She have gotten a fourth season. In manga form.

Yes, you will miss the music (not that great. The franchise needs Kajiura for that), the animation (suffered at times from QUALITY) and the voice acting.

But you can hope that Tsuzuki will bring flesh to his vision without having to worry about budget restriction. In fact, his worst enemies will be deadline and if something goes wrong with his collborators.

I am midly amused by the fact that the one in charge of the drawing in “Mahou Senki Lyrical Nanoha Force” is the same as the one who drew Shina Dark. A rather nice light fantasy manga with a bit of ecchi. We should not worry about the moé and the fanservice.

Now, it will be the first time we will see a magical girl in her mid-twenties. I just hope that the fact they dropped “Shoujo” in favor of “Senki” for Nanoha Force is not just for show and actually express the wish of the author, and a part of the fan community, to depart from the genre.

While this community have chanted that its roots lies in Gundam and Super Robots. One have brought up an alternative if not more interesting interpretation.

A careful scrutiny of the Nanohaverse reveals that it isn’t really a magical girl series. It’s a fantasy-adventure series like Slayers disguised as a Magical Girl series. The high-tech look of TSAB equipment and the title obscured that.
There’s also the fact that Nanoha, Fate and Hayate are getting too old to be called Magical Girls anymore. At 25, they’re approaching the other contender for the title of oldest magical girl, right?

You have the journey element (Nanoha Takamachi, her challenges and her growth), the happy party growing as more enemies are defeated, the signature weapons so dear to the adventurers, and the quest for artifacts of doom in the first seasons (the jewel seeds and the Book of Darkness), and you also have the older generation eventually passing the torch to the new generation (seen in some fantasy epics, or in tabletop RPG games where player characters becomes too powerful and when the players and the gamemaster want a peaceful retirement). Those elements and the overall structure are indeed closer to the fantasy genre than Gundam or the Super Robot genre.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Anime, Manga.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.