Symphogear

#⚠️TOTAL SPOILERS AHEAD⚠️

#⚠️TOTAL SPOILERS AHEAD⚠️ This review assumes you watched the season. Version I watched was CommieSubs. - - -

I think about this show too much. I saw this years ago when I first got into anime, one of the first five or so I ever saw, and Symphogear got lodged deep in my soul. It’s stuck there, and I can never get it out. I'm okay with that.

I like Symphogear season 1 (S1) because it mashed up several things I never expected to see together and made it fun. Not GOOD good, but FUN good. Geah wants to tell a story and plays it straight, very few “ironic eyyyy” moments, which I appreciate. I hate Symphogear season 1 because the last episode undercuts and cheapens everything the season built up to. There is plenty of tonal/emotional whiplash throughout Symphogear, but none of it broke my suspension of disbelief in the way ep13 did.

#PLOT SUMMARY Symphogear S1 opens on rainy, gloomy, battle-damaged Tokyo, and one girl (Miku) weeping at her friend’s grave (Hibiki). TWO YEARS AGO… Hibiki’s first encounters Symphogear when a piece of one whacks her in the chest and nearly kills her. The same incident left Hibiki one of two survivors of the last Zwei Wing concert and left her with a case of survivor’s guilt. Two years after that, Hibiki acts on her “I want to help people” impulse partly driven by that guilt to save a girl from the alien threat of the Noise, and she gets tangled up with Symphogear for real this time. Hibiki is recruited into Division 2 of Japan’s Special Disaster Response Team, the government organization tasked to deal with the Noise. She meets her longtime favorite idol, Tsubasa, has to juggle both school life and being a Symphogear user (which is top secret knowledge). Under the guidance of Div2’s commander Kazanari Genjuro, Hibiki goes from a lazy student with low self-confidence to a motivated student and fighter with moderate self-confidence. She eventually overcomes the initial misunderstanding between her and Tsubasa, makes friends with a former enemy (Chris), and teams up with them to prevent Finé the ancient Babylonian priestess (yes you read that right) from destroying the Moon. With a giant cannon named Kadingr. Yeah, this show is wild. #CHARACTERS - indented so the freakin list works - Tachibana Hibiki, the cheerful, dumb, well-meaning orange fluffball who “just wants to help people”. She doesn’t want other people to have to go through the concert disaster, survivor’s guilt, and bullying (for being the only survivor) that she did. She shows this in being over-eager to help people (usually rescuing people, in her case) and overly eager to forgive people. More on that later. - Kohinata Miku, Hibiki’s outsourced brain. She is Hibiki’s best friend, shoulder to lean on, former track star, good student, just all around good person, and the most mature of the four main girls. - Amou Kanade, rest in peace you beautiful fiery redhead. She was all over the promotional material, along with Tsubasa, and guess what? Dead ten minutes into episode 1! Kanade was the daughter of an archaeologist, orphaned when the family was visiting the dig site and Noise appeared. Kanade saved her fellow Gear-user Tsubasa and Hibiki at the start of S1 when she used a Gear-user’s most powerful and dangerous weapon, the Swan Song, which unleashes overwhelming power at the cost of the Gear-user’s life immediately afterwards. - Kazanari Tsubasa is an idol as her public career and a Symphogear user as her secret real job. Tsubasa first activated Ame-no-Habakiri when she was five years old, and was trained to fight ever since then, which explains why she’s so awkward and stilted outside of combat operations. Slender and fair and gloomy ever since she lost her closest friend Kanade at the last Zwei Wing concert, thanks to the Noise. - Yukine Chris, the furious floofy snowball. I would be furious too if I suffered one quarter of what Chris went through. More below in Character Development. - Sakurai Ryoko, the science woman who discovered most everything about Symphogears and keeps doing the bad touch thing with Hibiki. That last bit is likely because Ryoko is not Ryoko. 12 years ago when Tsubasa first activated Ame-no-Habakiri, her voice awakened the personality dormant in Ryoko’s genes… - …Finé, an ancient Babylonian priestess who sealed her consciousness within the DNA of multiple bloodlines of people, enough that Finé claims to the heroes to have been multiple important people throughout history. The waveform that Symphogear users sing awakens her and she takes over her host person, effectively killing that person’s original personality and soul. I have to give the Div2 bridge crew a shoutout too. Kazanari Genjuro is awesome. Top tier dad type character, Tsubasa’s uncle, cares for and looks out for his troops and niece. “You really wanna know how I got this power? I EAT, WATCH MOVIES, AND SLEEP! A TRUE MAN NEEDS NOTHING ELSE!” That’s bullshit, but I believe it. Ogawa looks plain and bland, that’s great, since he’s a ninja. And Tsubasa’s career manager. He has bullshit ninja powers. I don’t question it. Tomosato and Fujitaka, the only two bridge staff to survive S1’s events, seem like they’d be fun to hang out with. Without their command, control, and administrative capabilities, the Geahs could not do what they do (both for legal reasons and because the Geahs have outsourced their common sense). #CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT S1’s greatest strength was it only had 4 character arcs to resolve within 13 episodes: Hibiki, Miku, Tsubasa, and Chris. Hibiki goes from lazy and aimless to disciplined (fighting), responsible (repairs her relationship with Miku), and motivated (“I have people and things I want to protect”). At S1’s beginning, she is forced to mature by being recruited into Div2. She ends up disappearing often to train and doesn’t really provide a good excuse for Miku. Miku covers for her if she leaves during class times, but it wears on Miku. Both had promised not to keep secrets with each other. This goes on for a few months until ep6, when Chris has her one-on-one fight with Hibiki in broad daylight and Miku sees Hibiki transform for the first time. The breach in trust, even for a good reason, is too much for Miku; she ends their friendship and things are rocky for a few days until Miku and Hibiki work together to save their injured mutual friend from a Noise attack. They make up. Not an original arc, but an understandable arc.

