Advertisement
Guest User

Untitled

a guest
Jul 18th, 2019
438
0
Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
text 40.35 KB | None | 0 0
  1. Nanoha Detonation broke my heart, top to bottom.
  2.  
  3. I have not stopped thinking about Nanoha since I first watched the series in 2004, it's helped me realize who I want to be from StrikerS onwards and it has and will hold a special place in my heart. In addition, I have a habit of critiquing things as I watch them whether I'm excited for them or not. It's a habit that gives people the impression I dislike a lot of things that I really, really love just because I want to hold them to a higher standard than they tend to achieve, but Nanoha has actually held up pretty well to that! The Force and Vivid manga after StrikerS were a rocky start due to a monthly release schedule and some bizarre pacing choices on Vivid's half, but the new characters still shined through brightly to show they still had that magic, and both eventually showed their worth before too long. Vivid Strike made me nervous, but by the end all of my worries and complaints were gone as soon as it was clear that Fuuka not talking for 10 episodes of the season was purely because she's a moron and unironically can't string two words together unless her girlfriend really can't get her shit together. Not much to say about Movie 1st and Movie 2nd since they were re-adaptations, though I cannot bring up Movie 2nd without mentioning how amazing Kana Ueda's performance was, holy crap. What's worth mentioning before I get started however, is Gears of Destiny.
  4.  
  5. Nanoha A's Portable The Gears of Destiny was a PSP game released in December of 2011, a relative dryspot for fresh Nanoha content. The movies were coming but based on recap material, the manga was ongoing but slow and the translations were stalled, and Force wasn't far away from being indefinitely hiatus'd by then. There was a previous entry called Battle of Aces that had very light plot, mostly just enough of an excuse as to why the characters were fighting each other in a fighting game, and the introduction of palette swaps of the main three girls with their own personalities and slight variants on their movesets, surprisingly with the clone of Hayate being the villain of the game. There's a fun little twist with how the final boss happens, but not worth going into. Gears of Destiny picks up shortly after that, after A's ends but with Eins still alive, within a year or so of A's concluding. This time around, they opted to bring back the Materials with full names (Stern, Levi, and Dearche, though they were all misspelled on the website, god bless this series) as central characters, in addition to three new ones, Kyrie and Amitie Florian, and the villain, U.D. (Yuri from here on out for simplicity.) I don't feel the need to delve into the plot too deeply here, as it would be much more productive bringing it up as I go through Reflection/Detonation, but I do want to make a few notes.
  6. The game is a simple fighting game with autocombos with only a bare minimum of variance allowed for unique combo strings, and a few systems introduced to integrate series lore, like having cartridges to load and long range/short range mode to allow for close range fighters and long range mages. That being said, unlike most fighting games especially for the time, it did have a full story mode with full voice acting and a respectable CG gallery to back it up. For just about every fight you go through, you get to choose who you'll play as, changing the pre fight dialog significantly and giving a surprising amount of replay value for fanservice sake, such as choosing between Vivio meeting young Yuuno or Einhart meeting young Nanoha, and especially with that example, they went out of their way to make good choices for the sake of character writing rather than just filler to flesh it out. The talking takes up easily 4-5x as much time as the game, as every fight is bookended with the characters floating derpily mid air while talking with animated portraits to emote with their voice acting.
  7. I went through the story mode as soon as the game came out, being very excited to see what they were doing with the new characters and actually bringing the Materials back as full fledged characters. Full disclosure, I loved the dumbass materials from the first game so much I preordered the hilariously named "GOD box", the limited edition of the game that came with a bunch of goodies, particularly nendo puchis of the materials, as I imagined this was the last time I would ever get to see them.
  8. The story mode was -great.-
  9. I cannot stress this enough, GoD felt like the best one shot OVA the Nanoha series could get, introducing a bunch of fresh characters, concepts, and focusing the plot on Hayate and Dearche instead of strictly the usual suspects, as the Book of Darkness plays heavily into the storyline. Between me and my wife, we had both broken down into tears at least ten times easily just getting through the game, full ending especially. Music was good, character choices were good, fanservice was fantastic with inclusions of Vivio/Einhart/Thoma for shits and giggles, I honestly can't praise the game enough. Which is why it made perfect sense to find out when they made a alternate universe spinoff based on children's card games for the series, all of the characters were included as central elements! Easy picks.
