When it comes to anime, we all have our own junk food that we enjoy – shows laden with fanservice and sometimes lacking in plot. Comforting shows, where you can predict most turns before they happen and take solace in your relative prescience because that’s what you were looking to see.
All the same, there’s a degree to which we can still draw distinction between these shows, the Isekai and Battle School affairs that are a dime a dozen in any day. Some, like the Academy City shows dare to rise above their station, at least to a degree. Others, like Unbreakable Machine Doll can comfortably inhabit their genre while still providing something of substance and quality. On the other end of the spectrum there are also the shows that are just plain lazy like Yuna and the Haunted Hot Springs and on down from there until you get to the truly horrible outings like Omamori Himari or In Another World With My Smartphone.
As you might tell, while you could, depending on how you feel about them, call any of those shows “Junk food” in one sense or another, as a matter of acknowledging their appeal to visceral enjoyments, discerning between them remains relevant and, for a reviewer such as myself, important. So I want to be clear, when I’m looking at Infinite Stratos, that I’m not looking at an anime that’s trying to be great; I’m looking at as an anime that wants to entertain you, that’s deliberate in its staleness, that doesn’t go quite as big and crazy as an Exploitation show but that has the same habit of feeding you what it thinks you want first and what’s good for you at best second. So, without further adieu, let us dive in.
Infinite Stratos begins with the harem setup to end all harem setups: Main Character Ichika is making his debut as the new transfer student to IS Academy, a school for elite individuals who show an aptitude for using the titular Infinite Stratos devices, bleeding edge black box technology that, while currently mostly used for sporting, have the clear capacity to revolutionize the nature of warfare once the fragile peace around their creation breaks down. Every other student at IS Academy also happens to be a girl, because until Ichika activated one of the devices in a fluke encounter, it was believed that only females could use them.
Luckily, Ichika has a few familiar faces to greet him at his new school – his older sister Chifuyu is one of his teachers and implied to be fairly high up in the administration as a former ace pilot, and his childhood friend Houki Shinonono (also the younger sister of the currently MIA inventor of the IS) is his assigned roommate. I’m sure that arrangement won’t be a point of contention
Speaking of familiar faces, most of the cast will probably be fairly familiar to the audience one way or another. IS lives deep in the realm of things you’ve seen a million times, as fits its comforting junk food vibes. Some of the characters have obvious analogues, at least to me, and I’ll go ahead and reference them when they come up. Others are simply stock characters at their core. A couple are more unique, and we’ll get to them.
That said, if it ever sounds like I’m being harsh on these girls (specifically the girls; Ichika doesn’t really have a personality worth mentioning), let me temper that now: none of these characters are godawful as characters. Most of them are either very much the lesser spawn of greater sires or else the products of well-worn molds steadily losing definition, and some of them can even be fairly annoying in their own rights, but they all are distinct characters with their own personalities, which they manage to keep even after, for the most part, falling head-over-heels for Ichika. I can remember their names and their major traits and have opinions on them as their own things… which is more than I can say for the characters in some of the worse junk food animes I’ve watched.
Chifuyu, for her part, is every tough “always business” sort of woman. She’s got messy black hair, wears a suit most of the time, has a gruff voice and demeanor, acts more as a teacher/administrator than as family, and really hates explaining herself. I can’t say she’s exactly like anyone else in particular, possibly in part because her “mentor who seems to hate their student but really has the student’s best interest in mind” thing is gender-neutral as roles go, but I know I’ve seen it and will probably be kicking myself later listing off all the other characters that fit the bill.
Houki, meanwhile, is Meiya Mitsurugi’s table scraps. She brings to the show a similar style with her dark hair in a high ponytail, status as a kendo champion (Meiya used a real sword, but they’ve got the same spirit), and some of her attitude recalling the later incarnations of her predecessor, but she forgot to pack either Meiya’s Extra lunacy or the depth of her Alternative resolve and conviction. Instead, she’s got a tsundere streak a mile wide. She also has the strongest plot episodes and the second best chemistry with Ichika (in that it actually resembles chemistry rather than a psychotic crush). As such, she was my favorite character at the start of the series and remained someone I didn’t dislike seeing on screen later.
The first proper incident of the show also introduces our third side character and second harem member (to be), Cecilia Alcott. She’s a representative of Britain at IS Academy, and objects to Ichika (who is of course extremely popular with the student body) being named class rep instead of her, so much that she insists on dueling him for the title.
