Anime: IS: Infinite Stratos

If my Greek isn't so rusty, I would confidently say that "Stratos" means "Army"
But after watching this anime for the first time, I could conclude that Stratos actually means "Harem"
Therefore this anime should of been called "Infinite harem". Why? Because when there's only one guy in an all girls school, THERE ARE INFINITE HAREMS!

But hey, like many others, I myself love the harem genre. But my first impressions of this anime was that it would be a great mecha anime. But boy...Wow... Was I wrong about this being a whole mecha genre. They focused more on the harem than anything else. Of course it turned me on but the effect wore off after countless encounters with harem getting in the way sooo many times. It really ticked me off as I watched through the episodes.

The animation and art is up-to-date and very well done for a mecha anime, in my opinion. This was a main part of what drew my attention to the IS anime itself, great animation. There was no disappointment for me.

Now for the story.....was there really a story?...IS had great potential for a good story, but all I got out of this was, " Hey! I'm the only boy here! Lets ride on robots and create a harem!" ......No lie

Okay...Characters... The characters of IS are what you would expect in any harem themed anime.
Lets do a harem character theme count:
- Male who walks into girl while changing (Check)
- Male Lead (Check)
- Tsundere Girl (Check)
- Glasses Girl (Check)
- CHILDHOOD FRIEND that gets friendzoned (2x Check)
- Oblivious and Clueless Male Protagonist (Check)

Sigh.....Anyways, there were times that gave me a good laugh and thrill of excitement, so it wasn't all much of a failure anime.
For those who love a good harem, I would recommend this. But those looking for good storied mecha/romance, I'd have to say that this is not for you.

Infinite Stratos is the name of a mech system of immense power and ability, but which has been prohibited for military use. Now these potent exo-skeletons, which can only be piloted by women, are relegated to sport matches; observed by mysterious, probably politically influential men. Enter Ichika, the younger brother of Chifuyu, the famous champion of the first world tournament, who also happens to be the only male IS Pilot in the world. Now he goes to a boarding school for training IS pilots, among a sea of other teenage girls; yeah, you should know where this is going.

Infinite Stratos straddles a position between a mech-based action series and a harem. Unfortunately, this unwieldy combination combined with a shaky plot line and horrendous plot holes detract from an otherwise decent character development. For those who want yet another harem, this is one that recycles a lot of familiar concepts, without overly-excessive fan service. If you're looking for action, I'd steer clear unless you like watching laser spam wars. If you're more into the harem aspects, then this may be a decent pick up, granted you can deal with tsundere overload.

Animation:
This series is a mix of good and bad here. While the character design and detailed backgrounds are both above average the horrendous, blasphemous, overuse of CGI (pretty much whenever the IS mech form is used, which is a good 50%+ of screen time) completely detracts from the enjoyment of the show. While the characters are well proportioned, the IS mech "suits" for the girls leaves certain regions somewhat, well, exposed (while you don't have any panty shots per say, there really aren't skirts here to start with). There are a typical ecchi moments (hands where they don't belong) they aren't as prevalent as some other series (Yosuga, Sora no Otoshimono, Kiss x Sis to name a few). There will be very minor blood in certain scenes, but nothing overly dramatic.

I really have to make a comment about the battles here. In typical DBZ fashion, many of the scenes will take place with little dots dancing in the distance, or with light flashes occurring under a hidden veil of clouds. Battle damage is also very minor (entire portions of the IS disappear when damaged). These combined with the CGI really take away from the animation quality, and is why you should look elsewhere if you want any semblance of decent action.

Sound:
The OP is energetic but lacks a decent melody, which ironically actually fits with the disorganized, somewhat confusing plot in this show. The ED is a bit more organized in structure, but not good enough for a dl. The BGM serves its purpose, mostly highlighting ecchi scenes with a brass tune. Sound effects are decent, but overused in my opinion, mostly due to the laser spammage in the series. Overall 2/5.