  10. From here, Movie 1st comes and goes, Movie 2nd comes and goes, and as soon as the BD for Movie 2nd goes, the Nanoha twitter account drops that the third movie, Reflections, is in development and will not be based on the manga, nor the games, but something different. This was great news for me, as StrikerS being my favorite season at the time, wouldn't adapt well and I'd love to see them make new content, as long as it's not based on them being kids again, please god, do not bring us back to 9 year old girls that are written to be and are emotionally more mature than any 9 year old. Everyone had to wait a long time for anything to actually happen, but we finally get a season of Vivid, the announcement of Vivid Strike, and with the first episode airing, a confirmation of Reflections still being in development.
  11. Vivid Strike quickly replaced StrikerS as my favorite single season after nearly ten years, especially due to the fact that it avoided leaning on Nanoha/Fate as crutches to keep interest in the series high. I'd worried for a long time that the series would have a hard time continuing without growing old or the writers having nowhere to bring the characters, especially after going through all of Symphogear and seeing what happened with Tsubasa/etc where the characters were not written nor expected to exist longer than a certain point and ended up retreading old material while newer characters were fleshed out. The fact that VVST was so amazing is the only reason I'm not in a worse place than I am now, because that entire package lets me keep complete faith in the series not being in the trash after these two movies.
  12.  
  13. THE PART WHERE I ACTUALLY DISCUSS THE MOVIES -
  14. I managed to see Reflections in a local theatre thanks to elevenarts, with nobody else in the theatre to boot. I came out of the movie feeling a little lukewarm compared to literally every single other piece of Nanoha media I'd ever taken in. Sure, it was movie 1 of 2, Detonation having been announced by movie poster as soon as people went into Reflection to see it day 1 in Japan, but it felt off-The plot is lifted straight from Gears of Destiny, particularly the materials, Kyrie Florian, and Amita Florian, but the details were changed far more than they would need to for a movie adaptation. In particular, Kyrie's personality is 100% different than it is in GoD, than in Innocent, and different than it was in the mobile game. Amitie was as well, but that didn't shine true until the second movie, as it was easily explained by where we were in the plot by GoD's pacing. In addition to that, the plot was still based around the Book of Darkness, but for some reason Hayate was already getting shoved to the back seat to focus more on Fate having mommy problems and Nanoha getting upgrades by the end of the movie. Again, set up for the second movie, and don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Fate and always have, but having waited on this movie for a good six years, I hoped we'd focus on someone other than the most popular character in the entire franchise on a topic we'd touched on for three seasons already. Also, a major note for later, the movie spends a bizarre amount of time on Suzuka, Arisa and everyone's parents, which only bothered me once Detonation didn't have enough time to focus on almost anything it was trying to cover.
  15. Detonation finally came out on BD a month ago, and I ended up watching it a full month after release, not out of lack of excitement, but due to what I would later find out was one of my best friends continually putting off her availability because she had been spoiled on enough of the movie to know how bad it was going to hit us. Thank god I didn't watch this before I quit my job or I would have been in a really, really scary place.
  16.  
  17. I had made it about a quarter of the movie before starting to get concerned about what it was choosing to focus on and when, and halfway through the movie before I was getting lightly pissed off. Both my wife and I yelled in confusion when our friend had told us the movie still had 30 minutes left on the runtime when we had already gotten a bad taste in our mouth and the pacing had set up for the conclusion to happen.
  18. By absolutely zero means do I hate this movie because "it isn't Gears of Destiny". I've been through more than enough adaptations of side content into main content or vice versa where I was braced for the worst, but it was absolutely baffling to see this movie come out the way it was, where I could not only see a lot of the pacing problems pop up as they did, but multiple scenes popped out immediately as having been written as weak excuses to let certain scenes happen, or just for the sake of having a throwback to the earlier series whether it made any sense to happen or not. Within a day, someone had pointed out to me a portion of what I was trying to put my finger on, and that was the fact this movie is The Force Awakens for Nanoha, except instead of integrating heavy callbacks to earlier chunks of the series that were made so long ago multiple generations of children have happened since, this was a series that had a new installment in it just a year before Reflection, and two remake movies within 5 years before it had come out.
