Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid

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If my review of the anime adaptation of ViVid being BEFORE I read the manga is anything to go by, it should be stated I'd feel a lot differently if I'd known the manga essentially answered all my flaws. In essence, the manga's pacing and continuing storyline didn't have to follow a strict airing time necessarily, which gives it a LOT more time to flesh out the story. The only real flaw that I can even stick the series for is its length. Even here however, the length is required to fully flesh out the story without completely rushing it. As such, I should mention ... that the manga is one of the best series I've read in a while.

One of my main complaints with the anime was that Einhart's character development was stunted, with the anime's decision to not make the best use of her past life of Klaus. At the time, I'd even mentioned there should have been some tie up with her past, even in passing. Thankfully, this is a far cry from the manga's case: the manga not only develops Einhart in detail, but ties other characters to her in meaningful ways. This gives the battles shown a double edge: the physical battle itself, and the internal battle as we all embrace Einhart and her desire to succeed as our own. It's extremely easy to get absorbed in the battles and forget you're honestly looking at a manga panel; the fight scenes (unlike others even, such as in fellow impressive manga Tsubasa Chronicles) pop to life, the action taking place clear and cleverly displayed. The manga is also wonderful in that it primarily focuses on solely the action, not burdening itself (apart from a few rare occasions) with internal monologues or thoughts. Thus, the pace of the action is consistent and flows naturally.

ViVid also excels at non battle scenes. It's true that in a black and white manga, several of the characters blend in and look similar, making them difficult to make out (especially when their names aren't mentioned). However, I can give ViVid some slack for this; the cast was cut back from the back-breaking amount of characters previously shown to a meager approximate 15. This is a welcome change, since it streamlines Einhart and Vivio's roles as the protagonists to the forefront (unlike StrikerS, which suffered to balance Caro and Erio along with Tea and Subaru). Another welcome change is that the wealth of challengers to Team Nakajima actually have a somewhat important role, Micaiah even becoming a major character in her own story in Lufen for a part of the manga.

ViVid also perfectly nails emotion, not making scenes too dramatic needlessly or creating unnecessary sob stories; all of the characters' emotions feel raw and genuine, which helps create impressive levels of empathy and also guides us to understand their motives better. The only area that ViVid really suffers in is "filler" chapters, where the characters mostly sit around and talk, becoming human exposition machines at times. Even at worst, these only border on being boring and fail to significantly decrease ViVid's score. The manga also fulfills its goal of merging Einhart's past into her present, Vivio's future, and several other positive traits. This manga is absolutely worth a read. 10/10.

ViVid is a strange manga.
It feels less like a standalone story and more like the prequel of one due to certain unorthodox decisions it makes. I would have to guess those come from it being the first long story original manga from Tsuzuki Masaki: While I didn't like the reading flow of the manga very much, it wouldn't be strange in a Visual Novel, while I had problems with the "lack of commitment" problem in the manga, such problem wouldn't be there in a short anime.

Nanoha's storylines usually follow the structure of one of our heroes wanting to offer help to one of our antagonists ... in order to try to achieve a non-violent solution: This is the case with Nanoha and Fate in the original, Nanoha+Fate and the Wolkenritter in A's, as well as Erio+Caro and Lutecia+Garyuu & Signum+Reinforce Zwei and Zest+Agito in StrikerS. ViVid decides to flip the concept on it's had by asking "But what if our antagonist accepted our hero's help from the very start?", trying for a more light-hearted and low-stakes approach, but having problems in it's execution.
While it's first three volumes seemed a bit aimless, the start of it's tournament arc made it really seem like the series was finally taking shape in a way that reminded me of "Gunnm: Last Order", and that was somewhat true as there is a story that is somewhat completed at the end of volume 12 with a thematic ending... the problem being the strange spot the series as a whole is left after that, as there's no longer enough "time" to make some big arc, it's remaining volumes now being a sequence of small gimmicks, similar to it's first 3 volumes.

Here's why the definition of it looking more like a prequel: It introduces dozens of characters, but does nothing with them. While one could argue that StrikerS did the same, the reality was that StrikerS did so by being in the structure of a "large last arc", by having every character do "one last remarkable action", which is different from having a character do a single thing in the beginning or middle of the story and them be relegated to only being in cameos. This creates a vicious cycle where instead of reusing characters, we keep making new characters to be disposed after being used once (e.g. Chantez, Tao, Fabia) or never used at all (Yumina being the biggest example).
While this could be said to being a problem of the Nanoha franchise AS A WHOLE, it is something justified as it was done between three different series separated by time-skips. If you do it in a single series that's supposed to be coherent and happen in the span of a year, it becomes egregious.

Vivio is barely a protagonist for most of the series, that function being mostly divided between Einhart and Miura. There's also a constant problem (Could be because of editors telling the author to "wrap things up" or the author himself growing tired of a certain idea) of the manga doing "tell, don't show": If there are three fights, we will only be shown one of them and be asked to "imagine" the following two, being told what happened in it. If there is a five day trip, we see two days of it and are told what happened in the remaining three. The most egregious example being a certain tournament where there is a full chapter for the first fight, but them a time-skip and a single page for the semi-finals and finals.
Once again: ViVid does not commit.

While it fails on the macro scale, however, it does succeed in the micro scale: To present a character, make us care for them and having them have a motivation for one or a couple fights where it really is well executed (Once again, something that worked masterfully in StrikerS), the best example being the character of Corona, currently the top 3 ViVid original character with the most favorites, losing only to Sieglinde and Einhart.

There's also a curious case of "suffering from success": The new characters are presented as so powerful and having abilities so interesting that it makes it seem that characters from previous season (That should be stronger than them) are weak by comparison. StrikerS didn't have such problem by having a more "grounded" setting, where the powers of every single characters seemed simple, yet interesting, it was believable that Nanoha was a behemoth compared characters such as Subaru or Teana, but compared to the flashy powers of characters in ViVid such as Rio, Victoria, Sieglinde or even Einhart, the series fails to make her seem more powerful than a generic aerial mage even though, of those, only Sieglinde would stand a chance against her in a fight.

Talking anymore would've been just me repeating myself, so let's conclude: Don't be deceived by the high chapter count, this isn't a series that will use them to have many long, meaningful arcs or to work or develop most of the characters it introduced. If something, it's almost a gacha in the form of a manga, and this isn't changed by some very good moments it has here and there.