The VAs are definitely the stand out in this category. You get a full cast of incredible stars including Yukana, Kana Hanazawa, Marina Inoue, and Mai Kadowaki to name personal standouts. Out of all the roles, I'd say Charles/Charlotte (yes it's a spoiler but you'd know this already but if you can't figure it out w/in the first 5 min of him/her showing up then you obviously haven't watched enough anime) get's the honor here. Her calm voice is a wonderful ear-candy compared to the otherwise endless tsundere behavior by the other girls. Or maybe it's just the way she says "Ichika, no ecchi". Overall 4/5.

Story:
Wow, it must be impossible for Ichika not to hit it big in such an environment. Unfortunately, unlike in Amagami SS, it seems that Ichika starts off with pre-determined secret admirers in the form of one, er no, TWO childhood friends. In actuality, the story is a bit of a patchwork with slice-of-life planned activities interspersed with IS tournaments, which ALWAYS end up getting cancelled/delayed for mysterious reasons. The story tries to add some depth to the mech side by teasing with strange new mechs and teasing foreshadows. Unfortunately, the strange new mechs/interruptions only serve to confuse and disrupt the otherwise smooth flow of the plot, and the foreshadows aren't really foreshadows as they are never resolved, and thus turn into bleak plot holes which are never explained.

Out of the entire series, the 2.5 episodes comprising Charles/Charlotte's arc form the highlight of an otherwise irregular plot line, comprising of girls competing for Ichika intermittently interrupted by IS mech battles/laser spammage. Despite the patch-work nature of the series, each "patch" uses patterns seen in previous animes, therefore predicting all the plot twists was trivial.

The story doesn't really build to a conclusion, it just presents one in the form of a final battle to finish up the series. While the conclusion resolves in a typical in a harem way, I never find these all that "conclusive". The story really is only decent if you really focus on the characters, just squint really hard and blur out the mechs.

Character:
Ichika seems like your typical harem dude. He's very "nice", a bit clumsy, completely oblivious to girls' feelings, but is "man" when it matters. This of course attracts the girls, some of whom start out in disgust at the only male IS pilot. Though as explained by Kami sama (The World God Only Knows), negative flags also leave a strong impression! Anyhow, Ichika seems to be a decent guy who isn't so weak that you'd want to immediately punch him if he were real.

The show focuses on Ichika's relationship to five girls, all of whom are country representatives (i.e. the top IS pilots in the world) or otherwise related to genius characters as in Shinonono's case. I only have two serious qualms with the girls. First, 11 episodes is just not enough time to fully explicate five girls. In fact, I'd say two of the expositions are completely rushed, and the series would have done better if it had just focused on the other three in greater depth. Second, I know tsundere is popular, but making four out of five harem girls have slight variations of tsundere isn't what I consider extremely distinctive. All of them just try to act tough around Ichika while secretly wanting him to invite them to his room, it just gets irritating after a while, thank goodness there is one girl who is actually assertive up front.

There is decent character development, at least for some of the girls, but you'll spend more of your time watching the girls compete with each other for Ichika's attention, and then suddenly give him the cold shoulder when alone with him. Houki is by far the worst offender of this. I really don't know how Ichika can stand such a personality.

Value:
Despite having a lot of pointless battles and way too much CGI, IS still holds a compelling package if you focus on the harem aspect. While nowhere near a masterpiece, it is enough to tide you over till the next season, and maybe more. I enjoyed the character interactions, enough so to partially ignore the plot holes and battles. While this may not be the case for everyone, if you feel yourself inclined to watch for the characters, this might be a decent choice.

Another review, another shitty-ass load of goddamn bullfuck that wants to be treated and labelled as anime. Yes, you can already see what the hell this will go...

Infinite Stratos... more like Infinite Stereotypes or Infinite Shit!