  19.  
  20. WHERE I TALK ABOUT THE MOVIE; FOR REAL; THIS TIME WITH SPOILERS
  21. This is going to contain heavily spoilers for Reflections, Detonation, and Gears of Destiny, so please be warned. I need to stress again, especially with how I'm going to be bringing it up, I do not hate this movie because 'it is not gears of destiny', but I have absolutely had people tell me I hate it because "it isn't your precious gears of destiny" as soon as I started talking, as if I'm not allowed to have any thoughts on a media whatsoever when it directly lifts and adapts the plot of another media. For my own sanity, let me break this down by section.
  22.  
  23. Kyrie - Kyrie Florian is the instigator of the plot in both GoD and Reflections, and definitely the easiest place to start. Biggest thing of note, is that Iris does not exist whatsoever in GoD, leaving Kyrie to be self motivated and making her own choices, instead of Detonation revealing halfway through that every woman in the film was indirectly mind controlled or manipulated by Elon Musk into doing the evil deeds they were doing. The game opens up with introducing both Kyrie and Amita, two robots from Eltria that are known as the Gears of Destiny, and how their planet is dying and that they need something from the book of darkness in order to save it. Kyrie ends up sneaking off to Earth in order to do so, despite her sister vehemently disagreeing with doing so, and on arrival, ends up poisoning her sister with a virus to lock her out of some of her movement systems to get a head start on her, zero hesitation. Kyrie being the younger sister of the two, immediately shows herself to be mischievous, flamboyant, and starting with this first fight, cunning. On top of this, she outright has a lewd aspect to her, her initial reveal art all giving her a come hither look while posing dramatically with her two handed broadsword, while maintaining an odd clashing soft look due to the artstyle. She acts flirty and deflects often with the characters she interacts with, doing whatever she needs to get to her goal, and ends up setting off the real villain of the story, Yuri Eberwein, from the book of darkness, which quickly moves her from being coy and in control to losing it as she realizes she's going to both mess up Earth and not save Eltria either. Kyrie honestly does a fair share of awful things to try and achieve her means and never once gets redeemed for them, a simple bit of grey area villain writing that's standard to the Nanoha series and completely missing from Detonation. Oddly enough, they dropped almost every aspect of her character from GoD - She's now the meek younger sister who gets manipulated by an AI named Iris into going to Earth to capture something to save her world. None of that self motivating fire shows up in Kyrie in the movies, at most some of her cold attitude shows up when she stands against the main characters, but it doesn't have any of the sharp edge that it had in GoD where she'd constantly take verbal pot shots at the characters to upset them like it was a game. Moving into Detonation, Kyrie had been captured by the end of Reflections, spends most of the movie in a hospital bed, and reappears to fight Iris once, where she reveals she learned that Iris was mind controlled, to which Iris says "No I'm not" with her eyes now filled with Mind Control Code, absolving both of them of their actions. Kyrie goes super saiyan, goes to punch Iris, but instead of punching it immediately cuts to the two of them flying through the sky DBZ zwee fighting, imitating the dogfighting we had seen in the other movies, but without any of the actual choreography, just resembling it. After this, they do not return in the movie.
  24. Half of Kyrie's character seems to have been split into Iris with some of the evil seductress tones going on, but not even enough to really make much sense. So much of her personality and what made her great as a villain/relatable character is completely gone, for zero payoff. I don't need her to be the same as she is in three other pieces of Nanoha media, but they ultimately just removed what made her special while replacing it with nothing at all.
