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Despite the fact that, at the time of this review, Shin Cutie Honey only has positive or mixed reviews here, I've mostly seen negative opinions about it everywhere else. I do not understand them, however.

Shin Cutie Honey is a soft-sequel of the original, 1973 series, though in a way it makes more sense to refer to it as the "Turn A Gundam" of Cutie Honey, as it is set in a distant, dystopic future with different versions of characters from Nagai Go's star system.
It adds a lot to the original by having characters with more fleshed out personalities and episodes with more of a story ... to them.
We now have a Gotham-esque metropolis of "Cosplay City", a "hardened" Honey with attitude, a lovely side-cast (I absolutely ADORE the visuals and relationship dynamic between Akakabu and Daiko, Chokkei's parents) and a late-80's - 90's aesthetic that almost borders self-parody, from large shoulder-pads to glam-rock.

It goes harder in the ecchi direction, to the point that it would be very difficult to post a video about it on you tube without having to censor a lot of it, from Black Maiden's delicious flat chest to a Honey that, despite being made out of metal, really feels like a human made out of meat, bones, fat, muscle and sinew. It knows what aesthetic it wants, from the guitar rendition of the original theme song, from Honey's new forms such as a silver armor.

What might be a a letdown for many, however, is that Shin Cutie Honey is an incomplete story... sort of. It was initially supposed to have 12 episodes, but it only ever had 8. This is less of a problem since, due to it's unorthodox structure, the story technically "ends" at episode 4, with the remaining ones being somewhat self-contained episodes. If you found the (Equally incomplete) ending of the original series satisfactory, then this one shouldn't really be an issue for you.

I don't think that I need to talk about the artstyle or animation, it's the good quality you expect from a 90's OVA.
Give it the three episode try, at the very least, as I personally consider the third one one of the best.

Cutie Honey is an anomaly, and in a good sense.
Preceding Sailor Moon by nearly two decades on the idea of a female henshin-hero anime and preceding Minky Momo by one decade with having the idea of it's protagonist transforming into a new profession every week, Cutie Honey works as a parody of super-hero stories typically associated with Ishinomori Shoutarou: An android/cyborg/mutant fighting an evil organization with villain-of-the-week androids/cyborgs/mutants as well as their goons. This time, however, with a "female" motif and an erotic-comedy spin to it (Though the ecchi is very mild by modern standards).

Episodic shows live or die depending on how good it's episodic ... structure it is, while trying to avoid the sin of being repetitive. Perhaps due to it being only 25 episodes instead of 50, Cutie Honey succeeds on that by having a different transformation in every episode (As opposed to only using the same ones established at the beginning) and finalizing the weekly villain in a slightly different way.
While it would be expected of the male cast to simply be useless perverts trying to land a humor that is no longer funny, this is definitely not the case here, with them working as a pretty endearing and helpful side-cast to Honey's adventures.

The one thing that I would see as a problem are the usual early segments of Honey having to escape her academy while evading her ugly teachers: Sometimes the jokes land, but often I feel that they don't. They feel more reminiscing of Nagai's previous works with school erotic-comedy in Harenchi Gakuen, while in here they usually don't result in any consequence of Honey continuously eloping, don't connect to the rest of the episode (Anything would've sufficed, really, but there really is nothing) and the stories themselves could easily just start elsewhere, skipping those segments completely (Which is what happens later on).

Something that can be either a pro or a con depending on how you look at it is the fact that, other than the standard one-and-a-half-minute opening sequence, Cutie Honey also possesses a three-minute ending sequence, directly followed by a two-minute episode preview, which is mostly just straight excerpts from the next episode. If you choose to skip those, as I did, it makes episodes, an therefore the whole series, 20% shorter.

While Nagai's artstyle (And by consequence his character designs) feel "made to a flat 2D plane", thus not often taking "three-dimensionality" into consideration, only made to be seen in certain angles and certain poses (Which isn't a problem in a manga), the animation doesn't really feel "stiff", and other than the occasional weird-perspective shot or slight character off-modeling, it feels very good for an anime of the era.

While I complimented the anime for being innovative in every episode, sometimes this is done in the way of Honey having a new power or gadget never seen or mentioned before (The first episodes are quite fond of that).
The "transformation gimmick" is still very interesting regardless, as some transformations might have special skills (Such as being able to tame lions or be proficient in any vehicle) and others might be first and foremost be used as disguises, which adds the factor that Honey must first find an opportunity to change to her "combat form" before being able to win a fight.

