Articles with the Tag Infinite Stratos

Infinite Stratos II — one good scene, forget the rest

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Infinite Stratos II has one good scene and this is it

There’s a cute scene at the end of Infinite Stratos II episode ten. One of the main haremettes has spent most of the episode attemping to learn to cook, in the process putting most of her rivals in the hospital by accident. Finally, it’s the protagonist’s turn to teach her and he wisely decides that they’re going to make rice balls. When she struggles making a rice ball, he moves behind her and gently guides her hands to do it properly. Which leads to her self-immolating on the spot, our dense hero having no clue why she gets all flustered. It’s a sweet moment, romantic and actually funny as well. A standout scene in a series that usually goes for the most cliched of harem antics.

Infinite Stratos is a “only boy in magic school” harem show, only here the magic is mecha exoskeletons that normally only women can operate. The protagonist, Orimura Ichika, is the only boy in the world who can do it too. But unlike most such protagonists, there’s a good reason for him being so special. It turns out the inventor of the Stratos is the older sister of his childhood friend, who put in a special exception just for him. There is some sort of loose plot about his status as the sole male Stratos wearer in the background of the series, but you can ignore it. The real focus is on those harem antics.

Which are mostly a pain. The endless scenes of Ichika doing something “perverted” by accident only to be hit for it are on Love Hina levels of unfunny. Ichika being dense as one of his harem wants to jump his bones bores quickly too. It’s a bit strange how all these harem shows never show their protagonist actualy enjoying his harem. Maybe just the idea of being attractive to multiple girls is enough for its intended audience? Let’s be clear: Infinite Stratos is not a good show. Not even if all you’re looking for is some harem anime fun. Yet the original was just entertaining enough to watch all the way through. Likewise, this sequel was there when I couldn’t be bothered to watch anything that demanded actual attention. Just a pity it didn’t have more moments like this.

At least it would make some good doujins.

Infinite Suckos

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Watching this review of Infinite Stratos is infinitely more fun than actually watching the series, yet I still found myself watching twothirds of it last night. Mostly because it was the perfect sort of series to put on in the background while doing something else. For the most part this is a bog standard “only boy in magic school” harem series, with an uberdense protagonist blind to the very obvious advantages of the girls around them, notable mainly because it was one of the first and most popular of such series and paved the way for a veritable flood of such series. To be honest, what annoys me about this series is not the harem antics or fan service, but the world building, which is just ramshackle at best.

And I’m not talking about the show’s core premisse, of having mini mecha suits — Infinite Stratos — that only girls can pilot except for one man, our hero or that for some reason there’s only one school in which all IS wearers are trained. It’s a stupid premisse but there have been good series with dumber core ideas. No, what gets me is the sloppiness. in the first episode Ichiga, our protagonist, is introduced to his class and meets his childhood friend again, who he hasn’t seen in six years. A bit later we learn that the reason she hasn’t seen him in so long was because her sister was the inventor of IS and that on that day he saw her last, her sister revealed the IS suits to the world and she and her family were taken into protective custody and moved around Japan ever since. Then in episode ten the sister shows up and reminices with Ichiga’s sister about that time ten years ago, a month after she’d revealed IS to the world, when Japan was treathened by a spam missile attack and a single woman in an IS suit destroyed them all. Consistency? What’s that?

Worse, when Ichiga first arrives at magic school, in episode one, he has to be told everything about Infinite Stratos that everybody else already knows, yet he was friends with the inventor’s kid sister, his own sister is a famous IS champion, his childhood friend is in the same class as him, his other childhood friend is the cadet representative of China, his sister used to advice the German special forces on IS use, then became a teacher at the IS school and finally, just being the brother of the reigning IS champion got him kidnapped a few years ago. So why is he so ignorant? Not to mention, why didn’t he know his sister was a teacher there or that his second childhood friend was going to become the champion of China? Is it just Ichiga himself, too dull and uninterested to know much about the IS world and how his friends and family fit there, or is the series just making it up as it goes along?

I guess it’s the latter, as it’s ultimately more interested in tired harem antics than providing a consistent world. This is visible just in the way the Infinite Stratos itself keeps shifting in importance during the series. Is it the world’s most powerful weapon, keeping a balance of power between nations, or just used in a glorified form of jousting? The latter would explain why the series refused to provide any sort of real menace for Ichiga and his harem to overcome, even the final threat of the last three episodes turning out to have been engineered by the childhood friend’s sister to spice up the debut of said childhood friend’s personal IS suit.

And that’s what annoys me, this sloppiness, this almost disdain for anything that isn’t harem related. Adding insult to injury, isn’t not even a good harem show either.