  25. Amita - Amitie Florian in her first appearance focused on the fact she was hot blooded, an older, wiser sibling to Kyrie's younger and hasty decision style, and powerful. She starts the game out as previously mentioned with a virus in her system from Kyrie, but quickly meets up with Nanoha and company and quickly enough establishes they aren't enemies, but she wants to get her sister back and figures she ought to do it herself. Relative strength to one another can be difficult to establish, but around the halfway point of the game Yuri is released and you get your first optional bossfight against her, and regardless of victory or loss Amita ends up detonating her arm in order to blow her away and save everyone else at the scene. The rest of the characters flip their shit as soon as she does it, as doing so created a blast that was specifically described as being on par with the triple breaker done by Nanoha Fate and Hayate at the end of A's. As the plot moves on, we ultimately get to Amita confronting Kyrie with the help of the nanoha crew capturing her and get the first scene where Kyrie finally breaks her emotional shell, revealing how frustrated and angry she was with everything under the cool, manipulative and flamboyant mask she had worn the rest of the game. Both character's voice clips get completely replaced for this fight, with Kyrie's all being furious screams at her sister, and Amita getting defiantly firm and happy with her, pushing her self proclaimed gimmick of stating, word for word, "I AM ONEE-CHAN" and reassuring her that they can handle all of it together if she finally calms down and goes with her. She shows herself as an amazing source of strength, good energy and literal mecha pilot hot blooded bullshit despite the rest of her personality explicitly being sensible. This gets capped off with the final boss sequence, where you have to fight two phases of Yuri, one with one set of characters and the other with a seperate pool of characters. If you happen to choose Kyrie then Amita, Amita gets a unique powerup for the final fight where she has a heart to heart with Kyrie where Kyrie ends up giving her her gun, telling her to finish it for the both of them, and representing their teamwork resolving the problem they started, which nearly doubles Amita's damage outright.
  26. In Detonation, Amita shows up, saves Hayate once, then spends the entirety of the second movie jobbing, and when she gets a sequence dedicated to her being badass and using accelerator to witch time beat down a bunch of generic mooks, she's too busy being winded and pausing to rest after each mook to make the sequence feel exciting at all. None of the sensible older sister personality remains, outside of some of the stoicness implied by being the sensible one, and she gets heavily sidelined despite being one of the main new features of these movies, until she gets an entire hole blown in her chest and gives Nanoha her gun to make a callback to GoD, before Nanoha uses it to fight a generic mook, shoots it once, and it ultimately does nothing. Amita and Kyrie are honestly the biggest travesty of these movies, they could have cut them and just made a better story outright. Especially with the fact they tried to make a callback to the gun passoff in GoD and the emotional passage it represented for Kyrie and Amita as sisters, and completely missed the point of how it worked emotionally and in gameplay by having Nanoha toss it away after one worthless shot. Both of these girls are probably the actual best part of GoD, despite my Materials bias, and now that they're introduced to the mainstream, they don't resemble any part of themselves from the games, not in design, character, or backstory, and that's going to be the biggest travesty of all since there's almost no way they can build Kyrie into Kyrie with the backstory she has now.
  27. The Materials - So, Levi, Stern, and Dearche in BotA/GoD are clones of Fate, Nanoha and Hayate respectively, made out of the leftover data in the book of darkness from when it ate their linker cores. Ultimately, they're OCs that a teenager made of the nanoha characters with a pretty decent origin story. However, the idea of Levi essentially being Fate on a permanant sugar rush and some light brain damage, Stern being a cool, collected Nanoha who holds herself back for the sake of Dearche feeling important and quietly loving every moment she gets to spend with her two partners, and Dearche, who is essentially Hayate with a god complex while still trying to act twenty years older than she actually is, with Kana Ueda screeching her vocal cords out on every single line to sell the character. These three REALLY shouldn't be as amazing as they are, but the writers evidentally had a lot of fun with them and the voice actresses even moreso, as they've glided their way into everyone I've seen go through the game's heart, and they even do a good job with them in Detonation on that front. Dearche's portrayal and character arc (being the main character of GoD by the end of it) was so powerful it pushed my wife to get a name change to Claudia - Dearche's last name in Innocent. Dearche's interactions with the others through the plot in GoD made both my wife and I cry twice minimum, from the ending and the bonus ending alone. I don't have a lot of context to say here really, if you don't get them by the end of Detonation or anything else they're in, I don't know what to tell you. That being said. GoD establishes them as being people contained in the book of darkness similar to the wolkenritter, rein, and Yuri, though they got mixed up with Nanoha/Fate/Hayate's data due to fanservice. They start off as the fake villains in GoD before everyone reminds them they've already clowned them once, and end up being protagonists as they see Yuri released from the book and want to (iirc) control her, before very quickly getting pissed off at her, and ultimately wanting to save her. At some point, Hayate explains to Dearche how Reinforce was born and how she ended up naming her, and it's very clear the scene has a big impression on Dearche, especially how hayate held herself as a parental figure for Reinforce as she was born. Stern and Levi end up fighting Yuri in the story and outright get killed by her in a cutscene, and a distraught Dearche has to deal with the consequences, their energy absorbing into her body and giving her their magical strength at the cost of their lives. Detonation ultimately goes down the same route, except they all fight Yuri, they do just fine against her with an insert song, and then Elon Musk shows up, defeats all of them handily, and beats down Levi/Stern moreso before running off with Yuri. Levi/Stern survive just fine, being picked up by medical staff and being safely in their hands, but they mumble an excuse about "We don't have much time left (never mentioned before this point), take our powers, we know you can beat her" and they choose to die to give Dearche a powerup, which has a completely different tone to it, especially with the later fact that Yuri ultimately does not fight anyone after this point and Dearche just kind of flies in and shoots her once, dying in the process.
