Hello all, and welcome back to another episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha! What, did you think we were finished? Of course not! Influential as its first season may already be, Nanoha wouldn’t be half the institution it now is if it weren’t such an, er, actual institution. The franchise has been receiving new sequels and spinoffs and manga adaptations ever since 2004, making it a fairly unique property within the late night anime sphere. Most long-running shows fall into either children’s anime or shounen adaptation territory, which are always intended to have lengthy and largely episodic running times. Nanoha bucks this trend, adding seasons and properties piecemeal across scattered seasons, kept alive by its own enduring popularity. So what is Nanoha’s second season about, then?

No clue. Pretty much everything I already knew about Nanoha happened in the first season – the combination of magical girl and scifi influences, the clash between Fate and Nanoha, and the ultimate friendship they develop. All I can really say at the moment is that even the context of the first season makes it no surprise this series got a continuation. Nanoha’s first season certainly possessed its own self-contained narrative, but so much of its running time was dedicated to establishing its evocative techno-fantasy world that it also felt like the prologue to something greater. “We must defeat Testarossa” didn’t feel like a meaningful capstone to the world they’d established; it was just Nanoha’s first assignment, and was treated as such. Having established this rich world, underlined Nanoha’s unique strength within it, and just recently yanked Fate over to the light side, the pieces are all set for a thrilling sequel that takes advantage of the original’s careful expository work. Let’s see what awaits us in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s!

Episode 1

Our OP begins with a shot clearly intended to echo the first OP, carry over its “Nanoha standing in a field beneath a blue sky” staging and the spinning pan from around Nanoha to up in the sky. However, this time she stands back to back with Fate, an effect that simultaneously promises loyalty to the first season and an embrace of its consequences

Perhaps that’s one of the things that has helped Nanoha endure – it’s not just a series of scattered adventures, it feels like a world that you’re actually watching progress through meaningful stages between seasons. A lesson Symphogear has done its best to replicate with its consistent recruitment of former antagonists

A bunch of new characters, including a girl in a wheelchair and a blue doggo. Lots to do this season!

Oh my god chibi Arf. Is Arf just gonna look like that from now on?

It looks like this season will be heavier on fighting in general. Less simply melancholy shots, a lot more physical clashes

Our first shots center us on a darkened house and that girl in a wheelchair, accompanied by the first season’s inconsistent notation of the current hour. In the first season that timer generally accompanied material being observed by the space force, but I’m not sure that’s true here

Long shots effectively convey the sense of loneliness here, maudlin piano accompaniment aside

Dr. Ishida left a message for this girl, Hayate, asking if she’d like to go out for lunch tomorrow. So her only friend is her doctor?

Answering machines are such a naturally evocative device for drama – they possess an inherent sense of isolation and melancholy that voicemail can’t quite match, something amplified by their characteristically tinny recording quality. Always interesting how technology and storytelling intersect on more mundane levels like this

Ooh, great shot of her lying down on bed and turning on a light, naturally highlighting this strange book on the shelf

“It’s already midnight.” What a strange, somber way to start a new season. It gives me great hope that Nanoha is maintaining its signature quality: its oddly drawn out mundane, tone-establishing sequences

Aw dang, spooky book’s up to no good!

It breaks its chains. It is very hard to compose a dramatic escape sequence about a book

Episode title: “The Beginning Was All Too Sudden”

Our first scene with Nanoha swiftly demonstrates that she’s still working as a mage and has also improved her powers, as she practices juggling a target using only energy balls

They seem to have decided between seasons that Raising Heart should be a bit more intelligent and communicative

Oh my god she has a framed picture of Fate on her dresser

And they’ve been exchanging video letters. Lots of tidy reaffirmations of the first season’s ultimate status quo

It’s been six months, and Yuuno’s been away for a while, too. Time to check in with the bridge crew!

Apparently Fate and Yuuno have been training with the Asura crew

The ship is far more populated with background characters this time, which was one of my complaints from the first season. Though its resolution may just be a matter of this show being able to throw more resources at a successful sequel

Ooh, I like this. We actually get to see Fate’s trial

Arf is immediately settling into a general big sister role now that she doesn’t have to play the villain anymore. Arf is so good

Chrono seems to be developing a rivalry with Yuuno, a conflict I am deeply invested in

Hinting at some future Lost Logia issues

And of course, Fate has a picture of Nanoha and Nanoha’s friends on her own desk

A new menace approaches, and it is… a tiny girl with a big hammer. She looks like an angry, frilly dwarf. AND SHE’S GOT THE BOOK!

