3 July 2015: Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid sure had a lot less plot than I was expecting
Raising Heart gets to be in the show, but Bardiche didn't have a single line.
As long as they keep making more Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha anime I'll keep watching them, providing the shows are not complete shite. I'll even keep watching even if Nanoha and Fate aren't in the show anymore, even if it barely qualifies as mahou shoujo anymore, and even if it stops being lyrical. Once a franchise I'm following gets enough momentum, I'll pretty much keep watching new installments. Well, providing the anime continues to hit above the Cosprayers Line, that is.
Nanoha doesn't always tell Fate everything.
This is pretty much how I ended up watching all of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid. It's not good by any means, but it's particularly bad either. Every episode of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid seems content to underachieve with bloop singles, never swinging for the fences like its early predecessors. Unfortunately, I can remember approximately fuck all from the previous installment, Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS (it's been eight years!) and I don't read any of the Nanoha manga, so I didn't know hardly any of the ViVid characters at all.
"I said, I, I, ah ah ah, I, I want the knife."
It turns out it's not actually necessary to know any of the Nanoha ViVid characters, because there's also no plot and the anime doesn't have an ending. In fact, the anime didn't even try to fake a non-ending ending; it just drops off where I presume it left off in the manga and follows up with a low-effort clip show summarizing most of the Einhart (Einhard, whatever) moments from the 12-episode run, pretty much for no reason.
Ass shot.
Speaking of whom, Einhart starts the show as the putative villain. She uses ANCIENT BELKA magic and picks fights with random people. With the potential for DARK MAMIKO in the wings, so far so good. But then she's hit with the most powerful attack in the Nanoha universe, Friendship, and the series decides to coast from there and cruise through the Onsen Episode, Training Sequence, and Tournament Arc checkpoints.
The Chantez Series? They've been completed?
Training sequences were the bane of StrikerS, and aren't much better in ViVid, but at least they don't seem to drag out endlessly. Unfortunately, essentially none of the tournament battles in Nanoha ViVid save the Corona v. Einhart bout mattered to me because I didn't know any of the characters and thus didn't care who won or lost. But the ViVid tournament arc doesn't even finish during the course of the season. I suppose if and when someone scrapes together some more dirty Nanoha money, perhaps we'll see the end of the tournament in a split cour. We'll still need some sort of plot for the show, though. Is it too late for Einhart to start ripping people's heads off? What if someone kills her kitten?
