Anime: Senki Zesshou Symphogear

Review
Symphogear is your all-around idol-based adventure featuring young girls, music, magical transformations, and save-the-world business. It borders the mahou shoujo genre at many points, changing cute wands for huge weapons, and with an overall soft presentation with very little fanservice elements, yet from time to time you get to notice this was originally intended for the horny teens, featuring some big-breasted characters, a few semi-nude scenes, and some clever angles to focus on some of the cast's "attributes".

However, despite all this, Symphogear is a warming surprise. It manages to consolidate its basic and unispiring idea and overused elements with a solid execution, a good deal of dramatic moments, and a combat coreography that makes up for the shameful singing combats. If you are in for a shounen ride, this can be an unexpected minor jewel for you.

The tale is about Hibiki, a young girl caught in a massive attack by the mindless and deadly "Noise". These beasts kill humans they touch and are nearly invincible. Only those wearing symphogears, relics of ancient civilizations capable of turning sound into power, can stand a chance against them. After being nearly killed in the attack, Hibiki ends up with fragments of one of these relics inside her, and it will be up to her to take up arms and protect people from these vicious creatures.

---

1. ...okay... not so vicious
   The Noise can be one of the first turndowns of the show. They are polygonal creatures with bright colors, behaving with less intelligence than insects and just standing there waiting to be killed by the heroines. They look lame, they act stupidly, yet fortunately they are very secondary to the tale after the first episode, only working as "random thugs" for the action parts of Symphogear.
   
   And the fights are pretty interesting
   For a show based on idols, it can be truly surprising when animation and special effects are combined with a great coreography for the combats. The fights are intense, there a lot of explosions, characters have interesting moves, and the only two issues here are: first, sometimes the show freezes the scene to uselessly announce the name of an attack, something which fortunately becomes less common as the show progresses; and second, the girls are almost always singing as they fight, making for some weird scenes as they think and sing or others where it looks the music is on playback (which is almost always).
   
   The music is decent though
   Fortunately, beyond some terrible engrish and weirdly spoken latin words or whatever, the music of the show is engaging and fit to the ocasion, becoming one of the show biggest assets to make every fight, even stupid ones, into something more pleasing. The mixture of techno beats, opera-like chants, and quick rythmn may not be for everyone, but for a show about mechanical armors and fast combats it serves perfectly. After a while the chants from the girls also become decent tools to change the momentum of the show, and their voices are also never annoying even with a genki protagonist that speaks more than she should.
   
   An all-girls show
   Symphogear is closely tied to a mahou shoujo and for that same reason the cast is tied to the chains of that genre. Hibiki is your protagonist, a genki default girl who always want to aid people. She is in love with her best friend Miku, a silent and exemplar student. They are accompanied by Tsubasa, a somewhat tsundere girl with her serious mindset that is melted during the episodes as she befriends Hibiki. Although not exactly great and sporting a few annoying characters like the big-breasted mad scientist and a mysterious villain who is always naked, Symphogear does a good job with its main trio and later with a fourth character. It has a bit of development, some dramatic changes, the outcome of combats never feels too forced, and there are few convenient elements in the tale to annoy you.
   
   And the tales gets better
   Well, turn down your expectations first. This is about girls saving the world from bizarre creatures, working under a secret japanese organization and using magical transformation to fight. However, for a tale as basic as it is, it offers a decent development across the episodes, with some simple twists, affiliation changes, and never trying too much to explain concepts that are simply absurd. It just accepts things exist in this world and moves on with that, rarely resorting with gargabe dump in its dialogues. The script is basic, but good enough to move things forward without leaving you ashamed of watching it.
   

---

Comments
I truly don't know why the hell I gave Symphogear a chance, especially in the time I watched it (right after Guilty Crown, Sword Art Online, and many other overhyped pieces of sh*t). However, I am grateful I did. Symphogear became my guilty pleasure of its year and it offered so much more than others of the genre it worked to renew my strength to try some "I-think-it's-garbage" shounen shows.

Symphogear is far from being great, its cast is basic, the story is simple and unoriginal, and it tries to mix a lot of stuff in a show that ends up being a mahou-shoujo for shounen lovers (...? yeah, something like that), but it's a sincere show, it offers interesting combats, the overused music at many points give it an additional flair, and the tale grows enough to catch your attention after a few episodes. It's a solid presentation and a good way to show how even flawed ideas can provide a good entertainment.

PREMISE

If you are wondering why I bother to overview this piece of shit, it’s because the pre-airing promotion was presenting it as the next level in entertainment, combining amazing production values, catchy electronic music, lesbian magical girls, well-choreographed martial arts, very dark themes, tragedy and violence. Being a new project and not something based on videogames or manga, meant that it wasn’t limited by its source material, and you had no idea what to expect. Lots of people were hyped about it; heck, even I was intrigued by the premise. Lots of series I like have to do with fighting the enemy with music.

- Macross by fighting an interstellar armada of war-like aliens with a pop song
- Princess Tutu by fighting monsters through ballet dance
- Lyrical Nanoha by making all the magical weapons to work like computerized military weaponry
- Rahxephon by having huge robots which work and attack with monotonous sounds/wave frequencies
- Hell, I will even include a live action series called Kamen Rider Hibiki. The hero was fighting monsters with musical instruments.

