Vivid is probably my favorite Nanoha series, but it’s also almost certainly the worst. I like MMA. I like fan service. I really like Vivio as a character. But Nanoha Vivid is a really bad Nanoha project.
People love Strikers for some reason, but the narrative flaws, awful pacing, and fucked up animation and faces ruin the show. The show is 26 episodes long, and it only starts to get good at episode 10, when they bring in Vivio. Nanoha interacting with Vivio is probably my favorite thing in any Nanoha series. It fleshes out Nanoha’s childhood neglect issues and we even have Fate as a foil because Fate has absolutely no problem getting emotionally attached to children while Nanoha is being so incredibly vulnerable.
It’s too bad we didn’t get anything like this in Vivid.
OG Nanoha and A’s are good, hands down. I prefer OG to A’s. The movie remakes were good for obvious reasons.
Reflection and Detonation effectively retcon Force, which is for the best (even though I like Force) because the writers wrote it so that it’ll lead into an eventual Strikers movie remake hopefully.