Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS Episode 01
魔法少女リリカルなのはStrikerS（ストライカーズ）Ep. 01

SPOILER Summary: Its April 28, 0071 at the Northern Midchilda 8th Coastal Airport, a large fire has broken out and firefighters are unable to break through to rescue a girl trapped inside. The girl is crying and just before a large statue falls on her, she is saved by the mage Nanoha, who takes her to safety. From this, the girl, Subaru, works to become a mage herself and four years later, finds herself at the ruins of that same airport with her friend and partner, Tiana. Both girls are mages who are looking to advance from C-rank to B-rank and so are about to take a test, which will be administered by Sergeant Major Reinforce Zwei. Above the testing zone are Hayate, who’s now a lieutenant colonel, and Fate, classified as an “enforcer.” Nearby, Nanoha, now a captain, ensures the training zone is ready.

Reinforce Zwei informs Tia and Subaru that they have a set amount of time to reach the goal, in which they first must clear the zone of all enemy targets and drones, ensuring not to harm non-enemy ones. The two start and work to clear the first stage of simple defense drones. Having split the area between them, they clear their respective areas and meet to advance to the next stage. Here, the drones are tougher and there are “friendly” targets as well, which must be avoided. Both do well in clearing this as a team. However, the third stage is much tougher, as the defense drone there is pretty large, has good defenses and a good range. Subaru gets a little careless and when Tia gets her out of harms way, Tia injures her leg (breaks a bone I believe) trying to avoid the fire from the large drone.

Tia tells Subaru to go on without her since they don’t have a lot of time left to reach the goal. However, Subaru is unwilling to do this since she and Tia are a team and she doesn’t want to not help others. As such, they quickly devise a plan where Tia will use her magic as a diversion, creating duplicates of herself to keep the final drone busy. Meanwhile, Subaru will attempt a surprise attack at close range since she’s not good with distance attacks. The plan goes off and Subaru races on her skates across a magic bridge she created to burst through to where the final drone is and take it out.

Subaru returns to Tia to learn they only have one minute left. She has Tia on her back and using her magic, she “rocket skates” them to the goal, with Tia using her magical device, a gun, to take out the final targets in their path. When Reinforce Zwei annouces the final target is destroyed, Subaru channels all the magic she can into ensuring the two get across the finished line to the goal. However, she hasn’t thought about how she’s going to stop, so it looks like the two will hit the wall beyond the finish line when Nanoha uses her magic to catch and stop Tia and Subaru. Reinforce Zwei deducts a couple of points from the girls’ score for doing something so reckless.

Nanoha arrives and praises Reinforce for her work in the examination. She acknowledges Subaru, saying she’s happy to see her again. Subaru is touched that her former rescuer is there and more so when Nanoha remembers her. Reinforce goes to heal Tia as Hayate and Fate ponder the score Nanoha has given the girls.

Thoughts: I’m way, way overdue on watching the 3rd series of Nanoha titles, so better now than never. I’m going to try to avoid my normal highly detailed summaries because they take too long (got to work through this backlog, y’all).

First Raging Heart, which I know some official magazine or something decided should be “Raising Heart,” but the Japanese NEVER pronounced it as such when they could have. Second, Donna Burke, who has a lovely speaking voice and can speak clear English, is again made to say Engrish lines. For example, “There is no life response within the range” when they mean “There are no life responses within the range.” “There is no dangerous object either” when they mean “There are no dangerous objects either.” This is a case where IMO, they should have let Donna “clean up” the English to make it proper. But what do I know. Engrish it is, y’all.

Story wise, I liked seeing the older Nanoha (who’s 19 now) rather than the loli 9. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both Nanoha and Nanoha A’s but the story continuing 10-years later intrigues be very much, though Nanoha doesn’t appear to be the focal figure she used to be. I didn’t realize at first that Reinforce Zwei was in fact the same Reinforce from Nanoha A’s but I think that’s cool that she’s back, even if a tiny thing (I cheated and looked that up when getting the character names).

I can understand why people didn’t care much for this latest installment after the first episode. For starters, the focal characters were newbies Tia and Subaru. Second, the dialog was rather lacking in that it was simplistic and does not convey that same element that drew fans to the first series and kept them in the 2nd. Hopefully this will improve with time.

Regardless, I do plan to blog the entire series, for good or bad.