In essence, Cecilia is formed from bits and pieces of Luvia from the Fate series and the student council president from Hundred, having both the curly blonde hair and haughty noblewoman’s pride down pat. She’s not one I can really say is that much lesser than the other models I’ve brought up, but then Luvia is horrible (as a person; she’s a passably well-written character depending on the material) and Hundred was a horrible show, so those points of reference aren’t exactly setting a high bar.
The instant jump to “Fight me for something that probably shouldn’t be resolved in the arena” in particular recalls Hundred, though given the timing it’s more that Hundred stands as an extremely cheap knockoff of IS. As for that, Ichika gets some training from Houki and a personal IS unit to use. He loses the fight, but does so on a technicality, since his ultimate attack drains his own shield. Cecilia ends up wavering in her snob conviction, which ultimately marks her turn from catty antagonist towards interested romantic competitor.
With that set up, the show quickly introduces another girl, Lingyin Huang, the new transfer student and representative of China, who happens to be a second childhood friend of Ichika, from a different period of his childhood than Houki. She recalls the loud, obnoxious Chinese lady from Total Eclipse if you like, but more than that I’d say she’s like a gender-swap of Xiaolang Li without the charm or the excuse of being literally in grade school – prideful, shrill, and generally prone to anger over any other response.
The show loses some points for playing the Childhood Friend card again, and more for playing it in many ways worse than the first time. Like I said, Houki has the second best chemistry with Ichika, as there are at least a couple scenes where you get the sense that they’re comfortable around each other like people who go way back probably would be. Lingyin just talks the talk, jabbering about forgotten promises and unbreakable bonds while not really showing any sort of bond. At least they don’t pull the ultimate insult by having her be the forgotten childhood friend when there’s already a childhood friend in play, Ichika does remember her and her family with some fondness, but it’s a much more surface evocation.
Her arrival also kicks off the “Girls getting jealous” segment of the show, which will continue as a major source of comedy (or something like it) for the rest of the shows run, since she’s deeply jealous of Houki’s roommate status while Houki and Cecilia are moderately jealous of Lingyin’s mere existence as another obvious competitor.
Lingyin decides she wants to settle the score between her and Ichika at an intramural tournament, which is a good deal more tolerable than Cecilia calling for an outright duel for status, since she’s just using a pre-existing contest to deal with personal matters, but there’s still a degree to which it feels like a retread. The battle is ultimately interrupted, though, by the arrival of a strange IS.
The interloper fights hard, and ultimately Ichika and the girls need to work together to bring it down, revealing that it is, in fact, a robotic drone IS. Behind-the-scenes investigation also says it’s not one of the known IS cores, which raises several questions about where it came from, what’s going on with Houki’s Sister, what the IS really are…
But enough of that! It’s time to throw more members into the cast! First, Ichika’s roommate spot is freed by Houki being offered a private room. Ichika is predictably oblivious to the fact she might not want that, but ends up making a promise at her insistence to go on a date with her if she wins the next tournament. Shortly after, we get the first new arrival: Charles Dunois, a male IS pilot from France, who quite naturally gets dealt the roommate slot with Ichika because of that. The arrangement, after some not-so-subtle attempts at secrecy, sees Ichika discover that Charles is, in fact, Charlotte (Usually called Charl for short), the daughter of a major company that’s being beaten heavily in the race to develop later generations of the constructable modules for IS cores (don’t worry, the business and politics in this show just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think too much about it). She explains that her family insisted on the ruse as a publicity stunt and sent her to the academy for industrial espionage purposes. Ichika agrees to keep her secret, noting that the Academy can ultimately grant her diplomatic immunity, but only if she’s not kicked out or recalled first.
You may have noticed from the review thus far that I, personally, saw Hundred before I encountered Infinite Stratos itself. As such, you can probably imagine the cold terror I experienced on being properly introduced to Charl and her arc. Mercifully, it’s brief, taking only a few episodes and one plot movement before she’s properly revealed and begins to attend school under her real identity, rather than the deception long outstaying its welcome.
