Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's

[Dracos]

Magical Girl Nanoha is the sequel to Lyrical Nanoha and is, at it's base, a magical girl series (duh) with some sci-fi spice tossed in over a modern backdrop.

It follows a young magic girl Nanoha with a strong tendancy to try and befriend people who attack without warning, her friend Fate from the previous series, and this magical Administration Bureau who tends to try and seal dangerous artifacts to prevent them from hurting people.  Nanoha is a staff wielding gal with a tendancy for shields and gigantic blast attacks.  Fate, meanwhile, is a scythe and sword wielding expert.

Both are 3rd graders, which is pretty much one of the two sticking points of the show and something worth just forgetting since it comes across pretty stupidly and they really act at least like another few years older.  Just accept as with many shows of this type very young kids will demonstrate expertise and knowledge absurd for their age and experience suddenly and be taken seriously by the adults around them in such a vein.  The show does a good mark by not ever breaking note here such that the absurdity is more easily ignored as just a facet of the world...  even if it looks silly watching a busty 20ish year old looking at a 7-8 year old as a 'rival' and 'match in swordsmanship'.

Neat to this one is the impression that the magical girls aren't simply 'blessed superbeings' but do train with their powers and influence their magic.  This tone is set early by Nanoha being introduced doing some control training, things that come up later in the fights.

In this season, Nanoha and Fate face off against the dreaded cursed Book of Darkness, an ancient artifact that eats the magical potential of mages and brings destruction.  They also face off against the Cloud Knights, mage warriors with a special trick of being able to load 'magic bullets' that vastly increase magical payload for a short while.  Needless to say, they get cleanclocked by them early and slowly get to the point of pretty much wiping the floor with them.

Fights are really the star of the show.  There's a fight almost every other episode and it generally is fast and pretty neat with a pretty decent animation budget for it.  They've got a whole array of magical attacks and usually they're  pretty quick and styled.

My other 'grudge' with it is really that it does get too kiddy.  Literally aside from a 'last moment villian', everyone else is revealed as good and none of them are ever killed or hurt badly.  The heroes are, which sets a nice tone there, but the villians aren't really.  But then it's a kids show.

Notably, all friendships in this are generally of two kinds:
A)Friendship of rivals.  Shouldn't need explanation.  All the villians chant on this.
B)Ubercutesywaiwaiwaifriendship!  People who just met at the library will swoon over every word from each other.  New transfers into school will blush and glee happily at every hi, or just about.

There's really not much variety there as far as that goes, though I didn't find that a problem.  Your mileage may vary.

Overall, I enjoyed the show.  It was a nice spending of an evening, a coherent  13 ep tale that has a few twists and plenty of nice fights to keep one watching.

Dracos

Admin Edit: Fixed the name of the series in the subject line.