Score: A

I’ve been waiting for the first episode of Princess-Session Orchestra since the show was announced. A musical magical girl series with a few staff connections to Symphogear seemed like the kind of thing I had to at least check out. And now finally the Spring season has arrived and this show is ready. And I think it started on the right foot! This was about as close to what I would have asked for from a first episode as possible. The only thing to see if if it can keep entertaining! If nothing else though, the first episode brought exactly the amount of magical girl singing action as I hoped!

I fully admit that this is going to be another weird post. As of writing this there is no official simulcast for Princess-Session Orchestra. And of course fansub groups will need time to work depending on who even wants to take this on. I just didn’t want to wait for an uncertain period of time when I’d been looking forward to this show. This will obviously be a bit shaky since my interpretations are going to be almost entirely based on years of watching anime. I mostly know what was going on in this episode. But there are going to be elements that I just miss. If I do keep up with it, I’ll probably wait for a predictable fansub solution. But for this episode it’s all gut feelings! Not sure how many want to read my thoughts based on the Raw episode, but here we go!

Hello isekai app!

That whole other world raises so many questions and I kind of love that. It’s an interesting approach. Finding this world doesn’t kickstart the adventure in the show. This isekai has already been well known for a while and accessible by a large amount of people. It does have an interesting locking mechanism that excludes adults and boys. Truly a girl’s club kind of situation. I do wonder about that mechanism though. Why is it set that way? Who is making that call and for what reason do they draw that line. Is it because they want the girls for some reason or because guys are somehow dangerous for that world? A very curious situation. It might be as simple as trying to find magical girls like Minamo. If only girls qualify for that power then no reason to let anyone in that can’t possibly attain it.

The time discrepancy is curious as well. No wonder girls are flocking to that world when they can spend hours in that world and only be gone for a short time back home. There’s a pure usefulness if only for dedicated students that want to use that world to study! But honestly there’s plenty that in theory one could do in that world thanks to how time works there.

Gotta have the concert scene

You can’t have a (not) Symphogear show without a big idol performance where something goes terribly wrong! Less fatalities though! But I suppose it’d be rather hard to keep this world a secret if several teenage girls either went missing or were found dead in their homes…Still you can tell they clearly want to keep this a bit lighter in tone than how Symphogear tended to lean. Nothing wrong with that either.

The big thing…is that we totally went Symphogear with this! I was curious if they would go all out and actually have the girls singing while fighting. You would think so with Akifumi Kaneko involved and all the Symphogear connections to this project. But this was still a huge win. There’s just something distinct about having magical girls beating up their enemies and owning them with the power of music at the same time!

I welcome our Princess!

I am curious about Ripple’s transformation in this episode. Part of me thinks they went with a more abridged version of it so everything could fit nicely within episode 1. Because it builds up a bit and then kind of quickly jumps to her being completely transformed. They could be going with a short transformation since that’s been done in shows before. But I kind of feel as if they have a full transformation ready to go and we’ll just have to wait a bit to see it. Either way Minamo gaining power was the good and classic route of standing up to defend a friend. Kind of horrifying from her perspective since her best friend got swarmed by monsters and looked utterly shut down by the time Minamo got to her. At the very least Princess Ripple won’t be lacking reasons to beat down some enemies next week!

Wouldn’t want to be swarmed by these guys!

This was a solid start. They established the world, the magic, and showed at least one of the enemies that will be causing trouble here. It looked pretty good I thought. Silver Link can do solid work and hopefully they can maintain that across a long series. Everything in this one just felt right. You have Minamo who clearly has passion locked away and doesn’t yet have full confidence in herself. But when the chips are down she’s the type to stand in front of an army of monsters to defend her friend. I can’t wait to see how things will play out after the coming fight. It seems a given that Minamo will be dragged into a bigger fight once “help” arrives on the scene.

Not sure if I’ll pick this show up. It will be even more of a challenge if there isn’t a reliable source of subs for it. But there is a good chance I’ll jump on the full year blogging train once again. I mean this is the closest thing to a Symphogear sequel we’ll be getting for a while! If it keeps entertaining then I’ll keep talking about it.