Hibiki has her own little subplot where her goldfish-level memory and intelligence start to get annoying. She gets worried about how she’ll bring people together with the same fists she uses to punch Noise and bad Gear-users. Usually someone else, typically Miku, has to exposition Hibiki back to calm mood. This thematically crosses over with one of the abilities Gungnir gives her: if Hibiki gets emotionally worked up and angry, she involuntarily goes berserk, turns black and red, and starts tearing apart her surroundings. She has to manage that berserk power, fortunately she has her friends to help her with that. She is aware it happens occasionally and wants to master that emotion.

Tsubasa learns to value her own life, desires, and dreams, she realizes she isn’t just a human-shaped weapon used to defend Japan. She’s been well cared for materially during her life, but spiritually, socially, she is lonely. Kanade, her only friend, gave her life saving both Tsubasa and Hibiki. Ogawa and Genjuro are good men but they aren’t peer group friends that Tsubasa needs. Like Hibiki, Tsubasa is burdened by survivor’s guilt from the Zwei Wing concert massacre. It takes Hibiki’s clumsy initial attempts at friendship, nearly dying fighting against Chris, and Kanade’s ghost visiting her to clarify some things for Tsubasa to realize “hey, I can choose what to do with my life, and there are other people out there who care about me”. Tsubasa slowly opens up to Hibiki and Miku and eventually Chris too. By S1’s finish she is much more friendly and sociable than when she started the season. Chris discovers she can move beyond the pain and betrayal of her childhood and can trust her peers and adults. When we first see her she hates music and hates singing. Her parents were traveling musicians trying to bring music to people across the world; they died in a terrorist bombing in the poor and dangerous South American country Val Verde. Chris’s bitter comments about “adults being trash” and a flashback imply she was abused physically and possibly sexually, until she was rescued (by whom we don’t know) and sent to Japan since Div2 was interested in her. However Finé, almost certainly leveraging Ryoko’s abilities, diverted Chris to her own hidden mansion in Japan and trained Chris up as her pupil and fighter. When Hibiki became a Gear-user, Finé became more interested in Chris, and after Chris failed to accomplish her tasks against Hibiki and Tsubasa Finé told Chris she was no longer needed. Chris had to live homeless for a short time, during which she bumped into Miku and Genjuro. Miku showed Chris the first kindness Chris had probably encountered in years, and Genjuro brought Chris food, an emergency communicator, and didn’t try to meddle with her, setting an example as a responsible adult for her. After multiple brief contacts, Chris gradually begins to trust Genjuro and Miku, and then Tsubasa and Hibiki, and the end of S1 implies Div2 has taken her in and is providing for her as another Gear-user and member of the team. Between the character arcs there was sufficient time for plot development, fights, and a few comfy slice-of-life scenes, such as Hibiki helping Tsubasa clean her messy hospital room, Hibiki, Miku, and Tsubasa having a day out around town, and Genjuro’s TRAINING MONTAGE with Hibiki. These are simple meaningful character arcs and I think they work Finé for the season’s brevity and tone. #SYMPHOGEARS (RELICS) Symphogear is karaoke armor. You sing to fight. To use it, you have to be one of the “attuned”, one of the few people who can sing a very specific frequency (the Aufwachen waveform) and sing powerfully enough (phonic gain) to activate the armor. Symphogears are based on relics, a.k.a. mythological artifacts which turned out to be real, made by ancient advanced technology, and crazy powerful…if they’re somewhat intact. Tsubasa’s relic is Ame-no-Habakiri the sword the Japanese god Susanoo used to kill the monstrous serpent Orochi. The relic Kanade, and now Hibiki, wields is Gungnir, the Norse god Odin’s spear that was said to never miss its target. Tsubasa wields a sword, Kanade wielded a spear; you get the idea. The more complete or intact a relic is, the more powerful it is, and the only nearly-completed relic known to exist is the legendary sword Duranadal, stored at the bottom of Div2’s echoing underground shaft. The Swan Songs are important in that they have huge power potential, but singing a Swan Song places lethal stress on the Gear-user. Kanade dies singing hers to kill the Noise horde in ep1; Tsubasa nearly dies singing hers against Chris; and at the very end both Tsubasa and Chris nearly perish after singing the Swan Songs again to prevent Finé from destroying the Moon. (Finé still fired Kadingr twice and knocked about 1/8 of the Moon off as a separate chunk.) Having Symphogears be relics like this is something I appreciate. It makes the show a little more real and the writers still have leeway to get crazy with their ideas. S1’s other relics are Durandal, which is the sharpest sword in the world from Europe (the knight Roland, main character of the story Song of Roland, companion to King Charlemagne), Nehushtan, from the ancient Middle East (Moses’ brass serpent staff used to cure the Israelites of snake venom, see Numbers 21:4-9), and Ichaival, Chris's relic...isn't actually real, it was the result of a game of telephone spawned by an incorrect 2013 Wikipedia edit and a poor translation of "yew-dale". Blame Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War (1996). How does Babylon fit into this? Millennia ago, a Babylonian priestess named Finé fell in love with God and wanted to tell Him her feelings face-to-face. She had the Tower of Babel (show calls it Balal) built upon the plains of Shinar. God would not have humans standing level with Him and both destroyed the Tower and revoked mankind’s ability to speak the universal language, a condition Finé calls the Curse of Balal. And the Curse is maintained by the Moon, which is not just a satellite of Earth, but an ancient language jammer. So naturally, as a step on the path to speaking with God, the Moon has to go. We hear this straight from Finé at the end of the season. Tying her into the fate of the Tower and God confusing mankind’s languages specifically in a story about people trying to connect with each other despite confusion and suffering fits into the overarching theme nicely. At the finale of S1, Hibiki holds hands with Tsubasa and Chris and unleashes a completely new ability, X-Drive. My understanding of this is the three Gear-users share the strain of singing their Swan Songs, and with Hibiki’s special hand-holding/fusing ability, manage to surviving singing those songs. Using X-Drive while wielding Durandal is how the Geahs defeat (defeat, not kill) Finé and destroy her crazy dragon form she takes on. A shame the resulting explosion destroys both Durandal and Nehushtan, but that makes a certain amount of sense. I think they have to activate X-Drive again minutes later when Finé’s final act is to lasso the loose chunk of the Moon and pull it down towards Earth, leaving the Geahs no option but to fly out of Earth’s atmosphere and blow the chunk up. #NOISE Symphogear is the only known thing that can defeat the Noise, because the Noise are out of phase with human reality until the split second they strike, making conventional weapons useless without some crazy split-second timing. They’re okay as mooks go. Fitting name for thematic reasons. There are several forms I particularly like: the giant T-shaped flying motherships, the mobile yellow battle castle, and the “Michelin man but weevil-shaped, elephant-sized, and vomiting nasty goo” Noise. And Grapenoise. Never to be seen again. Sad. The bird noise in ep4 were funny, if you know what I mean. I’ve read enough doujins to know where that was going. The Noise are supposed to have been used by mankind in the past, and when they weren’t in use were shut up in the Treasury of Babylon, i.e. an alternate dimension that could only be opened by the relic Solomon’s Cane. The implication that King Solomon controlled the Noise is funny. Symphogear is theologically WILD if you really want to go down that path, and I wish the series had done that a little more. #THEME The “don’t give up, keep on living!” theme is passed down from Kanade to Hibiki and Tsubasa, from Hibiki to Miku, from both Hibiki and Miku to Chris, and Miku reiterates it through her actions in the post-credits scene. It’s simple and appropriate for the season.

Examples:

• Hibiki saves the girl in ep1
• Kanade explaining to Tsubasa while Tsubasa is recovering from her fight with Chris
• Hibiki and Miku help by befriending Tsubasa
• Miku to Chris when Chris is homeless, shows Chris real kindness
• Gen to Chris, showing her not all adults are liars, manipulators, or abusers
• Miku and her friends singing over the PA system to let Hibiki know they’re alive

Also important is Hibiki’s “bringing people together” power, both for relationships and fighting. Apparently being a human-relic fusion lets her fuse or combine other Geah’s powers for even greater output, which lines up with the show’s overall theme and helps Hibiki, Tsubasa, and Chris defeat Finé. It also has other special unspecified powers, like Hibiki being able to grab Durandal and control a nearly-complete relic with zero preparatory training in ep7. (This in particular vexes Chris, who had to train for months to use Solomon’s Cane.)
Forgiveness is another big theme with Geah. With help, Chris turns her life around and repents for her wrongdoings. There is another instance, which I elaborate on in Criticism below.

#MUSIC Symphogear is basically a musical. Every character song relates to the worldview and struggles of the character, right down to the moment they’re in. The character songs are pretty good, enjoyable to listen to, with a few exceptions not quite great. I think they should ideally be more musically distinct between characters. There are superficial differences between them, overall it sounds like the same immediate family of J-pop to my non-music-nerd ears.

Hibiki’s songs are very vaguely Norse-themed. Her first song, “Gekisho Gungnir”, has bagpipe-sort-of-synths. Western Europe is kinda close to Scandinavia. Good enough. I really like “Watashi to Iu Oto Hibiki Sono Saki ni” (Hibiki’s second song) for the piano and the bright sunny synths. Pianos and trance are peak music. Tsubasa as the traditional Japanese girl gets the traditional Japanese woodwinds and strings layered over her music. They’re okay. Chris. Oh boy, Chris. Chris has “MAKYUU ICHAIVAL” which is as far as I’m concerned the gold standard for character songs in the series and the BEST character song in the series. You can’t change my mind. It is easily the ANGRIEST song in the season and the entire series. No other character song ever cuts loose like Makyuu Ichaival does, and that saddens me. Another element Symphogear could have pushed further. Chris sings her second song, “Tsunaida Te Dake ga Tsumugu Mono”, when she teams up with Hibiki and Tsubasa for the first time in episode 10. It means a lot to hear a cheerful song like that from Chris after her struggles in S1.
There are group songs, as in with Hibiki, Tsubasa, and Chris. They're okay.

The ED is Meteor Light, and it comes with a bunch of edgy imagery completely unrelated to Symphogear. It’s kind of funny in hindsight, there is some interesting pictures in there. Like the headless female mannequin with its vagina stitched shut. I don’t think the studio(s) had a plan with the ED. I don’t like the ED songs nearly as much as Geah’s other tracks, they aren’t bad, just not my thing.

Then there’s the OP, Synchrogazer. SYNCHROGAZER. HOLY CRAP, SYNCHROGAZER. Those initial synths have haunted me ever since I heard them. Synchrogazer kept me locked in to the rest of the season. I’ve never heard anything like it before or since. Absolutely fantastic. #VISUALS S1 has a pretty spare and simple visual style. I like it. The characters look a little wonky, especially Hibiki with her huge tall eyeballs. However, the lack of huge highlights in the eyes gives the characters’ emotions a little more intensity, and I do appreciate that as well. I like the love put into the near-future background art for urban Tokyo, with the aerodynamic stadiums and Lydian’s campus, which looks like a parkour paradise. I like it that the Symphogears themselves vent steam after intense use, and I wish they’d done more weird edgy stuff in future seasons, like Hibiki’s very first transformation causing a couple car’s worth of alien machinery to erupt out of her back. Yeah, this, more like this. #CRITICISM Episode 13 nearly killed my interest in Geah completely on my very first viewing. When you show a person do heinous things all season and then get foiled, forgiven, and given a slap on the wrist, it really undermines the whole message you were trying to tell. You just destroyed whatever credibility you had with me. All of Finé’s actions in S1 (Kidnapping, manipulating, torturing Chris! Scheming with the U.S. government against Japan to further her own goals, including the assassination of Defense Minister Hiroki! Nearly killing Genjuro! And that’s just the deeds we know of in her millennia-long lifespan!) leading up to the final minutes of ep13 do not indicate a woman willing to change her mind or sympathetic to an alternate point of view. Hibiki trying to see the good in people is admirable. There is a limit to how much she should extend that grace. Finé is long past that point. Even after the Geahs defeat her, break Kadingr, and give her a gentle scolding, Finé still tries to pull the broken chunk of Moon down to Earth! And she gloats about being functionally immortal, the way her genes are spliced into mankind, and how she’ll respawn at some point and just go through with her destroy-the-Moon plan again! And Hibiki just says “we can still be united by friendship”. Finé smiles and shakes her head and says, “You really are hopeless. Believe in the song of your heart,” and then crumbles to dust. EVERYONE TEARS UP AT THIS. WHAT. That final exchange between Hibiki and Finé left a bitter taste in my mouth which remains in a diluted form to the present day. In the moment of my first viewing, it was unbelievable then, and it is unbelievable now. (I am still curious and unsure even after multiple rewatches if Hibiki actually killed Finé with her gentle fist bump, or if Finé used up all her power with her final lassoing of the Moon and had none remaining to sustain herself. Another question never to be answered.)

The less grievous but still annoying thing. I have to confess something. For being a magical girl fan I’m not super into the power of friendship solving problems. I would also prefer a character’s actions show me their conviction and motivation rather than having those things explained or exposition’d to me, the viewer. Hibiki grasping Durandal and having her friends run out to explicate her good deeds and motivations to counteract the berserker rage…I get what they wanted to do, but that is just sloppy and embarrassing. Not as bad as Finé, but c’mon man.

Other minor criticisms. The writing is not polished. The story tone zigzags between trying to be dark and gritty, hot-blooded and heroic, and goofy. The emotional and tonal whiplash is real. Combined with the rough writing and exposition-heavy worldbuilding and it gets tiring sometimes. I wish they had pushed the edgy elements further. S1 has edgy moments (blood, battle damaged Geahs, and Noise killing people) and characters facing dark pasts, notably Tsubasa and Chris, but ultimately S1 and Geah overall have an optimistic heroic core. They can’t push the edgy stuff too far. The story isn’t built for it. I think it’s a missed opportunity. Woulda coulda shoulda. Oh well.

The after-credits scene is just meh. It wraps up the gloomy beginning scene with Miku at the graveyard, she saves a woman from some loose Noise, the Geahs reappear, kill the Noise, say they had to stay out of contact for a few weeks because “so much was classified” surrounding the Moon incident. This is followed by a shot of Hibiki and Miku watching a meteor shower. That bit loops back to the show’s tagline and Hibiki’s promise to see the meteors with Miku, which is nice. It's that it comes after the awkwardly-done upbeat ending. In fairness that kind of gloomy opening scene does basically assure viewers there will be a post-credits reveal.

#“CAN YOU WRAP THIS UP?” The most valuable thing I got out of Geah many years ago was the realization you can attempt outrageous, weird stories, and it might end up okay. With enough practice, you might even end up with something good! And I think Symphogear is nearly good, just a shade away. It’s rough around the edges. It gave me some good feelings and crazy ideas and set me up to enjoy other anime more than it. Geah walked so others could run. I think that lines up with your philosophy, Hibiki. I try to remember the good times and not ruminate too much on the bad memories. There are a lot of smaller details with the characters struggling against their pasts and maturing and having fun that I did not mention since this review has already run long, but little details which I still appreciate.

Characters, plot, premise, none are outstanding on their own, but together they combine to make Symphogear S1 moderately fun, the music helps a lot. The unfortunate ending drags down the rest of the show, not irrecoverably, but man. It still stings. Chris’s climax song in episode 12 still gives me chills.

3/5 stars. There. I published a review. Please let me rest, intrusive thoughts.

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*This review did not draw any information from the “keywords” feature from the official Symphogear website because retroactively trying to backfill important plot points after the fact outside the story’s medium is really, really stupid. If your story can’t be understood on its own, you need to rewrite your story.*