In the very first episode, they even kill one of the main heroines, something that was cleverly kept hidden in all the trailers, which caused an even bigger shock to the audience. You know, Urobutcher style. Everything seemed great, and yet in just two episodes me and most of the viewers gave up on it. It was one of those rare cases where not even the pretty colours were enough to keep people interested. So, what happened?

TONE

Combining elements of various genres as means to create an uncommon result can produce wonders, such as the original Sailor Moon and Looking for the Full Moon. But most of the times it results to complete disasters, since it is pretty hard to bridge aesthetic differences, and gap whatever expectations and biases people of different audiences have for each individual genre. The thing that usually makes it work is subtlety in the way they are presented as a mixed product, something that in the case of Symphogear did not happen, since it suffers greatly from sudden tonal shifts. Cheery and scary things are happening almost at the same time, without smoothly moving from one genre to another.

It feels like a mismatch of a mahou shoujo for little girls, superpower action for teenage boys, and pop idol moe fluff for adults. If the genres had mixed properly, they wouldn’t feel disjoined but would be like a natural progression from one thing to another. And if you so much want to have an antithesis in tones, you can’t treat them as equally important. To put it in a more straightforward way, mashing high spirited ideology (which is meant to be cool for being unreal), with cruel down-to-earth reality (which is meant to feel brutal for being unfair), does not work if one doesn’t eventually overlap the other.

PLOT

To make this more apparent, I will mention 7 examples from the first episodes.

1) The heroines are pop idols at a concert. Monsters attack immediately after they end their song, making it feel like it was staged; a convenience so they can show off their powers right there.

2) The heroines transform and move to the offence. They fight by singing, which strengthens their attacks. They don’t use cute magic wands but huge swords and axes which cut the monsters to pieces. Said monsters in the meantime are brutally killing innocent civilians, making the whole scene to look like a massacre. The whole thing is meant to be brutal and serious. Yet everything falls apart because the girls keep singing silly love songs, without ever stuttering or losing their breath, as a result of their taxing acrobatics. This is not supposed to be like Bubblegum Crisis, where a recorded song of theirs is playing in the background purely for aesthetic flavouring. It is part of the battle, and yet it sounds like it is indeed pre-recorded.

3) The names of the special attacks they are using, are shown during the action scenes, making you think you are watching a videogame instead of a living, breathing world. The anime is not based on a videogame, and yet it feels like you are going to lose points if you don’t save enough civilians.

4) One of the heroines sacrifices herself in order to save a girl in the crowd. Why did she do that, specifically for her and not anyone else? How does wasting your life to save a civilian is better to staying alive and saving thousands of civilians? We are not told, so it makes the sacrifice to seem stupid instead of heroic.

5) That girl that was saved gets singing powers, and begins fighting as well. She sings perfectly, even though it was her first time, had no idea what of was going on, and on top of that was shocked the whole time. This is not plausible in a setting that tries to seem realistic.

6) Another monster attack takes place in the very first episode. This should normally be happening in a later episode, or be the continuation of the first attack. The in-between gap of these scenes is so short, that it might as well not exist at all. Cramming all that in 20 minutes, means rushing through everything, with hardly any time allocated for letting things settle in. And if you don’t understand what that means, just imagine how stupid it is to have three different timeskips in the same episode! You are given the impression you are watching a recap instead of the pilot.

7) We are being fed most of what is going on with dull explanatory monologues, and without seeing something to confirm anything that is mentioned. Having people standing still and talking is boring; good exposition is about showing what is going on.

CHARACTERS

Without time invested on smooth transitions, the events feel meaningless, the setting cartoony, and the characters forgettable stereotypes. Furthermore, instead of trying to flesh them out, the directors simply over-sexualized them, so you end up seeing them as nothing more than fapping material. It gets even creepier when most of said fan service has to do with lesbians, torture, and girls who are so young the show essentially targets lolicons.

The antagonists are pretty forgettable as well, since they are just mass produced monsters, with no personality, no motive, and on top of that have really bland and ugly designs. They act like brainless bullies, chasing defenceless people for fun and are defeated by the hundreds in just a few episodes, so they don’t even pose an actual threat.

The monster leaders are evil magical girls, whose entire personality is simply being one dimensional megalomaniac sadists. Meaning they are just horny sluts with no depth at all.

Then you see soldiers with tanks firing at the monsters, black ops assassinating high officials, and men in black being used as bodyguards. These are cool ideas that offer a sense of realism in an otherwise magical girl show, but just like everything else, they are thrown in there with close to no time investment.

EPILOGUE

I know that the original script was planned for a much longer series, and that they had to cram as much plot as possible in each episode. This does not excuse the show being complete garbage, why it was allowed to be made despite knowing it will be garbage, or expecting us to accept such an excuse, when despite all its problems, it was allowed to have more seasons. This anime is the result of greedy assholes, making deviant shit without giving a crap about the quality of the final product. A perfect image of modern anime.

p.s. Honourable mentioning of other music-battle-themed titles I failed to throw in somewhere in this text: Black Heaven, Detroit Metal City, Ar Tonelico, The World Ends With You.