In general I hate the harem genre, so when something like that appears in my face, I always get a headache already before even opening the damn file. So, yeah, this time was even worse... only by the fucking story I wanted to see how much retarted it could turn out to be. Well, guess what: this is one of the most retarded anime I have EVER watched. I can think something like Mars of Destruction, TMNT Superman Legends, Dracula Sovereign of Darkness, Ikkitousen but this one is so bad and retarded that it's laughable. And then, people ask me why the hell I don't watch anime like some time ago...

In the future, there seems to exist some sort of powered armor (that look like Gundams) that ONLY girls can ride them. While there is no a damn explaination of why, how and when, a guy seems to have the "unique" "ability" to be able to use them, so he enrolls to the IS Academy where he can use them. Along the way he gets his own harem of girls who have no reason of existence but love him and chase him around, fight over him, ... Oh fuck it, the whole purpose of the story is the harem and nothing else. They could simply remove the part with the armors and just have the harem. This will change NOTHING to the story. The "battles" are shallow, stupid, over"dramatic", they serve nothing at all, rather than to fill the episode time. Also, there is NOT a scientific explanation of how the armor works... so it's "MAGIC!!" here. Do the companies treat us like a banch of idiots? Finally, romance here is shallow and boring...

Believe me, if you try to make any sense out of it, you will fail miserably. Not because of you, but because of how retarded this is....

But since the whole fucking point of this series is the harem, then you pretty much expect every harem cliches there are: misunderstandings that lead to violent acts, various archetypes of characters who only go by the face and given trait and for the female characters, purpose of chasing and falling in love with the alpha male (since he is the ONLY male character here). Also, like in most harem anime, why do both male and female characters know how to interact with the opposite sex? Is it really that hard to know how the opposite sex works, or at least know the most basic functions? Also, while most girls are outside of Japan, why do they live like Japanese? We have a british girl, a french girl (who dresses up like a boy... -_- ), a chinese girl, and a german girl. OK, I don't expect for the producers to know the lifestyle and beliefs, nor turn into Hetalia-like characters, but was that the best they could come up with?

So, for the male character (I don't remember names of people and characters that I don't give two fucks), it will go like this:
"Oh, fuck... It's him..." "Yeah, it's him..." "Look, he is WALKING!" "Yeah, he is walking... I don't like him..." "He is an idiot" "He is an asshole" "He is a doodyhead" "Fuckface" "He is an idiot" "He sucks his own dick" "He wears his underwear backwards" "He has eyeballs for testicles" "He fucks goats" "He smells like bloody diarrhea" "Hope he dies from dysentery" etc. etc.

Yeah, I like him THAT much. XD

Production values are... good. Not excellent, just plain good. Just average stuff to see ('xpect for the armors who are well-designed, remind me of Gundams and that's the only thing I love from here). Sound departments are also average... Just forgettable and nothing special.

And now you are gonna ask me "Dude, how the hell did you watch this, then, when you talk smucj about it?" Well, Jimmy I am glad you asked. This is what I did: I open eac episode, then load Angry Birds and have Disturbed (\m/ \m/) play on the BG together with the episode, and once in a while I check it to see if anything significant happens... But who cares about a stupid harem when I try to help the birds get their eggs from the dirty hands of those pigs?! DIE YOU FUCKING PIGS, DIE!!!

To sum things up, it's a stupid harem show, that has nothing to offer but to waste your fucking time with the absolute loss of... everything and after 2 hours you will forget it...

Wow. Infinite Stratos may not be the most original series of the new year, but it's the most perfectly executed.

I seem to say this every time I see a harem show, but IS does harem right. Male lead Ichika fulfills all the stringent requirements of the genre - he's everymanish, easy to relate to, and entirely ignorant of his predicament. But unlike so many forgettable harem protagonists, he manages to seem like a real person while doing so. He's friendly, likable, brave (in later episodes) and (dare I say it) good-looking; such geekery as he possesses is due to the situation the show places him in. Add in that there are plot-based reasons for him to be the only male in a school of girls and it actually becomes quite plausible that there would be five or more girls chasing after him. Meanwhile his relationship with his sister (shockingly not played for incestuous harem thrills, but rather a source of genuine drama), and, later, the school's other male student, serve to anchor him firmly as a real character; we get a developed past and some quite subtle personality shades. This same realism (or at least, serious dramatic efforts) extends to at least the first few girls, though by the time we get to #5 we're down to your typical 2D harem archetype. But three or four fully-developed characters is doing well for a series this short.

