Tag: Vivid Strike

Watch ‘ViVid Strike!’ Before It’s Gone

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Sometime back, I wrote a largely enthusiastic review of Vivid Strike!, which I consider the best series in the maddeningly inconsistent Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise.

As far as I have been able to discern, the series is only legally available, at least in the U.S., on Amazon Prime—and I recently saw that the series is slated to disappear soon. At the time of writing, Amazon has posted a notice that it disappears in nine days. Assuming I can count, that means it will be gone on October 1st.

The rest of the Nanoha shows have previously disappeared from Amazon and are, as far as I know, not available anywhere else to the English-speaking audience.

Despite its problems, I do think ViVid Strike! is one of the best encapsulations of the magical girl warrior concept. If you’ve not seen it, you might consider watching it before it disappears. It doesn’t require knowledge of the other titles in the franchise.

Anime Review: ‘ViVid Strike!’

I have come to make friends and to kick ass, and I am all out of friends.

, directed by Junji Nishimura. Written by Masaki Tsuzuki. Music by Yôichiro Yoshikawa. Starring Eri Kitamura, Inori Minase, and Mamiko Noto. Seven Arcs (). 12 episodes of 23 minutes (approx. ). Not rated.

Available on Amazon Prime.

ViVid Strike! is the fifth anime series in the main continuity of the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise. On the one hand, that hardly matters because this series is designed to stand alone: No previous knowledge of Lyrical Nanoha is necessary to understand and enjoy what’s going on here. But on the other hand, despite a radical departure from the previous incarnations of the franchise, ViVid Strike! takes Lyrical Nanoha back to its roots, back to the core concept that made the franchise so enormously popular in first place—magic-powered little girls viciously beating each other to a bloody pulp in the name of friendship.

Fuuka and Rinne punch each other in the face.
When you’re friends.

Indeed, although it is not without its problems, ViVid Strike! is arguably the strongest entry in the long-running franchise, or at least the one with the clearest vision … as well as the most brutal violence.

Continue reading “Anime Review: ‘ViVid Strike!’”

#memes

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I believe ‘ViVid Strike!’ is an under-utilized source of dank memes.

‘ViVid Strike!’

It might be a bit before I finally produce the review of Made in Abyss that I’ve promised. I’m working on my book today instead, and I should probably consider higher priority.

I’m also trying to figure out the new interface for WordPress, which is an improvement over the old one in some respects, but deeply frustrating in others. They added some handy new features, but for some reason also stripped down the WYSIWYG editor, so to do some of the formatting I used to use routinely, I now have to write in-line CSS . Go figure. And there’s not even a button to insert ordered lists; I mean, that’s basic HTML, and this editor can’t handle it. Good thing I know some HTML.

I’ve decided that, after Made in Abyss, the next series I tackle will be ViVid Strike!, which is the last series in the Lyrical Nanoha franchise available on Amazon Prime. After that, I intend to drop the service: Amazon Prime is expensive, and its selection is lousy for an anime fan. For someone interested in magical girls, Lyrical Nanoha is probably its biggest draw, and even then, its selection is disappointing: it has none of the movies, and it’s missing ViVid, the series that comes after StrikerS and before ViVid Strike!

I haven’t started it yet, but ViVid Strike! is supposed to be fairly violent series, with more physical combat and fewer magical attacks than its predecessors.

Once I’m done with Amazon, I’ll probably subscribe to HIDIVE, which I can get for only five bucks a month (a third of Amazon’s price), and start working through their catalog. After I’ve eliminated everything of immediate interest that they have, I’ll likely end up subscribed to the complete VRV package and return to Crunchyroll in spite of my increased misgivings. But I’ll put that off for as long as I can to give them time either to clean up their act or crash and burn completely.

So … that’s all I have for today. I’m just too pissed off at WordPress to write any more. I mean, is it too much to ask to have a blog editor that can insert numbered lists or special characters? And whatever happened to my ability to indent paragraphs?