  28. Final boss fight in GoD? No matter who you pick, if you don't pick powered up Dearche for the last fight, Dearche canonically is the one that blasts the everliving hell out of UD, then swoops in, picks her up, and gently tells her she's safe and gives her her name, Yuri Eberwein, mixing both Nanoha and Hayate's strengths at the same time. Detonation? We find out they were cats in a past life and they sacrifice themselves to fight Yuri who had been busy not fighting anyone in order to keep herself safe for Dearche to double KO. The materials are not main characters in Detonation, despite the book of darkness and their birth being a central setup in Reflection, and they don't come off nearly as poorly as the florian sisters, but please scroll back to the fact that instead of being AI people from the book like the wolkenritter, THEY'RE FUCKING CATS NOW. Instead of going with people from ancient belka who have their own history, skills and personalities melded with Nanoha Fate and Hayate's images, creating new people with a lot of writing potential to go somewhere, they've had their past moved to an infinitely more restricted one just to make one scene where Dearche is blasting the hell out of Yuri and being so happy she was treated so well as a Cat. Not only that, but this completely reverses Dearche's character arc, going from being a bratty child who yells about being a King every five seconds to actually growing into the role in a sense, becoming the loving Onee-chan of her group and placing Yuri under her loving protection, to being... uh, the boss cat. This really isn't as bad as what happened to the Florians whatsoever, as it doesn't damage them as long term as the Florians have been fundamentally, but I don't understand why they had to adapt them so similarly up to a point and then completely change their storyline and have a throwback to Dearche Trinity without having any of the emotional weight or justification for it behind it. I'm actually furious for myself at the fact I'm not MORE mad at it now having vented about it, but how god awful the Florians were handled really just overshadows the materials at this point, and I'm heavily biased for god's sake. Ultimately, they feel like they were introduced because they knew people love them, then they just did what GoD did to get them out of the way and make way for Nanoha having a big moment.
  29. Hayate and the Book of Darkness - Alright. The movie is based around the book of darkness, it can help save Eltria, it's used to create the Materials and Yuri is linked to it, as she is in GoD. However, unlike GoD, Hayate is not a central character in these movies whatsoever. She's important for like, a fifth of Reflection and then she's completely off screen for almost the entirety of the rest of the movie and detonation, and after her very first barrier jacket/weapon upgrade in the series, she ends up not getting to do anything new for them whatsoever. And her rod is dumb looking now. Having her interact with the other characters and do her mom bit with them and help inspire Dearche was absolutely crucial to the original storyline, and while you don't have to be GoD, we also don't need to spend a good chunk of Reflection focusing on Fate's constant Mommy problems when Hayate has been shoved to the background of every single Nanoha property except A's, and Force, which essentially got canceled for god's sake. The fact we have to focus on the most popular character instead of getting some actual development for Hayate when the movie revolves around HER STORY is ridiculously shitty. All they had to do was change the Book of Darkness to a new lost logia and change how Dearche/Levi/Stern get introduced, and this is a complete non-issue and just status quo for the series, but instead the Book is central to the plot as a throwback with GoD with all of the reasons and interactions based around it removed.