Part of the dynamic is that Honey cannot transform in public, as she fears that she will be shunned and hated by all if people find that she's an android... but this fact doesn't have a lot of energy to it, as we never see characters expressing negative opinions about androids, so it's more something that you have to think "Yeah, I guess that would make sense" rather than something the anime will try to convince you. Maybe it was common trope of the era and it's supposed to be "obvious" for you if you've read enough similar stories?

The biggest problem would likely be that it eventually gets a bit boring, as a lot of it's "episodic episodes" don't have much in terms of plot, and the personality of a lot of the villains of the week doesn't differ much between one and the other.
While by it's latter half the story goes to an "around the world" route, it mostly seems random, as rarely is stated a reason for Honey & crew to be there or go there, and this is where I feel the anime would've benefited a lot of having a more overarching plot at that point. It also has a bit of an open ending.

It really isn't bad at what it promises, but the main issue is that it never promised much in the first place.

When we talk about the Nanoha franchise, the only constant is change.
The first two seasons were urban fantasy stories with loosely defined (For the best) magic systems, then StrikerS (Which many people disliked, but I liked) decided for a more grounded approach to magic and a bigger focus in it's Sci-fi elements in favor of the urban fantasy ones. Finally ViVid mixed things up once more, and as a long running manga suffered from issues such as a lack of a long term plot or motivations for it's characters, which made most of them feel "underutilized" or even "wasted".

ViVid Strike chooses to be it's own ... thing, so I'll review it under it's own merits.
It solves the biggest issue the ViVid anime had (Well, apart from not covering the entire manga), by not dilly-dallying and knowing what it wanted to do and where it wanted to go from the start (I guess Nanoha just shines in the short-form, after all): It's a story about Fuuka, Rinne, and their relationship.

While Rinne is an well explored character, Fuuka has an issue that most things about her seem to orbit around Rinne, not having much of a backstory to herself. The biggest issue for me being how it wasn't entirely clear how their personal conflict was solved via their fight (In that regard being very similar to Vivio vs Einhart fight that solved their conflicts in the volume 12 of the manga, which wasn't 100% clear either).

We always knew that, when it came to Nanoha, Seven Arcs had bit more than it could chew, so it really visible the comparison between ViVid, made by A-1 Pictures and that even though sometimes the art would be crooked, it did have animation to it, to ViVid Strike, with it's noticeable limited animation. Often there are uses of creative methods to compensate for that, such as only animating the effects of an action (e.g. light effects from a punch, water splashes, etc) to make us be able to imagine elaborate movements while still giving us a nice sense of impact.

If Force was supposed to be the edgier manga while ViVid was supposed to be the more light-hearted one, ViVid Strike grabs elements from both, a ViVid with sprinkles of Force: It has scenes that would never be in ViVid, it's violence feels more vicious in how it's strikes are portrayed, bones break. There isn't much fanservice to it, if something it's levels are pretty similar to ViVid's, but the main difference being that while ViVid's fanservice was rarely noticeable or even interpreted as fanservice, ViVid Strike's call some attention to them due to feeling "different" from all other scenes.

There's not much more to be said here: It sells itself as an anime of little girls putting their feelings on their fists, and in that regard I don't have any complaints, it does that well, despite it's limitations in the animation department, having impactful fights full of twists and a nice sense of energy. On average, it feels better than ViVid, but in a way, it is also JUST an anime about little girls fighting, not having the ambition to aim for more than that nor having resources to be the best at what it tries to do, so "Mixed Feelings" it is.

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.

Vivid is an oddity, the circumstances of it's creation unclear: A show that was supposed to be longer but had it's budget cut? A contractual obligation? Something whose sequel relied on it being successful? (Then again, we had Vivid Strike the next year).
It's hard to talk about an anime that only covers 1/3 of it's manga, does so without much in the form of a thematic conclusion, and that simply ended when it finally took shape on what it wanted to be.

However, if I was able to praise StrikerS for having it's entire anime be a build-up for it's final arc, seeing strikers as a ... build-up for episode 11 guarantees it a "Mixed Feelings" rather than a "Not Recommended".

The Nanoha franchise as a whole was ever a bit ambiguous about the identity it wanted to have: Season one starts as a monster-of-the-week mahou shoujo for three episodes, transitions to a urban fantasy and finally to a sci-fi setting. A's settles in a mix of it's urban fantasy and sci-fi aspects, while StrikerS steers away from it's urban fantasy elements and goes full-on in it's Sci-Fi and Fantasy mix.
Vivid decides to once again do a big change in the form of going to an initially more light-hearted slice-of-life direction until finally finding it's identity as a light-hearted fighting story. While this works for it's manga, since that would be the majority of it, in an anime where it is only the latter third of it, it gives the idea that Vivid is directionless.

