Review
Symphogear is your all-around idol-based adventure featuring young girls, music, magical transformations, and save-the-world business. It borders the mahou shoujo genre at many points, changing cute wands for huge weapons, and with an overall soft presentation with very little fanservice elements, yet from time to time you get to notice this was originally intended for the horny teens, featuring some big-breasted characters, a few semi-nude scenes, and some clever angles to focus on some of the cast's "attributes".
However, despite all this, Symphogear is a warming surprise. It manages to consolidate its basic and unispiring idea and overused elements with a solid execution, a good deal of dramatic moments, and a combat coreography that makes up for the shameful singing combats. If you are in for a shounen ride, this can be an unexpected minor jewel for you.
The tale is about Hibiki, a young girl caught in a massive attack by the mindless and deadly "Noise". These beasts kill humans they touch and are nearly invincible. Only those wearing symphogears, relics of ancient civilizations capable of turning sound into power, can stand a chance against them. After being nearly killed in the attack, Hibiki ends up with fragments of one of these relics inside her, and it will be up to her to take up arms and protect people from these vicious creatures.
- ...okay... not so vicious
The Noise can be one of the first turndowns of the show. They are polygonal creatures with bright colors, behaving with less intelligence than insects and just standing there waiting to be killed by the heroines. They look lame, they act stupidly, yet fortunately they are very secondary to the tale after the first episode, only working as "random thugs" for the action parts of Symphogear.
And the fights are pretty interesting
For a show based on idols, it can be truly surprising when animation and special effects are combined with a great coreography for the combats. The fights are intense, there a lot of explosions, characters have interesting moves, and the only two issues here are: first, sometimes the show freezes the scene to uselessly announce the name of an attack, something which fortunately becomes less common as the show progresses; and second, the girls are almost always singing as they fight, making for some weird scenes as they think and sing or others where it looks the music is on playback (which is almost always).
The music is decent though
Fortunately, beyond some terrible engrish and weirdly spoken latin words or whatever, the music of the show is engaging and fit to the ocasion, becoming one of the show biggest assets to make every fight, even stupid ones, into something more pleasing. The mixture of techno beats, opera-like chants, and quick rythmn may not be for everyone, but for a show about mechanical armors and fast combats it serves perfectly. After a while the chants from the girls also become decent tools to change the momentum of the show, and their voices are also never annoying even with a genki protagonist that speaks more than she should.
An all-girls show
Symphogear is closely tied to a mahou shoujo and for that same reason the cast is tied to the chains of that genre. Hibiki is your protagonist, a genki default girl who always want to aid people. She is in love with her best friend Miku, a silent and exemplar student. They are accompanied by Tsubasa, a somewhat tsundere girl with her serious mindset that is melted during the episodes as she befriends Hibiki. Although not exactly great and sporting a few annoying characters like the big-breasted mad scientist and a mysterious villain who is always naked, Symphogear does a good job with its main trio and later with a fourth character. It has a bit of development, some dramatic changes, the outcome of combats never feels too forced, and there are few convenient elements in the tale to annoy you.
And the tales gets better
Well, turn down your expectations first. This is about girls saving the world from bizarre creatures, working under a secret japanese organization and using magical transformation to fight. However, for a tale as basic as it is, it offers a decent development across the episodes, with some simple twists, affiliation changes, and never trying too much to explain concepts that are simply absurd. It just accepts things exist in this world and moves on with that, rarely resorting with gargabe dump in its dialogues. The script is basic, but good enough to move things forward without leaving you ashamed of watching it.
Comments
I truly don't know why the hell I gave Symphogear a chance, especially in the time I watched it (right after Guilty Crown, Sword Art Online, and many other overhyped pieces of sh*t). However, I am grateful I did. Symphogear became my guilty pleasure of its year and it offered so much more than others of the genre it worked to renew my strength to try some "I-think-it's-garbage" shounen shows.
Symphogear is far from being great, its cast is basic, the story is simple and unoriginal, and it tries to mix a lot of stuff in a show that ends up being a mahou-shoujo for shounen lovers (...? yeah, something like that), but it's a sincere show, it offers interesting combats, the overused music at many points give it an additional flair, and the tale grows enough to catch your attention after a few episodes. It's a solid presentation and a good way to show how even flawed ideas can provide a good entertainment.