  30. Yuri - Yuri was the character that made it out of Detonation by far the best, being a more fleshed out character than she was in GoD since it was an origin story for her, but her actual fighting design and motivations are awful in this, and GoD just had her be an out of control program of the Book of Darkness for god's sake. Having her be mind controlled by a man who isn't introduced properly until the second movie is absolutely worse than being an out of control program, fuck. Her design in GoD being focused on overwhelming dark power focusing into wings, massive claws and overwhelming energy was also far more interesting than the weird mecha angle they took that ultimately made her look less creative while still being restrained by playing homage to her amazing energy claws that made her obnoxious as hell to fight. Like, giant metal man punching hands? We got that instead of monster energy claws? Her being mind controlled also fits worse with the fact she's now the onee-chan type than being a scared out of control girl in GoD.
  31. Iris - The unique character to Detonation, she absorbs half of Kyrie's traits in being an AI that Kyrie grew up with that ends up manipulating her and having like sexual tension with, before turning full blown evil, getting an evil lady barrier jacket and taking control of Yuri. Iris was the third character in Nanoha i'd ever walked away from not having any attachment to, the first two being Erio and Caro from StrikerS (with lutecia graduated due to how hilarious she is in Vivid), and as soon as I booted up detonation I realized we never had any motivation given for her whatsoever, and I figured Nanoha's consistently great grey area villain writing would solve that easily!
  32. She was mind controlled into doing everything by elon musk from being the scenes.
  33. Kyrie confronts her, tells her she's doing this because she's mind controlled, she screams back goign 'No I did this by my own choice" with mind control code in her eyes, and ultimately she doesn't matter in the plot because she was a chess piece that Elon Musk utilized and she had her one off fight with Kyrie so they don't have to be on screen anymore. I really don't like red letter media anymore, but hey. Why don't we just make a better movie, by taking Iris, and Kyrie, and combining them into an entirely brand new character - Kyrie Florian. Who has all of the same backstory, which would fit her GoD personality and backstory, and wouldn't leave us with two less than full characters that feel practically like they exist only for shipping. Yes, Iris does state she wanted to manipulate Kyrie and that it was of her own will separate from the mind control, but considering how nonsensical the mind control is and how clearly it exists just to absolve her of any fault and erase any good villain motivation writing, I don't buy it.
  34. Elon Musk - Halfway through Detonation we discover that Iris was not the villain whatsoever, it was the CEO of a company that was trying to save Eltria who, upon being defunded, revealed that he had signed a deal with a military PMC, a deal we never hear the details of and what he has to do for it, and ends up killing every employee underneath him for monetary gain or something. Yuri runs in, chastises him, and he repeats a line he says in the current time "as long as I have the last laugh" and Yuri kills him. Then, Iris runs in and asks Yuri if she killed him, and Yuri says Yes with zero context. Iris shoots Yuri, instead of seeing the aftermath or anything we suddenly cut to DBZ fighting in the sky with no actual details of the dogfight, and then we hard cut to Iris being crucified by Yuri with no explanation as to why Yuri went with THAT or fucking anything. This is suppose to be the motivation of our main villains besides the mind control, and it's ultimately 'Yuri decided to say she killed him without mentioning he killed literally everyone else in the building and let Iris decide she probably killed everyone else too". I had someone try to justify this with "Iris is an AI, she doesn't understand how life and death and decisionmaking work", but they immediately after explained to me that Iris fits perfectly well into a lesbian relationship with Yuri or a triad with Yuri and Kyrie, so AIs can integrate flawlessly into relationships but don't have any sort of protection against hastily murdering people or anything else. Or, y'know, that's headcanon horseshit to justify the lynchpin moment of the entire movie when there is no good justification. Elon musk shows up in Detonation to beat the shit out of everyone else, saying he can defeat all of the girls even if htey attack him at the same time, revealing he stored a chunk of his memories into his mass produced cyborg program, and as long as a chunk remains he can always come back. There's no explanation as to why he's still continuing his plan on Earth, as the plan was vague enough that we have no idea if he just had to create the mass producted androids and deliver them to the military group or ask any questions about this movie, but he's introduced with Accelerator Alter, which is like Kyrie and Amita's Accelerator, but he's better and cooler than them. He later goes on to clown a bunch of the girls, then Nanoha fights him and beats him only by using Accelerator, glad this random guy is so much more powerful than anyone else including Nanoha who has received TWO FULL UPGRADES IN THIS MOVIE SERIES that she needed every bit of strength to handle him, then Nanoha blasts him and tears off his arms/legs graphically in a beam for no justifyable reason, then he directly quotes Jail Scaglietti with no context or similarity about how he wishes Nanoha and Fate could have become his children (like the androids I guess?). At this point he has no arms or legs, can't move and seems blind, but he immediately converts a rollercoaster into a space shuttle launch system to send something into space, bluffing it's something I don't care anymore but it's actually a copy of his memories and the command to a sattelite he was able to Formula bullshit into a orbital laser telling it to nuke the city. Nanoha ends up flying after it to destroy it with Amita, telling Fate, the faster of the two with the social skills of a kindergartner, to stay behind and keep him talking so he doesn't figure out what they're doing. The guy with no arms or legs. Amita jobs, gets a hole in her chest which is really really extreme for this series once again, passes her gun onto Nanoha, then Nanoha flies into space and fights the mook that is piloting the orbital satelite. Unfortunately, this generic mook is keeping up with Nanoha with all of Nanoha's absurd upgrades AND Amita's gun, resulting in Nanoha having to punch her hand to hand and have her own body blown to bits, leaving her hanging in space alone, bloodied and missing limbs.
