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.