Infinite Stratos

This past season I’ve only been following one anime.



Well, if I had to say one thing about this anime, it’s that it caters to its target audience extremely well. What’s better than mecha wielding big ass guns? Women wearing skin tight clothing piloting mecha wielding big ass guns. It’s not often you get to see harem mecha anime, so I guess that’s a point in their favor.



Animation is done pretty well. There seems to be a lot of these CG scenes nowadays that make for some really nice action scenes, with explosions and lights flashing all over the place. It reminded me a lot of Macross Frontiers in terms of how much crap was flying across the screen at one time. Normal scenes are crisp and well detailed, and character design is pretty good overall. The mecha design is pretty decent too, with a very wide assortment of weaponry and ass-kicking utilities.

Being that it’s a harem, you have pretty much no character development and it’s all just focused on relations between the male and the girls chasing after him. I feel like they went a little overboard with all the Tsundere types, and in general I didn’t like most of them other than Charlotte and Houki. You get maybe 1 minute of back story for each character, and most of the time it is something dumb that is completely irrelevant. But I guess that’s not the point of the show.

The story was pretty much non-existent. There was some random episode where it looked like some evil thing appeared, but they destroy it and never hear from it for the remainder of the series. This is one series (like Angel Beats) where the first half is spent on merely introducing cast, which leaves zero time to actually develop a story. It also irritates me when you have these all-powerful teachers who could basically wipe the floor of all the bad guys, but instead they send out inexperienced students to fight. This kind of stuff really pisses me off, and is incidentally a reason I really hate Harry Potter.

The fan service in this series steadily got worse and worse. I mean, you already have everyone wearing a bathing suit while piloting the mechs, but there was an annoyingly large number of revealing camera angles. And of course, despite having only 12 episodes, they managed to shove in a beach episode and a hot tub episode, where absolutely nothing happens except fan service. Like I said, this series knows how to cater to its target audience.

Overall, the series was a bit of mindless, harem fun. I definitely enjoyed it, but it’s not something you put on a pedestal.