  35.  
  36. what the fuck.
  37.  
  38. "it's to set up the fact nanoha always pushes herself too hard" No, it's not fucking setting up Nanoha's injury in StrikerS, because this is ABSOLUTELY A WORSE INJURY THAN WHAT SHE RECEIVED IN STRIKERS, AND SHE IS DEPICTED AS FULLY HEALTHY WITHIN 10 MINUTES OF THIS HAPPENING. "there was a nine month time skip" YES, THE FACT THIS CHARACTER FULLY HEALED FROM LOSING AN ARM PULLS IMPACT AWAY FROM HER BEING FUCKED UP BY ROBOTS WITH BLADES FOR ARMS WHEN VITA WAS CLOSER TO HER TO SAVE HER AND THEN HAVING TO REHABILITATE HERSELF FROM SQUARE 1. This scene feels absolutely ridiculous, aside from keeping up with the movie series' wanting to repeatedly tell us that Nanoha has always had trouble with social situations, anxiety, and hating herself, which is perfectly fine, but everything else is just dramatic for the purpose of having empty shock that hurts the progression of the older series. Literally, this one elon musk mothefucker who killed a lot of people because he took some ritalin and wanted to create a startup has done more damage to more characters in the nanoha franchise in one movie than anyone else with zero buildup, and they could have just went with any of the girls being actual villains wtih grey area motivations like anything else in the series. I can't coherently talk about this dumb shit anymore I hate it so much whatever blow me up for not ending on a coherent point.
  39. Formula - Formula, being the name they give the brand of science magic that the Florains use, is weird. It's either said or implied that it's stronger than the magic that the nanoha crew are using, or just that their access to Accelerator mode is very powerful, but it ultimately falls flat with it's distribution. Kyrie doesn't get to utilize it outside of once or twice in reflections, Amita gets to use it in both movies but jobs hard using it regardless multiple times, and Nanoha gets it but she gets her powerup so early it ultimately feels like it has zero impact adding onto her arsenal. Even worse, it changed her into 'I fire a starlight breaker sized beam every time and it'd be boring to end the fight on the first shot So None Of THem Matter, despite her smaller beams in StrikerS being regarded so highly she had to get military clearance to fire them towards the sky, let alone horizontally or anywhere else. Now? Way, way, way bigger and less effective than shooting divine buster at a tree in season 1. This is one of the things I've been worried about since StrikerS, where the obvious progression of "girl shoot beam" could devolve into DBZ beamspam, and holy shit this movie does it, with the beams not having the same emotional purpose and care put into each one of them like before and just being mindless eye candy. Jesus.
  40. Formula, part 2 - I forgot the original reason I even wrote Formula on here. In GoD, Amita and Kyrie have guns that slap together to turn into swords, Amita usually preferring the regular sentai sword and Kyrie usually preferring the two handed broadsword. Nice, matches their design, etc. In this, they introduce the fact that all Formula weapons can be used to change into anything at any time. This, one, means we never get to see the two sisters with their original weapons properly, and two, means that after that point in Detonation people are changing their weapons so fast in fights that none of them have a recognizable outline, let alone memorable ones, and utility is just out of the window. Everything we saw was super throwaway except for the demonstration scene, in which Iris pulled out something that looked like Arnage's guns in Force, I Guess.
