Where to start with Symphogear? Satelight Inc.'s crowning achievement is a hard series to summarize. What began 7 years ago as a sort of seiyuu supergroup series has grown into something that means a lot to a lot of people. It's quite the daunting task to stare it all down.

Nonetheless, there is a place to start. In the course of exploring a medium--any medium--you will come across certain works that are so outsized in personality that someone liking them can tell you a lot about that person. They cut to the aesthetic core so thoroughly that they reveal what that person values in fiction in general.

There are many of these in anime. And of those anime, many happen to be high-concept action series, focused on kineticism and heart with a strong emotional core. Many FLCL-indebted action anime are in this category, as is a certain kind of shonen, and many magical girl series. Yet, as far as sheer force, there might legitimately be nothing that tops Symphogear.

It is easy to forget seven years and five seasons on, but the first episode of the original Symphogear actually begins with a grim premonition of protagonist Hibiki Tachibana’s funeral. Her girlfriend Miku Kohinata screaming in the rain at the prospect of never seeing her again. It’s only after that that the show jumps into its more memorable opening scene. The monstrous Noise attacking an idol concert. Those idols transforming into power armor-clad superhero-magical girls. One of those girls sacrificing herself to save the concert’s last survivor, Hibiki herself.

Premiering almost a year to the day after Puella Magi Madoka Magica permanently darkened the mahou shoujo outlook (willingly or not), it must’ve been easy to believe at the time that Symphogear would follow a similar trajectory and was just being less coy about it. In truth, as the series went on it became clear that--by decision or by accident--Symphogear was an alternative. Less a refutation than a brighter future. This culminates in the reveal at the end of the first season that the rain-soaked funeral shown at the start of the first episode was a fakeout. Hibiki still lives, Miku hasn’t lost her precious girl, a story can be meaningful without having a sad ending.

This emotional core makes it all the more frustrating that Symphogear is the sort of thing that often gets slapped with the “hype” label. Or even worse, “dumb fun”. To a point, these are valid descriptors. The series will definitely get you amped up, and it’s not an intellectual affair in the same way that say, something like (say) Serial Experiments Lain is. The problem with calling it these things is that it misses a bigger picture.

Symphogear is so beloved because it embraces the entire toolset of its medium. Symphogear’s best animation is flashy and fluid. The franchise’s signature “attack cards” turn two things that are traditionally weaknesses for action series (non-animated stills and recycled shots) into a strength.

The writing is Greek tragedy levels of deliciously melodramatic, with few anime peers in its medium. The soundtrack? A wadded candyball of idol J-pop and -rock, EDM, trance, hair metal, and even occasional splashes of traditional Japanese music. The characters have some of the biggest personalities in the whole medium. Each one a color-coded archetype that at the same time, manages to have a surprising amount of depth. Put simply, Symphogear is one of the most anime anime ever made. The entirety of Symphogear, on every level, could not survive in any other medium.

Much of this is a unique blend of influences. Other shows have merged some combination of super robots, magical girls, and idol anime. None have done all three, in as nearly an even mix, as Symphogear does. What the series recognizes is that these genres have a common thematic endpoint. They are from-the-bottom, “for the little guy” power fantasies. Visions of a world where truth, justice, love, and compassion really do reign supreme, and there are no problems that cannot be solved with either the offer of an outstretched hand, or a fist balled in righteous anger.

Everything about Symphogear is huge. Themes, writing, animation, music. It is a series of uncommon enormity, which has perhaps a dozen peers in its medium in this realm--Diebuster, Gurren Lagann and that series’ own inspiration GaoGaiGar. Nanoha, the more ambitious Pretty Cure seasons. Symphogear is aiming for your heart, not your head, 100% of the time.

That big-heart attitude cuts both ways. And part of what it means is that where Symphogear does fail, when it does, is in nuance. The series by necessity has a moral framing that, while I’d never call it simplistic, revolves around its particular interpretation of the idea of “love”, and what it means to sacrifice for the greater good.

Hibiki’s forgiveness of her deadbeat father in GX reflects well on her character certainly, but not anyone else’s, and her attempt to knit her family back together, while understandable keeping in mind her age and general mentality, is kind of questionable from our perspective as the audience. Likewise, when AXZ delves into a character arc about Maria and her adoptive mother, it’s hard for it to not scan as abuse apologia. Nastassja’s actions, originally shown in G, are framed as harsh, but ultimately justified, which is absurd. All this complete with a clumsy people-as-tomatoes metaphor to rival the infamous example in The Big O.