And it looks so good. Many series will spend most of their budget on the first few episodes, trying to hook viewers, so for episode 4 I was expecting a calmer, character-based episode. Instead I was treated to the best fight yet, both visually and in terms of the choreography. Because the show is so short - twelve episodes - it can keep offering frequent fights without risk of them getting samey or character powerlevels getting twisted. I only wonder where they get the budget from. Seemingly every episode of IS manages a fight that looks like the pinnacle of a whole series (or at least, the pinnacle of a series from a couple of years ago. Maybe progress in animation means that every series will soon look this good; if so, I can't wait).

This sheer relentlessness keeps the series going through what is admittedly a weak plot. The show attempts to keep a bit of mystique around the IS themselves (the mecha systems which the cast are learning to pilot), and wins points for at least doing so consistently - everything said so far has made a certain amount of sense, and the ending is far better than this kind of show usually manages. But the plot still feels bolted on, a retroactive justification for the fights rather than the driving force behind them, and the IS is too absurd to really be taken seriously. Partly this is simply lack of time; most episodes (quite rightly) split their time evenly between character interaction and out-and-out action, meaning there just isn't space to develop the kind of complex plot IS is angling for. For my money, it would do better with a simple, straightforward enemy and reason for fighting, à la Strike Witches.

But for the same reason this is a minor problem; the plot simply isn't that important in Infinite Stratos. For some people that will be a reason to avoid it, but that's fine; the show doesn't try to be all things to all people, it's content to excel within its genre. What it delivers is a very well-executed harem, following genre lines but with characters so well realised I found myself thinking more of Toradora than the classic comic harem style (of say Akikan) that this belongs to. That's not to say IS has Toradora's emotional depth, because it doesn't (indeed, it couldn't, at half the length and with half of that spent on action) - merely that its characters are rounded enough to be at home in such a show. Additionally we get strikingly good presentation - slick effects, a catchy opening, consistent voice acting and astonishingly high motion in the animation. Looking at stills the animation is pretty ordinary (at least by modern standards), but the fluid, action-packed fights raise it above the pack. And these fights are impeccably choreographed; we get a real sense of tempo, and also of strategy. Not one of the victories feels anything other than natural, which is a real achievement when the protagonist wins every time.

Within the constraints of its genre, Infinite Stratos is the closest thing to perfect I've seen. If you have any interest in harem or mecha action, watch it now.

IS: Infinite Stratos: A suitable name for a show that was only so much substance-less air.

There are some days in which I really ask myself why I bother. Days when the desire to watch, and especially talk about, anime just reaches rock bottom. Languid spots in my anime-watching, if you will. It is for this reason that I welcome it when certain seasons bring with it shows that really bring something new to the table, something to fire up my passion for anime-watching. And, in a slump, I can get by with welcoming shows that don’t, but still fire me up by being formulaic, bad and altogether devoid of good taste. Shows so bad that I feel like sitting through the entire seasons’ worth of Abomination, just so I can say with a straight face that I gave this all the chances it could get and it was *still* crap – hatred, after all, is also passion of a sort.