  41. Injuries - This movie has a LOT of body harm we don't see in the other parts of Nanoha, really inappropriately used and for no real impact. We see a man get hit by a beam that tears all 4 of his limbs off and it looks like actual limbs being torn off iwth bone sticking out - It ultimately ends up being robot metal sticking out, and I bopped myself for overreacting, but as soon as he lands and starts giving his plan out he has realistic humanesque robot organs spilling out of his arms and legs. I can't think of any reason to do this whatsoever, especially with the rest of the series... Nanoha's giant beam in StrikerS 25 that blows through the entire ship leaves Quattro visually unharmed, the fuck does this have to be like this for? I'm the gal that's always complaining about Nanoha's beam being set to 'stun' ever SINCE Quattro, and THIS is not the time or the reason to actually change it. Not only that, but Amita had to have a giant hole blown into her stomach? Cauterized and zero detail, far more appropriate, but the robot has guts and the human doesn't? And Nanoha's shock injury being resolved within ten minutes of movie time with no impact or actual problems caused by it in the short term is completely messed up. Oh, and Nanoha had to be in crutches after her last fight in Reflection, but she's OK afterwards as well. You know, whatever. Not hurting the believability that all this shit isn't worse for her body than just the event in StrikerS.
  42. Upgrades - So, as part of this movie being based on callbacks ala Force Awakens, we have the force weaponry integrated into the plot, and new weapon upgrades for everyone that look more advanced than what they had in StrikerS. First thing to throw out of the way real easily, I really don't like the fact that the girls get upgrades immediately in the first movie, only to have Nanoha IMMEDIATELY get her upgrade upgrade right afterwards, pulling any of the specialness away in Detonation when she already has everything together and you can barely tell she's any different outside of when she tries to use accelerator. They definitely could have only rolled out half of the upgrade or just delayed it to Detonation to help with the hype pacing, everything felt like a real mess. Dearche getting Dearche Trinity was as well, since instead of having a single girl triple breaker like in GoD, she just kind of fired three beams while yelling about being a cat and died for it instead of getting all onee-chan-y like Nanoha with Vivio in StrikerS. Again, I can't argue too much because the integrity of who the Materials are is still there, but the beam felt really unexciting, though I guess you can blame way more of that on Yuri having weird uneventful mecha stand powers and being irrelevant as a threat because she was only around for Dearche to fight at that point.
  43. Secondly, the entire point of the force weapons to back up their outlandish design is the fact that they're pulling up banned physical based weaponry, which brings up a lot of interesting history with midchilda and the development of weapons over time, politics banning deadly weaponry, et cetera. Just having the designs without any of the lore honestly just lead to the generic beamspam problem earlier. Nothing shot out of the new weapons felt any different than Nanoha shooting a beam out of Raging Heart in StrikerS, but worse.
  44. Pacing, and zero forethought in justification - Okay, shit. There's so many things in this movie that feel like they were added last second to justify shitty retcon decisions or to halfass keeping throwbacks without making any sense. Having to introduce Yuri as a part of the book of darkness separate from it, and that Eins forgot about her in A's because 'oh a page got torn out' instead of her being so deeply embedded she's under Rein's programming? Neither are super amazing reasons as to why Yuri is being introduced now of all times, but if we had to I just realized that Yuri and Hayate had zero screentime together what the fuck was the point of the book of darkness instead of it being a new lost logia I absolutely hate how much they lifted and kept as a skeleton frame for the storytelling instead of just writing new backstory for these characters that are completely different than their old versions god damn it.
  45. Okay, aside from that, Iris shooting Yuri, Them hard cutting to DBZ fighting then hard cutting to the crucifixion - I was told by one person 'it's so we don't have to focus on the torture porn', but we didn't need the torture part of it whatsoever, don't just have a shot and use dbz zwee fighting to transition to any random scene you thought was cool at the time, that makes david cage scenes look more coherent. God, after that last revelation with Yuri and Hayate not having a scene, I'm too upset to write more and don't want to return to this for a minute, so I'm going to just post this on twitter for shits now.
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement