This review spoils the entire show, duh.
Ok, I'm just gonna play it straight: This show is weird, so weird that I really don't know where to start with it. At first glance, you can easily just throw this away as "Symphogear for kids" and a good chunk of people getting into this (at least on the western side) were just Symphogear fans looking for their fix after the gacha game eos 'ed, and I feel like the team behind Princession knew that since they end up referencing gear every 5 episodes or so, but despite how much it seems that this leans on symphogear, Princession truly is it's own beast, and I feel like a lot of the discussion about princession I see on the net is weighed down by it constantly being compared to either symphogear or precure (it didn't help that priorche had to air right along side the precure season all about idols and music). Despite saying this, I am going to be a complete hypocrite and compare Princession to those things several times throughout this thought du- I meant review. Of course, I don't want to talk about online discussion for the entirety of this review, so I'm actually going to start talking about the show itself now.
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The Main Trio (and Nabisuke, I guess)
Over the course of the show, I have grown to love these three gremlins even though they're objectively the least interesting characters in the story. The thing with Princession is that for most episodes that don't drop major reveals (I didn't want to say episodes that don't push the plot forward, since every episode does that at least a little bit) the focus isn't really on the girls, but it's on whatever victim of the week who gets their musessence stolen, we see what her passion is, and later on we get to see her talk to the previous victims of the week until Band Snatch/ The Knights come in to summon some jammerwocks. Now, what are our beloved princesses + mascot doing before the monsters show up? Hanging out in their clubroom, eating snacks, and drinking tea. I get why this would be an issue for others since it kinda makes the girls look incompetent (hell, when Viola and Neige show up, they end up beating the motw before the main trio even have a chance to realize there WAS a monster), but I personally like the fact that the princesses spend most of their time dicking around and acting like kids. I LIKE the scenes where Kagari incessantly lusts over Minamo's father or turns into a moeblob when sweets are involved, I LIKE when Nagase turns into a vessel for Kaneko and starts going on about random-ass JRPGs or old anime, and I LIKE how easily Minamo goes along with all of this, along with how Nabiyu plays the straightman here, and in all honesty, despite the final arc and his heelturn coming out of nowhere (it really didn't) it made the "talk" the trio had with him in episode 46 hit that much harder for me. I really did love those four idiots with my heart and soul
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#The greatest Mahou Shoujo Villain Group (They don't really have much competition)
I know calling these guys the greatest villain group in the history of magical girl anime may be an overgeneralizing statement, but out of everything I watched, I can't think of a single group that even SCRATCHES the level of charisma these guys have. Like, yeah, at the start of the show, they just seem like the guys who sit around and send out monsters until they eventually go out to fight and get killed by the princesses, but then Calist shows up in episode 12 and you go "oh shit" and then the Red Queen (who i'll get to later) shows up and lets the boys go all out and then you go "oh shit" again, and then the girls get their powerup and are finally able to find Band Snatch on equal footing which makes you get so high from the hype you find yourself passed out on your couch, which forces you to restart the episode. In my opinion, providing hype is what these guys do best, but they do have great interactions with each other and the princesses (if you couldn't tell by this point, the character interactions are the thing I ended up liking the most from this show)#Nacchi Interlude
"Who is Natsu Hinomoto? For the blind, she is light. For the hungry, she is food. For the sick, she is the cure. For the sad, she is joy. For the poor, she is the treasure; for the debtor, she is forgiveness."Nacchi is, without a doubt, the most emotionally mature character in this show, and if you went into this with Symphogear in mind, then you'd naturally conclude that she's the Miku to Minamo's Hibiki. I also came to this conclusion, but after thinking about it a little deeper, Minamo and Nacchi's relationship would probably be comparable to a hypothetical version of Symphogear where Hibiki and Miku's roles were swapped. While it is true that both Miku and Nacchi are the rocks for their totally platonic best friend and their group of magical girl companions. Now, what makes me say that Nacchi is more similar to Hibiki rather than Miku, even though she and Nacchi effectively play the same role in the story, is that Miku (and to a lesser extent, Minamo) place their self-worth on their ability to help their totally platonic female best friend, but the key difference BETWEEN Minamo and Miku is that Minamo can fight (remember, both of the songs that create the princess's power-ups were written by Nacchi) Both Hibiki and Nacchi inspire Miku and Minamo to exercise their agency as people and do the things they feel as right, the things Miku does (taking care of Chris being one example) are on a smaller scale due to her not being a Magical Girl and all. Of course, I'm not saying that Minamo and Nacchi are just carbon copies of Hibiki and Miku, but I just wanted to introduce that comparison and tie it into why I love Nacchi as a character.
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#Kazahana Riri gets her limbs torn off in Atlanta (part 32)
Yeah, if I'm being honest, this arc is the worst one in the show, solely because official outlets spoiled that the flower knights were going to be Viola and Neige. I'm not sure how this arc would feel to someone who went into this show completely blind, since it would make the reveal that Sumire and Riri were the flower knights, as obvious as it was, slightly more shocking. Now, going into Sumire and Riri as characters, I really like both of them. I think that it would be very realistic for a person of Riri's age to fall into despair after losing a close friend, and I actually liked that Sumire enabled Riri, since sure the show plays up her being a huge siscon as a joke, but that girl really and truly loves her little sister, and when the trio eventually have to get the sisters to talk through force, Sumire realizing that she has to be the one to snap Riri out of her slump, it's nothing too complex, but I ended up liking it. Now, after the sisters get their princess forms, Riri is hit with the classic villain-turned-hero guilt, where she feels like she deserves to join the group even though everyone has already said that they forgive her. Now, naturally, this sounds stupid, but think about it from Riri's point of view; She joined the White Queen because she felt like stripping Alicepia of Musessence was a good thing since it's what ended up "killing" Tohma, but in turn she realized what she was doing went directly against his wishes. So now, she has to deal with the fact that she killed her friend, and then immediately started pissing all over his grave.
Spoiler, click to view
One last Symphogear comparison, but Riri's arc after becoming a princess is REALLY similar to the arc Tsubasa faces in Symphogear S1 as they both deal with the loss by devoting themself to endlessly fighting. The difference between the 2 is that Riri had a way more stable support system to get her out of that mindset way faster. Also, considering that Nacchi's talk with Riri was what inspired her to get with the princesses, similar to how Hibiki inspired Tsubasa to not throw her life away at any given opportunityOverall, the White Queen arc was Princession's weakest stretch of episodes. I still think it's good, but its only real flaw is that it just went on for too long.
#Queens and Themes
If you were to ask me about what idea this show was trying to implant into its viewer base, I'd say that it's about dreams and the lengths one goes to protect them, and this is apparent with the Red and White Queens. They both died as Princesses Shinku and Hakua protecting Alicepia, the place where girls go to protect their dreams, and their will to protect it was so strong that their essence persisted DECADES after their deaths, which is what turned them into queens. Of course, after they came back as queens, they took on roles of villains with their own ideals on how to keep Alicepia safe. The Red Queen and Band Snatch thought that the best way to protect Alicepia was to create new princesses that could surpass her, which is why she had Band Snatch act as trials for the girls to overcome, while the White Queen thought it would be beneficial to halt all production of musessence to stop the thing that caused her death from coming back. Even though what the queens did was wrong, as it caused strife for Alicepia's residents, they aren't EVIL. Deep down, all they wanted was to protect the dreams of future generations, which is why the final threat the princesses face is Carol, a natural disaster. This works well for the themes of the show since it shows that throughout these 48 episodes, the princesses truly surpassed the queens, not just in power, but in ideals as well.
#Wrap up and Other stuff
It's actually insane that this show has over FIFTY VOCAL TRACKS, like hell, other fully musical focused shows like the Aikatsu and Pretty series work up to that number over the course of hundreds of episodes, but for Princession? They just drop new songs to play for one episode and never again. They were working the girls in the studio to the BONE. In terms of animation, however, yeah, it kinda sucks. I lovingly began to refer to this show as "slideshowcession Orchestra" at one point, but the fight choreography was still really solid, and the introduction of the song fragments really did spice things up (Nagase was effectively moving like a newtype with the glowstick funnels she had). The victims of the week were also fleshed out, even though they REALLY didn't need to be. I'd like to think that they did this so the audience would also care about the well-being of Alicepia's residents as much as the princesses did. (I LOVE YOU BOTAN)I can easily see why people would hate this show and drop it, considering it feels repetitive, but I'm glad I stuck around. Even though all of the toys may rot in a bargain bin in some Japanese toy store, the memories this show gave me will stick around in my heart for a while.