Charl is also the character with the outright best chemistry with Ichika. Houki has a nice connection, and could really work as a slow-burn relationship if the show wasn’t constant, loud, active harem energy… but with Charl we get some actual sparks. It helps that she’s the only one of the girls to default to anything resembling sweet or approachable. Cecilia is the closest, but she’s also haughty and it’s hard to forget that her first instinct was to fight out of pride. Houki, then, is standoffish and Lingyin is a loud little firecracker. Even the girl I’ve yet to introduce doesn’t step on Charl’s friendly and ironically traditionally feminine toes. She’s also really good at reading Ichika, playing into his (generic or not) likes and dislikes, and getting scenes with him that aren’t consumed by over-the-top RomCom nonsense. That’s not to say she doesn’t get into her share of compromising situations or push sufficiently to win his heart, but she does it in a way that’s much more amiable and diplomatic and seems to resonate better than everyone else’s general strategy of using superior firepower to get what they want.
The other new addition rounds out the main cast, and is introduced in the same episode as Charl, with their introductory arcs ultimately running side by side. This is Laura Bodewig, the almost comically harsh representative of and transfer student from Germany, who wears a very military uniform and an eyepatch and frequently brandishes a knife at whatever displeases her. As of her very introduction, she seems to have some history with Ichika’s sister, respecting her deeply and seeming to view her almost as a parental figure, while being quite hostile to Ichika as she sees him as unworthy of his relationship with his sister.
As it turns out, the next tournament (on which Houki made Ichika bet her a date, which via a game of telephone has turned “date with Ichika” into a prize for the winner as far as most of the school is concerned) turns out to be a doubles tournament. Ichika partners with Charl, and Houki, by the luck of the draw, ends up with Laura as her teammate. Naturally, these two pair clash at the top of the list, where Laura’s flagrant disregard for Houki compared to Ichika and Charl’s fairly good teamwork sees Houki taken out of the match and Laura facing a two-on-one battle she can’t win.
Laura’s IS mech, however, decides to not take losing lying down, and activates a destructive berserker mode. We get some of the hints that she’s a genetically engineered super-soldier who was treated as both a failure and not a human until Ichika’s sister took care of her, and when her dark berserk form is put down, she’s allowed to regain her senses and reevaluate her outlook on life… the end result of which is Ichika receiving her aggressive and comically disturbing affections, and she insists that he will be her bride and takes an extremely straightforward approach to making it so that clearly indicates how little she’s had socialization like a normal person.
Also in the epilogue to the doubles tournament arc, Ichika gives Houki her date even though she didn’t win (again, they could be a cute couple if the show had the pacing and tone to go there) and Charl decides enough of the lies and deception, and reveals herself and re-enrolls under her actual identity.
Now that we have the whole core cast, I suppose I should talk about their dynamics as a group. The long story short is that Cecilia and Lingyin are superfluous and annoying. Ichika, Houki, and Charl together make a good classical love triangle. Houki is harsher, stronger, and less feminine, but also in a lot of ways more shy or timid. Charl, by contrast, has a very classically feminine persona (again, rather ironic given the ruse). She’s softer and more approachable, but also has a capacity for being kind of seductive when she puts her mind to it, going places Houki is too proper to follow. Laura, for her part, is a great monkey wrench in everything. Nothing about how she acts is at all what a properly socialized human (much less a teenage girl) would be expected to act like, probably because she’s not a normally socialized human. Her extremes make for some good comedy, and both Ichika and the other girls could get a lot of mileage out of having to roll with the punches.
Cecilia and Lingyin are, for the dynamics of the group, basically Houki #2 and #3. Cecilia is more proper and refined and Lingyin more fiery, but Houki’s steely demeanor and frequent frustration cover both the proper and fiery angles, and she does it with far better chemistry with the lead than either of those two other jokers. And unlike Laura they’re not particularly funny, charming, or interesting in their own right; rather, it’s quite the opposite, and they’re the two who are the most grating rather than endearing when they have to hold a scene more or less on their own. They’re still not the worst characters, but they really weren’t needed and the time spent on them could have been better spent, in my mind, on more of Charl, Houki, and Laura. It would give Houki more time to build proper romance off her starting chemistry and Charl more room to take a starring role in the technical plot. Alas, that is not to be, and we’re stuck with a cast of six instead of four.
The last arc for Season 1 is centered on Houki. It starts when her sister lets her know that there will be a new personal model ready for her soon. This model is more advanced than any except perhaps Ichika’s. In the lag, we get our obligatory beach episode, and then big sister Tabane (who, recall, is somewhat AWOL from the world) arrives with her new machine.