That's not to say that there aren't positive aspects to it: It manages to inherit much of the more "fantastic" type of magic present in the original as well as A's (From golems to transformations), but that were "toned down" in StrikerS in favor of a more down-to-earth approach, while also inheriting the "personal stakes" character dynamics that made the fights in StrikerS work, and in that way it succeeds at making us care about fights between characters that were barely shown.

For the characters, they follow the same philosophy as the conflicts in StrikerS: Not that much depth to them, yet they're definitely entertaining and charismatic. As previously stated, Vivid has a somewhat magical way of making us care for characters we've barely met, and this synergizes well with the StrikerS philosophy of "rotating" your focus between different characters.
I would have to say, however (Perhaps due to the distance between it and StrikerS) that the way the characters sound feels more "generic", to the point that I had to double-check if no voice-actors were changed. This could've been solely due to Vivid haing a more "happy" vibe (Likely the best example of this being the character of Lutecia).

Honestly? It's a fairly obvious "Just go read the manga" situation. The first of it's kind, as Vivid was the first Nanoha TV anime to not be original, but rather an adaptation of a source material.

Imagine that you have to make the last arc of a long-running series, but from zero, without previous arcs, and in only 26 episodes.
This was the challenge and building block of Nanoha StrikerS, finding a way to show the tip of the iceberg of it's universe that exists inside it's creator's mind, investing heavily in having cool character designs and interesting concepts, and winning in terms of quantity what it can't in terms of quality, with it's end result being similar to reading a Wikipedia article about a huge war in terms it's huge amount of participants, their different origins, motivations and conflicts.

StrikerS first couple ... episodes might seem difficult to watch due to slow pacing and the plot barely moving, mostly consisting of training episodes with barely any glimpses of our villains. Despite our incredibly large cast, such episodes are not about introducing them, half of the cast being introduced (Sometimes with only a name drop and two lines of dialogue, which surprisingly works) in "action episodes" (Starting around the end of episode 11), which are the strongest point of the season.

Regarding it's themes, StrikerS is built around three: Growing up, legacy and bureaucracy, which — just like the myriad of character plots — are linked to one another like Borromean rings.

Our characters grew up, and are now adults that have taken the mantles and positions of their seniors. No longer Nanoha lives on earth or sees her family and school friends, and rarely does she sees Yuuno or Chrono now. No longer is Fate in need of the reassurance from Lindy or Arf, no longer is Hayate a crybaby who can't do anything, no longer is Nanoha simply about being a mahou shoujo story, the events of the first two seasons are closed. This season is about Subaru, Teana, Erio and Caro growing up to eventually follow the steps of our previous protagonists and of Vivio learning to (Literally) stand up on her own.
Which is not to say that everything that happened before has no meaning, for here is where the theme of "legacy" comes in: Fate saves lonely children for she once was one and needed saving, she feels connected to the artificial mages for she is not only one, but also the origin of them all. Nanoha trains her pupils so they don't commit the mistakes she did in her past, and is sympathetic to the cyborgs because it was never relevant for that Fate or Hayate's knights weren't human, likewise Fate being sympathetic to them because she too once was only an artificial being unemotionally acting in search of acceptance from her creator.

Finally, bureaucracy: Our characters work for a literal bureau, and while since season one we had some concepts of protocols and due processes, in this season this reaches another degree of magnitude, with now each character responding to a different one of the at least half a dozen named agencies, groups and branches. EVERYTHING is bureaucratic, for Midchilda is born from the trauma of "mass weapons" and the misuse of magic and relics that destroyed entire worlds, so the research and development of magic is limited, each one of our characters has their powers limited and has to request permission to use them, with even Nanoha herself internalizing that logic and admonishing Teana for trying to find "dangerous shortcuts".
That isn't to say that such bureaucracy is perfect, for in a way each of our "big-players" tries to find their way around it: Hayate creates Riot Force 6 because she feels that the current system would be unable to quickly respond to major incidents, no different from Regius' rationale (And therefore the rationale of the council who ordered him) regarding cyborgs and artificial mages (Which are reminiscent of Ishinomori Shoutarou's recurrent concept of "jinzō ningen"). But while they might be similar in ideas, they aren't in methods: At the end of the day, Riot Force 6's still stood by the rules of the system, while Regius looked for shortcuts which would eventually bite him back. Finally, Scaglietti represents wanting the complete breakdown of the entire bureaucracy and the search for absolute power.

