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Do you ever wonder "What if Harry Potter were actually good?" Okay, maybe that's too harsh to Harry Potter. What about "What if Harry Potter were an anime?" Um, maybe I'm getting off point here. Anyway, it has magic, so that reminds me of Harry Potter.

Do you know that part at the end of Just Cause 2 where Rico grapples between missiles while they're in the air and he has to diffuse them before they blow up an oil field? Yeah, that's a pretty cool scene, and this show has just as climactic an ending, I won't spoil it here.

But overall, what makes this show ... great is the comedy. It's refreshingly actually funny. I don't watch that much comedy anime because I don't find it that interesting as a general rule. It tends to lose my interest very quickly. But this one managed to remain interesting. The episodes are mainly self-contained, but towards the end there starts to be more of a continuous plot. Despite this, each episode manages to be interesting, and drives forward the characters' relationships. By the end of the show you grow to know and love a large number of them, even the side characters. Most characters have at least one episode about them.

The art, of course, is excellent. As to be expected from Trigger. It's not as incredible as Kill La Kill, but it's solid throughout, especially in the character design. Each character is distinctive in a way that matches their personality.

Overall, I'd strongly recommend it. It's no Madoka Magica, but then again, few things are.

I had mixed expectations going into this series. On one hand, it is slice-of-life, a genre which typically is too boring and mundane for my tastes. On the other hand, many people had described it as one of the most emotional shows ever. I'll have to say that both of these expectations were not met.

First, the good. It was not boring. The episodes always had some kind of activity, and the characters were engaging enough that, although it felt slow at times, it was never slow enough that I didn't want to continue watching.

But the counterpoint to the interesting characters is the main character: Furukawa ... Nagisa. She's the least fleshed out out of any of the characters, and yet she is the one for whom Tomoya falls. Not that this is unrealistic, she's kind and earnest, but she's just not an interesting character from my point of view. And this is most of why I was disappointed by what the show had to offer in the emotional department. Because I wasn't attached to the characters, I wasn't able to truly empathize with them as I was expecting. This contributed to a watchable experience, but not what I was hoping for.

A second criticism is the show's pacing. Years go by within an episode and it's not obvious when this happens, and we're expected to follow a character's emotional state through these years without seeing what happens to them. This creates a confusing experience which further prevents empathy with the characters.

All-in-all, it's worth watching, but don't get your hopes up.

A poor excuse for an OVA whose only purpose was to show breasts. I love the characters of this show and its unique premise, but what really carried the series was the plot. This OVA has almost no plot.

That's not to say that it's horrible. It's OK, keeping the characters we have come to love through the show's first season, but it doesn't add anything to them, and doesn't even focus on the fact that they're assault rifles.

That's basically all I have here, but MAL wants a longer review, so I'll keep rambling on. It's actually been a long time since I've seen this OVA ... so I'm writing much of this from memory, so I apologize if any information is incorrect. The story is really what kills it here.

I'm not one to hate on fan service, that's why my score is as high as it is, because overall the only thing this has going for it is fanservice.

What really carried this anime was the art and characters. The story was present in full after the first few episodes and things were fairly stagnant after that point. Nevertheless, there was always enough content to fill the episodes, and neither did they ever seem to drag on, something common in anime of this cute/slice of life genre.

The art is well-done through the whole thing. It's fairly typical for a modern well-funded series, but it's still impressive particularly the way the characters are animated, they are very emotive and fluid. Each character has a unique and interesting design that separates them in more ways than ... just having distinct hair colors as might be the case in a more low-budget series.

This series isn't life changing and it isn't spectacular, but it is very enjoyable. It's a quick watch which never gets boring through its first season, relying on cute girls for much of its content, but that's a valid strategy which I thought worked very well here.