool, with their very mechanical design and operation.

Basically, nine year old girls manage to beat a number of shounen protagonists at being awesome and just wrecking stuff. How long did it take for Naruto or Ichigo to become competent? And how long did it take for Nanoha to be blowing stuff up? That’s what I thought.