Once again, you won't find very complex character dynamics:
Erio and Garyuu's entire gimmick is being knights of someone they want to protect, Caro and Lutecia's is being summoners in search of family, Zest (+Agito) and Signum (+Reinforce) their pride as knights and Unison Devices, Teana and Vice about seeing themselves as failures, Subaru about how the circumstances of your creation should not define who you are, but rather what you choose to do with your life, etc
But it's this myriad of "small wishes" and the constant cycling between the sub-plot of each character what makes StrikerS succeed, against all odds, at being "the last arc of a long-running shounen series, but from zero, without previous arcs, and in only 26 episodes".

This is an Alien World, Otani Yuri simply lives in it.

"Deconstruction" is an often used buzzword that people usually use to describe anime that subverts their own genre tropes and logic in favor of a more "realistic" (Though it often ends up being some sort of romantic pessimism) system.
Alien 9, however, excels at it quite naturally.

Alien 9 is an experimental story, and the fact that some of it's elements don't have hidden meanings behind them only makes it more experimental: It is, more than anything, a story that you must "feel" in order to grasp.
We follow Otani Yuri, a fairly unpopular middle-school student with ... a single friend that ends up forced into the school's task-force of dealing with aliens.

Aliens, in this world are at the same time "a part of life", but also something "exterior": For something that is so recurrent, we never see any institutions or structures made to deal with them, yet at the same time their presence is never seen as unnatural. For someone 40 years ago, having most of humanity's knowledge at the palm of their hand would've been a world-changing event, nowadays we simply call it "having a smartphone", for most people, having to move to a safe shelter after hearing sirens might seem like a nightmare, for some, however, that's simply a weekly occurrence.
Yuri is essentially "us", the viewer, one that is weirded by the weirdness of an unnatural world where no one seems to see a problem, she's the girl that actually sees the king naked when everyone else sees him fully clothed. This constant juxtaposition leaves us, just like Yuri, with a sense of "uneasiness".

In a certain scene, while an alien tries to dear down a classroom door full of grade-school children, clearly distraught and frightened, they are assured by their teacher that there is nothing to fear. That teacher isn't hiding her fear, she deals with the entire situation with a robotic lack of sentiment: If that is the difference between a small child and an adult, then Yuri never left being a child.

Yuri's story is one of solitude, is one of being abused by the world around her, and one could even see her as being analogous to someone with a neurodivergence. We are constantly exposed to a world full of shade, of silence, full of empty places that give us a liminal feeling (And he directing really sells that compared to the manga), Yuri is like the Chosen One in the Matrix, but what good is a Chosen One if every human in the Matrix knows of their situation, accepts it, and lives side-by-side with the machines?
We might feel that there are constant implications that there is some sort of conspiracy at bay, that the world isn't normal... but alas, there is none, that world is how it is: Sadly the anime doesn't cover it, but as the manga passes the reality never changes, yet Yuri is still able to find happiness on small things and have some of the normal experiences of a teenager, she still has do deal with aliens later in her life, but now she isn't the little child that couldn't even move, frozen in fear, but rather a girl with friends that simply doesn't like her job, a true incarnation of "It doesn't get easier, you just get stronger".

Aliens are everywhere: They're your neighbor, your classmate, your boss, your friend. Yuri can't accept that reality, and thus gets constantly lambasted and yelled to "just suck it up" and that "it isn't too bad", yet Alien 9 is also rife with empathy, from when Kumi and Kasumi are forced to share Yuri's feelings of crippling fear and dread, to when, during the vacation episodes, we see Yuri's paranoia even when nothing is there, preventing her from simply living a normal life. This is galvanized by the choice of having Yuri be voiced by a 11-12 year old on her first anime voice-acting role ever (Ihata Juri), while Kumi's (Shimizu Kaori) and Kasumi's (Shitaya Noriko), despite also being at the start of their careers in anime, were 6-7 years older, in contrast with Alien characters, that were voiced by older more experienced seiyuu at the time. Pure coincidence? Maybe, but if so, then it was a welcoming one.

Not much else to say about the more technical side of it outside of compliments:
*The directing makes so certain scenes have more "gravitas" compared to their manga counterparts.
*Kuniaki Haishima's OST feels unique and memorable.
*The aforementioned nice use of shade, silence and emptiness.
*Nice use of CG that doesn't feel at odds with the rest of the animation.
*Fairly distinguishable artstyle.
*Smart use of surreal visuals (Sometimes paired with a bit of body horror) to convey it's psychological feeling.

Just bear in mind that it's an incomplete story that only covers 14 chapters of a 30 chapter manga with a seven chapter sequel, so you'll have to read the source material if you want to know how it ends.