IS: Infinite Stratos is a 2011 spring anime that most definitively fits into the latter category. Set in a futuristic Japan where one-man mecha called “Infinite Stratos” have been invented, using technology that is clearly on the far side of Clarke’s Third Law (for the uninitiated, that means the suits have frak-all relevance to any science at all and is basically all Magic and Wizards). These suits, which incidentally have made war obsolete and revolutionized the military and politics through some unknown means, can only be driven by women. Why? Heck if I know, but nobody seems to care much on a political level. When main character Ichika Orimura, a Man with his mighty pe-... errr, 'Male specialness' (yes, that will do), turns out to be able to drive one, the result isn’t vigorous scientific testing, academic papers, a re-evaluation of the whole system and a revolution in IS design and geopolitics, but the introduction of your average standard Harem Male to an all-female school of future IS pilots to form a wacky harem comedy. The result isn't so much underwhelming as it's a lesson and exercise in tolerance for stupidity and pain.

Animation and Visuals: 6/10 –- Ok, before we go anywhere else… Those are some very nice mecha and backgrounds. Shame about the character design, though.

One thing the whole 'robot' aspect does add to the mixture is at least the promise of some fight scenes and some demo scenes of the mecha. Infinite Stratos does add this, and I have to say that even if the mech design is some of the silliest I've ever seen, the animation is good and the backgrounds and inevitable laser effects look just fine. The backgrounds and setting, both in the fight scenes and the regular high school, are just fine (the sky and water effects look actually impressive for an anime), and the fighting choreography is decent if nothing especially awe-inspiring.

On the flip side, character models and overall design are extremely derivative (even if the main characters themselves are easy enough to distinguish), the lines are very rough, and the animation of dialogue and emotion spectrum is rather poor. The drawings are intentionally focusing on fanservice aspects and will stick practically every drawing angle to get a look of the old T&A (for the children in the audience, that means 'naughty bits'). Which would be just annoying if, you know, this show had anything really to offer on this part, which it does not. So in the end it gets both annoying *and* a wee bit pointless.

Sound: 4/10 –- "He's... talking." "Oh, is that all? Daughter, some people like to talk." "But his voice fills me with a terrible rage!" "I know it does, honey!... I know it does.".

The sound of Infinite Stratos, meanwhile, isn't winning any prizes. The music is generally unremarkable and mixes standard violin/piano plink-plonk pieces with some unrecognisable background Muzak, but since there is no emotion or interesting things going on on-screen to undercut it it all falls flat and is immediately overlooked and forgotten. The voicing is annoying and, while well-fitting to the flat, boring and annoyingly shrill cast, are still annoying on their own. Some of the side characters -- well, one of the side characters, the main character's sister -- is actually able to get a voice that's not completely terrible, but overall the main problem I have with this cast is knowing almost each and every one of them, knowing they having voiced better characters, with significantly higher degrees of pathos and ability, and knowing that I will not be able to un-know the amount of potential being wasted in this show. Oh, and the OP and ED are both Abominations that I will ban by law should I ever arise to the position of sovereign ruler of planet Earth. That is all.

Story: 2/10 –- Super Magic Robots With Chosen Pilots Who Win At Everything meets Spineless Harem Lead Attracts Millions Of Poorly Justified Girls… Was this show intentionally trying to make the worst story ever?

Infinite Stratos does not have much a 'story', when it's all said and done. It's more of an 'excuse' to design an all-female environment to which to drop the special Male to attract all the girls and win all the days with his Magical Special Super Mecha. In other words, the premise is basically an amalgam of the plots of Love Hina or any given harem show with that of your average Gundam, and a rather poorly-made amalgam at that.

To sum it up: Male proves to be special to drive all-special female-only mecha that have somehow changed the world (unexplained and irrelevant how), gets enrolled into female-only school for IS pilots (which, despite training people in the usage of military-grade equipment with *live ammo*, is still structured like a Japanese high school) where everyone squees over him because of his mighty pe-... Maleness, gets to be the underdog against some bitchy and domineering females that he all wins over through guts and grits and being male and therefore favoured by the scriptwriters, gets all those girls squeeing over him too, gets some bad backstory, fights mysterious super robot and wins due to the power of Friendship and I Must Protect You. That's about it. In the best Japanese traditions this all takes place on the Planet Stupid, where common sense does not exist and everyone can only solve their problems through the most contrived, overdramatic and idiotic solutions possible, talk out loudly about their current situation and the most minor of misunderstandings lead to violence, usually against the male because as we all know domestic abuse is 'funny' when it's the poor man who's getting it up the arse (errr... figuratively speaking, I mean. Though frankly, a little strap-on humour would probably improve this).

