These are nice eps to watch. Einhart's reactions to Vivio's huge extended magical family and their escapades are no doubt some of the best things in this series. More is yet to come, naturally. I'm glad they are saving some of the budget specifically for the action sequences even if it makes the general looks kind of bland. No matter what, it's jolly to see this animated and voiced (and in colour) after the manga.
Lutecia was funny. A peculiar personality you hardly saw in Strikers.
anon - 05, 06
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What I really like about ViVid is that everyone gets a particularly distinct style and it's well thought out and developed. Nicely showcased in these episodes. Even the Vivid or original side characters, Corona and Rio, have something to really stand out with.
StrikerS is fun, but it always boiled down to Lutecia and Caro are the same, Subaru and Nove are the same, random staff or magic rifle mages. Even now, they draw the distinctions out further. Nove focuses much more heavily on kicks, and it is shown through with her pupils. Caro is more distinctly support and defense while Lutecia is more of a battle coordinator and more offensively structured. They emphasized in eps 6 that Teana's magic is slower, but hits much "sharper," something touched on in StrikerS, but not shown quite as spectacularly as now.
This ties nicely through to the main cast. Corona is a summoner, and her device is hand crafted by Lutecia, the franchise's only other summoner. But her style is unique to Lu's, with her forming golems from her surroundings rather than warping in bugs. Being a Strike Arts practitioner, she also has some hand to hand capabilities and some significant endurance on her own, a weakness that Lutecia had in Strikers.
Rio, probably my favorite of the new characters, doesn't even fall into the Strike Arts bucket. She practices it to hang out with Vivio and Corona, but her kung fu style Strike Arts is very flashy and fun to watch. Lightning flash...fiery explosion! The lol fang she has doesn't hurt either.
On the other side of it all, you have Einhart. She's not even really good at external magic (can she even use it at all?) but as we saw when Vivio finally started using her own sparkles, Einhart is so overwhelmingly powerful at Belkan Strike Arts that she can actually counter magic. Only minor instruction let Einhart figure out the signature move of one of the best modern Strike Arts practitioners (Nakajima Quint).
Last but not least, you have Vivio, who finally starts showing off her real specialty. Vivio isn't that overpowering at magic now that the Cradle is gone, and she's definitely not up to Einhart's level of CQC. But she certainly has more range than Einhart, which helps her distract her opponent. It almost seems unfair that Vivio wasn't allowed to use magic blasts in her previous fights with Einhart, because it makes them much more even. Still, Vivio's true skill is in Counters. She blasts, closes in, sometimes gets hit back, but she always manages to get one last alarmingly powerful hit in. Einhart's barrier jacket was damaged by just one of Vivio's grazing counterhits, comparable to one of Nanoha's blasts. It's an interesting specialty, one that isn't really flashy or necessarily even evident until after an exchange of blows. Judging from her reaction when her jacket exploded after the fact, Einhart felt that one too.
Can't wait for episode 7 for the conclusion to this bout.
Caro is a summoner as well. A dragon summoner, no less. Now she's even an Einhart summoner!Originally Posted by Ryllharu
To be honest, I always thought Einhart is far too strong considering she has always been alone, apart from assaulting people in the streets. How do you become so strong if you haven't got any other practice but a punching bag? She apparently has far more complete memories than any of the other descendants, but that ought to go only so far.
This battle was what I most wanted to see animated. Too bad Hayate's gang wasn't present. Then it would have really rocked.
Caro isn't really a summoner, other than of Einharts. Fried is the only thing she ever brings, and he's with her all the time in tiny form. It's not really the same as Lu or Corona, who bring or create all sorts of different things. If Lutecia could only summon Garryu, then Caro's abilities would be comparable.
I always assumed that Einhart gets a vision of a fight or battle, remembers the technique used, and tries it out herself in her home gym. The way she described it earlier, it isn't so much that Einhart gets some snippets of memories in dreams. She's actually plagued and cursed by them. She has such vivid memories of her ancestor's lives, emotional states and all, as if she had photographic memory and lived these events herself. It's more that in split seconds, she recalls when her past self used a technique against so and so, and uses it in her present.
She's exceptionally calm in battle, like it's all stuff she's done before and going through the motions. That's why she was so surprised by the Unchain Knuckle. She used a new and novel technique for the first time ever.
Each of the three Belkan "rulers" are different. Ixpellia actually is the same person (I'm still hoping that gets animated some day), Einhart has near perfect memories, and poor Vivio is just a clone. In some ways, Vivio is the most free. Now that the Cradle is gone, she's no longer trapped by her legacy.
Garyu seems to be with Lutecia all the time as well. Caro can also summon the humongous Voltaire if she wants to crush a town or two. She's a proper summoner, alright, but since she's a dragon summoner, I guess in practice it seems like she doesn't summon as often as those summoners who specialise in summoning lesser things. At least she can use other kinds of magic to make her more useful in the mean time, as dragon summoning doesn't seem good for every day use.
Episode 7 - anon
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Lutecia has something in her that makes it more understandable how she could side with the bad guys in Strikers. While there are self-confident and battle thirsty characters left and right in this story, their boasting is typically in a good sportsmanship spirit. Lutecia, however, does exhibit certain kind of arrogance in my opinion, in addition to the very obvious need to show off. One very good specific scene to demonstrate the wicked streak in her personality was how she, when talking to Einhart, made it sound like Hayate was her personal contact and thus she ought to be the one to introduce Hayate to Einhart. Right.
Lutecia's prideful boasting is a part of her new personality that I vastly prefer to her morose, suffering, largely silent old one.
What a difference results with being reunited with her mother. They were largely imprisoned on that frontier planet with only the StrikerS crews to keep them company as part of Lutecia's parole.
Makes me wonder about Einhart's family and what happened to her parents.
Rehabilitation was a big part of redeeming Scagletti's gang following their arrests, and it seems to have worked wonders for the Nakajima siblings and Lutecia. The Numbers girls at the church...not so much. The twins are still bizarre as hell and dubiously socialized, and Sein of course is still up to no good.
Episode 8 - anon
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As expected, the tournaments fights are jolly to watch animated, even if it was only a couple of meaningless early ones in this episode. Einhart got another nervous dose of the highly formal ancient Belkan atmosphere of the legendary Yagami household...
I lost it when Einhart was starting to spar with Micaiah and Teo jumped on her shoulder all fierce and meowed.
I don't feel that they really did the opening fights justice. Vivio's was okay, but the manga gave a much stronger impression of Miura's absurd strength. They also cut a part earlier where Miura hits a training dummy on the beach and it basically exploded.
The Chantez sparring scene was wonderful though. I also loved the detail of her device returning to keychain form when she draws a circle between the two tonfa.
That it is immediately followed by remarkably-out-of-place tortoise shell bondage from Deed is just a bonus. What the hell is that church teaching those four (numbers girls plus Chantez)? It's like the Church from Black Lagoon.
Last edited by Ryllharu; Sun, 05-24-2015 at 06:00 AM. Reason: typo
What's the purpose of the church anyway? It always seemed to me they were dedicated only to the ancient Belkan legacy, including training fierce fighters and aiding national security. So, yeah, I think it's pretty close to the Church of Violence, only it's working for the good guys.
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