I’ll be honest, I enjoy Tabane quite a lot given her status as a bit character. She comes off as a complete ditz, addressing matters with no regard for how anyone normal sees the world and styling herself with robotic rabbit ears. But, of course, she’s actually a frightening genius, and that’s showed from time to time as well, making you wonder if her normal persona is calculated to obfuscate her intelligence or if she just really is that batty. In any case, she makes for some fun scenes, especially bouncing off Ichika’s big sister with whom she seems to have a history (not surprising given that Ichika and Houki do).
Her delivery also comes with a crisis, as an American-made drone IS goes on an uncontrolled rampage, and it’s said that only Houki and Ichika have the speed to catch it. They try, and while they’re able to catch it they get their butts kicked attempting to beat it, resulting in Ichika being pretty badly injured protecting Houki at the last moment, and Houki losing a whole hell of a lot of resolve as well as her hair ribbon (a trinket of her connection to Ichika) being burned to ash. However, the fight slows it down, so there might be a second chance, albeit one that the team would have to go against orders to get.
We do the thing where Houki goes overboard in her despair and almost quits only to be given the friends pep talk from the other girls. They go against orders to engage the drone, and things get pretty grim there too while Ichika is busy having a weird esoteric dream that’s probably supposed to be meaningful but that the show never really gets around to using. Later in the Light Novels, I guess.
Ichika arrives late to the party to give Houki a brand new ribbon for her birthday and a second wind to battle alongside him, and the two of them (with support from the others) manage to take down the drone. Tabane hops off, but not before dropping hints that she’s behind both Ichika’s inexplicable compatibility with IS systems and the drone’s rampage. Ichika and Houki, meanwhile, have the start of a meaningful romantic talk, even going so far as to have Ichika nearly kiss her before the other girls burst onto the scene and the season ends with Ichika carrying Houki as they run away from the jealous remainder of the harem, in a scene that’s not quite as good as Muv Luv’s version but worlds better than Hundred’s.
A couple of things for the record: first, I said that Charl had the best chemistry, not that she was necessarily the logical favorite. Second, while I mention both and think Hundred owes a good deal to IS, I don’t think IS actually owes that much to Muv Luv. It’s just fun to draw comparisons.
There’s room enough in this review for Season 2 as well, in large part because there’s a good deal of it that’s just more of the same harem antics with our established cast. Normally I like spelling out everything in sequence for anyone who hasn’t seen the show, so that I can talk intelligently about the material to unknown readers without confusing anybody, but in this case it’s probably best if I do a general outline, some highlights, and the stuff that actually has meat to it.
While Ichika and the girls start out with their summer water park episode for some extra fanservice to remind you he’s dense as lead, the plot starts in another sector as a mystery woman with a scary IS does criminal things, cutting down guards and stealing plot trinkets with her badass IS. This figure is initially known as M, and provides our plot for the season.
At school, Ichika soon runs afoul of the Student Council President, who both does and doesn’t insert herself into the harem dynamic. The final takeaway seems to be that she’s not interested in stepping in, but is enough of a complete troll to lead everyone (Especially the other girls) on about it. She gives Ichika some hell training, and then gets him wrapped up in layer after layer of mischief.
This becomes relevant when forcing him to play the prince in a school play results in an all-out insane struggle as the female student body (starting with the other main characters) are informed that whoever ends up holding Ichika’s crown will be his new roommate, while he’s tasked with retaining it until the curtain falls. Most of the girls attack rightaway to snag the crown, though Charl almost walks away with it via a rather clever “Let me take that for safekeeping and I’ll hold them off” ruse.
The chaos is interrupted by the arrival of M and one of her compatriots in crime, who attack, targeting Ichika to steal his IS (possible because, like most magic mechs, the IS becomes a simple bracelet when not in use). However, in part because the two of them get in each others’ ways, they’re successfully fought off.
We then get another fanservice competition between the girls (though this one acts as a birthday party for Ichika, so they’re in less venomous form than usual), in which Charl goes far enough with the sexy routine to be disqualified by the others, and after that nonsense an encounter between Ichika and M, who reveals herself as Madoka Orimura and his… secret sister? Opposite sex clone? Something like that where she has ties to big sister and hates Ichika’s guts just for existing, so she tries and fails to kill him.
From there we have an episode focused on Charl and one on Houki, both mostly for comedy, while introducing Student Council President’s little sister alongside, with the Student Council President suggesting/blackmailing Ichika to be her partner in a doubles tournament, which she’s initially loathe to accept. The tournament is attacked by rogue drone IS units (Again!) and in the resulting battle we get something like decent character development as the little sister overcomes the chip on her shoulder about the Student Council president and the bond between that pair of sisters is mended. Mercifully, she only upgrades Ichika as far as “friend” after his help and doesn’t join the main cast harem.