Plot holes does not so much litter this story as the whole thing is practically made of plot holes: The slightest examination of the show's subtext and what must be going on in there behind the scenes causes the whole thing to instantly crumble like a termite-eaten house in a cartoon, and this show does not so much have "you need to be this clever to get maximum enjoyment from it" factor as a "you need to apply a cast-iron skillet to your head this many times and reduce your IQ to this low a number before your brain gets dumb enough to get enjoyment from it at all". And while this is all well and good for certain types of shows -- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Sengoku Basara would not be able to exist without the 'turn off your brain' factor -- Infinite Stratos does not have the adrenaline-pumping ability, the sympathetic characters, the background music and visual effects underlining this, the pathos, or the playful promotion of its own inherent silliness to get away with it. If you want to treat what's going on inside the show as Serious Business, you must tolerate that that's how your viewers will look at it too. And Seriously, this is pretty abysmal as far as story goes.

Characters: 2/10 –- I don’t know what’s worse: The fact that the show seems intent on feeding us only insultingly bad characters, or the fact that by process of elimination the only character worth sympathising with for any significant period of time is the moe-appeal Frenchie.

But despite my misgivings about said story, Infinite Stratos’ perhaps main problem isn’t actually in the insultingly non-contextual story or in its very dubious lasting appeal – if I actually had to pick out the main problem, it is the characters. Even for a harem show, a show type that seems to base itself upon recycling the same old stereotypes of emotionally vulnerable and passive-aggressive women who cling to the boring-as-cardboard male with the aid of sad contrived backstories to substitute for some actual emotional investment, Infinite Stratos is of a low standard. Sure, I could rag on for pages over the one-dimensional, non-developed and non-developing nature of the whole darn ensemble, but let’s just stick to the highlights:

All the men and women appear to have lived their entire lives in boxes, given their experience with the opposite sex. Much of the ‘comedy’ of the show seems to come from the fact that the main character is utterly emasculated and apparently has no understanding to women at all -- but unlike, say, Sousuke from Full Metal Panic!, who was ignorant about everything because of his military upbringing, Itchika is supposedly ‘normal’. This has the effect of making his general ignorance of romance seem like he’s highly dysfunctional, or in the very least an ignorant, limp-wristed moron. I have known gay men who have a better sense of how to treat women than that.

This, of course, isn’t helped by the attention said ignorant, limp-wristed moron receives as the special man and harem centre. Much like he has apparently never seen a girl before in his life, all the girls have apparently been raised in a sterile machine-operated lab pumped full of female sex hormones to drive them all mating-crazy, the way they all squee over the fact that something with a Y chromosome suddenly walked into their field of view. Yes, I realize that the man… Err… *Main* character, has to be desirable and special and blah blah blah, but there is a distinct lack of logic of how everyone goes totally “A MAN!!!” over him – are there really no male characters apart from him in the entire world?

As for the characters themselves, they are the usual collection sad, flat and insultingly dumb harem stereotypes. There is nothing original about them, there is nothing distinctive about them, there is nothing to them beyond a basic, conforming pattern of behaviour. Heck, for an ensemble cast that supposedly comes from all over the world, they all act completely Japanese. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but obeying the age-old national stereotypes about Limeys and Frogs and Krauts and whatnot would actually be a step *up* from this (although I will give them points… Well, *a* point, for their reference to the French Gender Conspiracy). At least then we’d have some variables thrown in that would at least showcase that these aren’t all Japanese people with a dye job. By the time the bunny-ear fixated 'super-genius' appeared, I was getting visibly pained.

