VIVID STRIKE!

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionMahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid
OVA ActionViVid Strike! OVA

REVIEWS

• 

  Messyrats

  20/100
  If my interest in Nanoha wasn't already dead then Vivid Strike sure managed to beat it into submission.

  Vivid Strike has a rather unique distinction in that it's one of the only anime I'm aware of that is explicitly about women's MMA. There's only a couple of anime/manga to my knowledge that are about women's mixed martial arts or feature it in any real capacity and I can count them on one hand. (By all means, feel free to correct me on this as I would be more than happy to be wrong!) There's Nanoha Vivid, that is, the show this is spun off from, Teppu and All-Rounder Meguru. Stories about female martial artists are nothing new, and searching for just that on Anilist or any other site like this would probably increase the results a good amount, but women's MMA in particular is a niche among niches. Vivid Strike also has another, much worse distinction:

  It fucking sucks.

  It's important to note before I get into this that like Nanoha Strikers, I think Nanoha Vivid is a bad show. The big difference between it and StrikerS, however, is that it's bad in an entirely different way. StrikerS has many faults but it could never be accused of lacking in ideas. It was always trying something even if it fell short of the lofty ambitions it set for itself. Vivid, on the other hand, is bad in the worst kind of way: It's boring. It's a show almost completely divorced from the entries prior to it that if it weren't for having Nanoha in the title and it being (ostensibly) about her adopted daughter, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they have nothing to do with each other. Vivid is the kind of show I'll fully admit I expected Nanoha to be. Low-brow, weirdly horny for little girls and lacking in sincerity. I'm not going to say that Nanoha itself is any kind of high art but it didn't have any moments when it winked at the audience about how silly all this is. It's played very straight and it's that sincerity in just about everything that made it appealing and made me invested in a lot of what it was doing.

  Vivid, meanwhile, is a show full of unlikable, uninteresting characters who are completely devoid of conflict and manage to somehow become less interesting as the show goes on. The anime ends in a "read the manga" way that honestly made me feel cheated out of my time. I've not read it and I have zero intention of doing so because I'm genuinely not interested in checking out any more of it. Vivio is boring, Einhart is even more boring and I couldn't care less about reading about their inevitable face off. And that's my review of Vivid.

  I bring all this up because Vivid Strike comes roaring out of the gate with what feels like a mission statement in the form of its opening minutes thanks to its lead character, Fuuka Reventon. The manga for Vivid isn't written directly by Tsuzuki (it's written by him in much the same way Nasu signs off on lore bible stuff in Fate) whereas this is. It's a blistering opening sequence, with Fuuka just going to town on a bunch of delinquents who are stopping her from working her part time job. The intent is clear: this isn't going to be like Vivid. Within the first ten minutes the show manages to make Fuuka a more interesting and compelling character than anyone in the show before it. She's an orphan that's down on her luck, she hates rich people and she is mad.

  Then the cast from Vivid shows up and all the interesting conflict ends up being sucked out of the show, as if they're some kind of vampires.

  Vivid Strike is not a really bad show only because the cast from Vivid make appearances, but immediately following their appearance the show becomes significantly less interesting. I became convinced after they reappeared that they're incapable of having any kind of conflict written around them and I don't know why that is. What I do know is that I spent the next few episodes very nearly zoning out every time the characters spoke because I just couldn't bring myself to care. When I say that Vivid is boring, I mean that it's boring to the point that it becomes genuinely hard to talk about as so much of it goes in one ear and out the other. I had a hard time remembering what happened in these episodes until the show brought me back with a scene that was so funny that I later discovered it became something of a small meme.

  The other main character besides Fuuka is her rival, Rinne. Rival feels like a term that should be used very loosely here as the way the show handles their rivalry is incompetent and they spend so little time together that I had to wonder by the time the last couple of episodes came about if it had just forgotten about it. Rinne is uh... well, she's also boring but she's got what is without a doubt the funniest moment of the show. After an episode in which she's bullied beyond belief by her comically evil classmates, to the point that it causes her to miss her adopted grandfather's death, Rinne comes in and practically murders them. It's so funny, in fact, that I'm going to link to this handy YouTube video to demonstrate it:

  Look, I'm tired and I don't really like talking about this show. I've already reached the point that I'm running out of things to say about it. It's incompetently written, incompetently directed. Incompetent is the best word to describe it because that's what it is. The rivalry between Fuuka and Rinne is practically nonexistent for the vast majority of the show and when it does end up rearing its head again, well, the fight between the two of them is bad but it's clear that there's something there. Vivid Strike is a story that can ultimately be boiled down to being about two friends whose paths in life took them in very different directions and it's through mixed martial arts that they ended up reconnecting. It's a straightforward enough idea that it should have been easy to write a compelling narrative around it, with all the trials and tribulations that come with these sorts of underdog sports stories. When they're actually talking to each other during the fight about where their lives have led them, it's clear that there was a story there with potential, but for some reason that's not the story Vivid Strike is interested in telling.

  But to call Vivid Strike a series about women's MMA is honestly insulting to the sport itself. It can't even really be called a sports story because it's abundantly clear that it doesn't care about sports. The actual fights themselves may as well not involve MMA at all for how little that actually factors into them. One thing I thought was really funny about Vivid was the lengths it went to in order to justify how it can get away with having literal 10 year olds beating the crap out of each other. No one's actually meant to be getting hurt in Vivid. They're all using some kind of technology that emulates the pain of the injuries without actually hurting them. Vivid Strike throws that out of the window and instead decides that these kids are, in fact, just beating the crap out of each other. I'm not sure what it adds, honestly, I just think it's funny that the show decided to do that.

  This show managed to achieve its mission statement, it was not like Vivid. It was worse, in fact. If you want to experience a good story that's actually about women's MMA then please, read Teppu. If you want to experience the good parts of Nanoha then watch the first two seasons of the show. Watch StrikerS if you feel you have to but leave it there if you do. Just please, don't watch this, anything else but this.

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