After a Cecilia-focused comedy episode (because she’s still in this, and apparently a lethally bad cook) with a scene where Tabane is found by the villains, trashes them, and then agrees to make Madoka an awesome IS unit of her own just for fun, we move into the season’s final arc.
During a school trip to Kyoto, we get all the typical Harem/Romance beats with all the girls (or at least Houki, Charl, and to a lesser extent Cecilia), and then Ichika ends up face to face with Madoka while the girls, in different locations, face down against her accomplice from earlier and their boss.
This leads to a multi-front fight throughout the city, with a bomb on a monorail, Madoka beating the snot out of Ichika, and the other girls facing off against one of the two other villains. Ichika is bitterly injured (though he’s fine soon enough) and the accomplice is killed outright (a surprise, given that the show had been big on robot enemies and “get you next time” exits for humans), but Madoka and her boss prove an ample challenge. The two of them are eventually put on the back foot, but disengage for future villainy, spouting a cliched cryptic “we’ve done enough” sort of excuse.
Throughout this, we get hints that there’s some sort of time travel nonsense going on, with Ichika’s mech taking on the form of the first, anomalous IS ever seen (and Madoka’s being quite similar to the enemy it battled), but we really don’t have enough pieces to know what’s possible in this universe or what Tabane’s game might be, so when the story doesn’t continue in anime form it’s basically leaving off with a massive shrug. I get that an anime adaptation is often seen as more of an advert for the print version, as opposed to in the west where a film or TV adaptation will usually be seen as the “highest” version, but if you’re going to wrap up at least give us something that feels like an arc was wrapped up. A Certain Magical Index and its related shows managed to, seven times, end us with an “adventure continues” sort of ending that at least felt more like a closed chapter than this. With no more real reveals about Madoka nor stopping a meaningful evil plan, this feels like a mid-arc confrontation, not an arc end.
In any case, the show is well and truly over this time, so how does it sort out?
Well, as I mentioned before, the Harem girls could be better, but they could also be a lot worse. Laura is fun to watch, Charl and Houki are better than the average of the show as a whole, and while it can’t drop them entirely the show seems to know, to an extent, that Cecilia and Lingyin are superfluous, so especially the latter doesn’t steal too much focus. What’s more, even when they are the “mob of clingy, jealous girls” from time to time, they are allowed to keep their unique personalities, which a number of lesser shows have trouble with.
I do wish that the show was less focused on the Harem antics, though. I guess that it’s the genre, but did we really need an entire episode dedicated to Charl trying to hide that a time-space anomaly banished her panties to the shadow realm? More than we needed to tell a story from beginning to end? This is a much bigger problem with Season 2 than with Season 1. In Season 1, the story is introducing the girls, it’s very arc-based, and the conclusion arc does feel like it’s bigger and bolder. In season 2, each girl has already spent most of the drama she could bring to bear, so the plot needed to step up… and it doesn’t, at least not enough. I was interested in where they were going with the villains, especially Madoka, and I was interested in Tabane, but it turns out that these things were going nowhere, at least if you don’t go and read the light novels. And, while I’d entertain the idea that the Light Novels could at least be some kind of fun, the show wasn’t good enough to convince me it would be worth my time to pursue them, even if they are actually available in English unlike so many other series that have made stronger shows, like Unbreakable Machine Doll. Now that was a show that could juggle harem antics and strong plots.
And, in the end, I feel like you have to understand what the aspirations of Infinite Stratos are. It’s not entirely fair to judge it against an action show, even a harsher Battle School Harem show like Anti-Magic Academy, because that’s not what it’s doing. It’s a harem show first, and it happens to have some action and plot in it to drag that forward. Its ambitions are probably a little lower, but its achievement measured against those ambitions is higher.
What does that mean for a letter grade, though? IS is a quite watchable show. It’s even fun, something I could see coming back to for pure enjoyment even if not a recognition of quality.. Measured against other Harem outings, it’s not the best of the best but it does everything essentially right, and is worlds stronger than, say, Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs. I think ultimately that puts grants IS the final grade of B-. B, because measured against the rest of its ilk it does more with its characters and scenario than it had to do. Minus, because measured generically as a show, it does have some critical flaws that pull it down and away from its ambitions. If you want junk food, this is a bit of that which I would generally recommend over others.