In short, the characters in this show are frankly horrible from start to end, from the main character’s slack-jawed ignorance about all things female coupled with his constant innuendo (like referring to childhood friends as his “first” or “second” in the same way most people would reference their first and second kiss, or girlfriend), to the high-strung females all trying to get in his pants while domineering and abusing him (but still being emotionally vulnerable and in need of the power of the pe-... 'Big strong man' to function), to the cliché dialogue about love and friendship and justice and how you must get stronger and protect people, blah, blah, blah. The closest thing you get to character development is roughly the same story as Achilles in his Tent (“Achilles… The Illiad… It’s Homer… READ A BOOK!”), only compressed to about 15 minutes and incredibly annoying. I’m sure some people find it incredibly rising in emotional value, but for me it’s all the pathos of watching cardboard cutouts doing retellings of punch-and-judy shows.

Actually, scratch that. Punch and Judy shows usually have proper good-old male-on-female domestic abuse and crocodiles in them. Which, when compared to this, is positively riveting drama by comparison.

Value: 2/10 -- If you want better and less insultingly stereotypical harem, almost everything else will do. If you want better and less insultingly stupid mecha, drop that ‘almost’.

As a habitual viewer of many of the things animedom has to offer and, if not an actually educated critic, at least someone with some experience and some opinions to form up under those experiences, my personal viewpoint on IS’ ‘value’ is that it is to be ‘valued’ to the same degree McDonalds should be ‘valued’ for bringing quality gourmet meals that brings the love of good cooking to the great public.

If what you’re looking for is cool CGI mecha battles of a similar nature, let me recommend you any of the Macross series instead; or even the Gundam series in its ham-handed angst. Even Souko no Strain is a dozen times better than this show without even trying.

Enjoyment: 2/10 –- Well, for a given value of ‘enjoyment’…

There are probably things to enjoy in Infinite Stratos, if you really like this kind of thing: There may be enjoyment in seeing paper-thin stereotypes act out their outrageously exaggerated ignorant behaviour. There may be enjoyment in the stereotypical mech battles, where the Mighty Special Male with his Special Long Hard Magical Pe-... Sword Mech defeats all the bad guys and humbles all the pretty girls with his Mighty Pe-…Errr… ‘Male Specialness’. There may also be enjoyment in going dumpster diving in a container full of discarded medical-use needles and unsecured scalpels.

All I know is that you’ll never get *me* into any of those things. Although, if pressed to do any of them, I might be inclined try the dumpster diving. Provided proper security equipment, of course. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent security equipment for the brain-dumbing of Infinite Stratos, unless you count “don’t watch it” as security equipment.

Total: 3/10 –- THE GUN MECHA IS GOOD! THE PE-... MALE WISH FULFILMENT IS EVIL!

So, how to summarize this quickly and succinctly? Infinite Stratos is a dull, predictable and uniform mess. It’s mired in stereotypical harem archetype women with all the self-respect and personal initiative of an expired boot, with the added plus of all the charm and sex-appeal of a rabid pitbull who’s decided to attack your dangly bits. It has a main character so dumb and oblivious it’s a wonder he’s able to operate on a daily basis, and so bland he’d make a valiumed-up lobotomy patient look ‘distinctive’ by comparison.

The storyline is a standard progression of harem clichés mixed with shonen fighting clichés without forethought for rationalization, justification or preservation of suspension of disbelief. It solves nothing, goes nowhere, and lacks originality and freshness to an almost (but not quite) astounding degree. We have been plagued its ilk before, and as long as this particular blend of sexism and cheap fanservice appeal continues to sell, will see it again ere before long. About the only thing that is worthy of praise in this bland pile of insulting stereotypes is the fairly well-done mecha CGI animation… But finding or recommending a show with equivalent graphics but superiority in practically every other single field will not be hard. It's still better than Princess Lover! because at least this one doesn't throw curveballs that makes the show look even *worse* by comparison, but that's about it. To be avoided.