The sexualization of minors present in some places is also (understandably) going to lose some people. I’d argue that this is less an issue with Symphogear and more a systemic one in the anime industry. But it is just worth noting that unlike some of its stylistic peers and descendants, it does not go out of its way to avert this issue, and criticizing it for that is valid.

Really if one wanted to be disingenuous, they could accuse any critics of expecting too much from a show where the moon is a supercomputer and also the Tower of Babel. But that’s underselling Symphogear, a series that, much more than most I’d argue, understands its core strengths extremely well.

What prevents any of the aforementioned flaws from coming anywhere near sinking the series is that they’re also what makes its emotional writing so strong. Symphogear is primarily about how human connections inevitably hurt us--no two people can perfectly understand each other--but those same connections are what make life worth living. Often left out of analysis of the series is that among the many other things it is, Symphogear is a love story. Hibiki and Miku literally don’t fully process their feelings for each other until the closing minutes of the final season, a conceit that would be maddeningly frustrating in almost any other series. Here, it’s the perfect metaphor for the show’s overall philosophy. Symphogear deliberately does not make any great distinction between the personal and philosophical. What’s true of the lead couple is true of humanity in general.

So that’s Symphogear in the broadstroke. What about XV specifically?

Well, while it may not be the overall strongest season (that might still be AXZ, it’s a tough call to make), it’s definitely up there. Noble Red are not quite as fully fleshed-out as some prior antagonists like the Autoscorers from GX and the Illuminati trio from AXZ, but this is a minor complaint and made up for by the foregrounding of Fudou, Tsubasa’s grandfather and a very transparent stand-in for all the worst tendencies in Japanese political discourse, as an antagonist.

XV’s first half is in part an indictment of all the bad ends that tradition can be turned to--support of abuse and fascism chief among them. While antifascistic sentiment is not uncommon in anime, it is rarely this in-your-face. Tsubasa’s ‘seal’ plotline is literal brainwashing-as-easy-metaphor for indoctrination. Breaking it requires a literal slap in the face and being woken up to the fact that the condescending attitudes inherent in such philosophies are a lie to begin with.

XV’s overall ranking is arguable, but the show’s final episode, in a deep rarity for anime, is almost certainly its best. Plotlines from whole seasons back are briefly threaded into the narrative to support the final defeat of overall villain Shem-Ha, and the show closes with Miku and Hibiki finally realizing they’re more than friends in a fashion that is only just subtle enough to get around Japanese TV censors. There is more feeling in the last half hour of the show than there are in some entire romance anime.

At the end of it all? Symphogear has flaws and they don’t matter. More than almost any other anime I’ve ever seen, Symphogear almost actively resists critical analysis. A thousand lists of nitpicks throughout the franchise buckle in the face of any of its many explosive singing-fight scenes. Other “hype” anime wish they were Symphogear.

But that’s not to say that Symphogear is above, or not in conversation with, other anime. Quite the opposite, in fact. While it’s true that XV likely marks the end of Symphogear’s explosive decade, the question of the series’ influence is not one of if or even when, merely when it will be acknowledged. Even now, we can probably thank Symphogear at least in part for the notable uptick in female-driven ensemble action shows that blossomed in the New Tens. Without Symphogear it is hard to imagine, say, the surreal symbolics of Revue Starlight or the dubstep superspy stories of RELEASE THE SPYCE getting so easily greenlit, and that’s just shows from last year.

There is an entire legion of henshin heroines as yet untransformed, their stories as yet unwritten, who will be--and in some cases already are--the easily-identifiable daughters of Hibiki Tachibana (Revue Starlight’s Karen Aijo is so similar that for that series’ mobage crossover event, they saw fit to stick her in the Gungnir Gear and call it a day). All art is comprised of cycles of influence, of course. Symphogear itself is the synthesis of a good dozen different aesthetics that all shared a common thematic end, but that synthesis is itself what makes Symphogear what it is. Less a spark and more a roaring flame. Less a whisper, more a song. It is a light that will not be quick to fade from its medium.

Of that much, we can be certain.

And if you liked this review, why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?