The book is called the Book of Darkness, which seems straightforward enough

This episode’s time stamps have revealed themselves to be a necessary consequence of its scattershot, “let’s catch up with everyone” focus. They establish a sense of continuity across these scenes

Nanoha’s purple-haired friend runs into Hayate in the library. Good choice – Nanoha’s friendship with her entirely fantasy-adjacent friends was a crucial thread in the first season, so actively integrating them into this season’s conflict seems wise

Right, Suzuka was her name

It’s nice to see a character in a wheelchair taking such a presumably prominent role. That’s quite rare in anime, and media more generally

Shinbo is no longer directing this season, and it definitely shows. While the show’s overall look is more crisp and cohesive, and there are more filtering/lighting effects, we haven’t gotten any of those strange, abstract backgrounds, or the dramatic two-tone compositions the original series used for major moments. I wonder if those will show up, or if they were a Shinbo quirk that didn’t end up being carried into the overall franchise aesthetic

That said, this season director Keizo Kusakawa was clearly a close associate of Shinbo, having worked with him on Petite Cosette and actually having directed the first episode of the original Nanoha, which was where those theoretically “Shinbo quirks” were most prominent. I doubt we’ll receive too major a shift in aesthetic

Regardless, I do like this shot of Hayate walking with her presumed caretaker. Neatly geometric compositions and a punchy contrast of character and background do a lot of work by themselves

The woman is Shamal

And now there’s Signum, who was definitely doing some battlin’ in the OP

Hayate asks where Vita is. Presumably that hammer girl

“Even if we’re separated by great distances, we’ll always be by your side.” “Yes. We will always be with you.” I’m guessing these are this season’s “villains,” which makes this sequence feel like a very deliberate contrast against Precia Testarossa. Precia essentially embodied the cruelty of an unsupportive family, and stood as a thematic antithesis to Nanoha and her close family life. This season seems to be complicating that thematic clash by introducing villains who actually do deeply care for each other

Vita’s out hunting sources of magical power to enhance their book, and presumably keeps sensing Nanoha’s power surges

Some very dramatic shading work for Vita, contrasting her dull red hair and vividly blue eyes against the shadows. I like how these closeups make a dramatic landscape of her highly angular design, like this were a Shigeyasu Yamauchi production

Oh my god, Vita can actually cast spells and physically attack at the same time. What is this. Why did no one say that was allowed

Solid animation for this whole sequence, and I really like how the aura of Vita’s search spell casts this whole scene in sickly green and purple

Is Vita’s staff modeled on a croquet mallet? That’s how she seems to use it, tossing up energy balls and slamming them towards Nanoha

Ooh, great little cut of animation for Vita scrambling to avoid Nanoha’s homing beams. You can really feel the sense of disorientation as she jumps to the side, and then is forced to block the second shot

Divine Buster gets all the fanfair and copious animation befitting a signature move

Oh no, they blew up Vita’s bunny hat!

Ooh, I love this. Vita’s staff undergoes a transformation, and the shot is immediately splintered into a series of rearranging red squares, with the shot’s composition briefly echoing the transformation. It combines Shinbo’s abstract pattern work with an actual in-universe physical shift, blurring the line between artistic interpretation and real-world mechanics

Smart of the show to immediately add a melee brawler. One of my issues with the first season’s fights was that they were basically all spellcasters just shooting beams at each other

Love these shots using the broken window to frame Vita

Fate arrives at last, AND HELL RIDES WITH HER

And Done

That was a lot of fun! To be honest, a great deal of this episode was taken up by relatively routine exposition and catch-up, as we checked in on basically the whole cast and moved towards Fate and Nanoha’s reunion. But even though most of this episode was relatively routine, that fight at the end might well have been the best-composed battle in this franchise so far. Dynamic animation, a unique contrast of strengths, plenty of dramatic and beautiful compositions – it was an excellent battle, and feels like a fine sign of things to come. I can’t wait to see Nanoha and Fate team up to smash their tiny and extremely angry opponent!

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