Senki Zesshou Symphogear: How to Create a Kamen Rider Anime (That Isn't Fuuto PI)

INTRODUCTION

I want to start this article off with an apology. Not the usual, “sigh, sit on a couch, tell you I’ve made mistakes in a vast understatement” kind of apology you might find from a YouTuber. But an apology for all the people who have told me, “Hey, you should watch this show/play this game/read this book/so on, you’d really like it.” I have a nasty habit of planning to watch things, of intending to play through things, of allocating time to catch up on my reading, and it just… doesn’t always happen. Maybe it’s the aftermath of having a lot of jobs that just drain my energy at the end of the day over the years, maybe it’s a mixture of factors involving my own neuroses and how I engage with stories versus other people, or maybe it’s just the pure and utter glut of media that consumes and pervades the fabric of our culture to the point where media has become culture instead of reflecting it, and you’re always judged as what you watch and know instead of who you are, so you find yourself focusing more on what you theoretically should be engaging with popularly vs things your friends deliberately suggest because they know it’s your jam.

…probably the second one, if I had to guess, but who’s to say.

The point is, I’m the type of person who could actively benefit personally and professionally from engaging with what my friends suggest watching, because they know me well, but I’m also the type of person to instead blast my brain with endless rounds of Tetris instead for that sweet, sweet dopamine kick.

…in particular, this is an apology to Drill. You know who you are.

Why am I apologizing to Drill?

…Drill told me to watch a show called Symphogear sometime before 2017.

In checking our message history, he apparently spoiled Symphogear AXZ for me in 2017 as well, and I fully forgot every single word he typed.

He’ll also probably be remembering now that he spoiled me on Final Fantasy XIV, as well, and I also forgot that.

…he probably knows where this is going, too. Especially since I said AXZ and not Season 4.

…so let’s talk about Symphogear!

Senki Zesshou Symphogear (or, Swan Song of the Valkyries Symphogear) is an anime series that ran for five seasons (possibly more on the way do NOT play with my heart) from the animation studio Satelight, of Aquarion, Macross Frontier, and Log Horizon fame (among others) with primary creative duties being handled by Akifumi Kaneko (best known for his work on the Wild Arms series of JRPGs, among other credits) and Noriyasu Agematsu (founding member and lead of the music composer conglomerate, Elements Garden, which you may recognize from helping to produce music for—

JESUS CHRIST, THAT’S A LOT OF PEOPLE—)

Anyway: Symphogear takes place in an alternate future Japan where monsters known as Noise have become a common threat to the populace the same way a natural disaster would be: they appear from nowhere, and are intangible and thus unkillable—but they can sure kill a bunch of people (in this case, through carbonization, for the nightmare fuel), and vanish. So, not the greatest thing to ever happen for or to humanity.

Life goes on, despite the continual tragedies, in part because of the efforts of Section 2—a black ops organization dedicated to striking down Noise threats through the power of ancient and powerful Relics. These Relics, when properly attuned to a user, grant the power of a Symphogear, a costumed warrior who uses the power of song to force the Noise into a physical form—and then forcing them to experience physics by beating the everloving hell out of them.

In short: Imagine punching a hurricane with the power of karaoke.

That’s the baseline at the start of the series.

Of course, none of this is especially relevant to Hibiki Tachibana, who just wants to go to a concert with her best friend in the whole wide world, Miku…except her aunt caught a case of not-quite-isekai’d by way of truck-kun and her parents won’t let her go, so she has to miss the shindig. It’s fine, of course—what could possibly go wrong in a big, open area in a setting that’s established to experience the occasional monster rainfall?

…oh, right, the occasional monster rainfall. Hard to imagine why people even have amphitheaters in a world where that’s a problem.

So as the concert goes from pop to death metal, the two active Symphogear users (that we know of, and that the writers knew of at the time), take the stage… er, take off the stage? Look, they were the ones doing the concert, it doesn’t matter right now, the point is, one of them is a shy, blue-haired one—Tsubasa—and the other is a feisty red-head—Kanade—. As they take out the Noise, Kanade sees that Hibiki is about to get super-killed, and you know exactly how this is going to go if you’ve seen any superhero origin story.

During the chaos, the Noise overwhelm Kanade for a brief moment as she tries to protect Hibiki, and after a particularly devastating strike, her armor breaks apart—and a piece gets jammed into Hibiki’s heart like it’s a usb port someone's kid just shoved a quarter into. So, her day’s going great. Kanade’s is going a little worse.

Determined to save Hibiki at any cost, and encouraging her to not give up on living, Kanade uses her Swan Song to defeat the Noise and save Hibiki—a super-powerful attack that, as the name implies, uses up all the power in her body. She fades to dust in Tsubasa’s arms while Hibiki gets rushed away to an unseen-for-seasons tragic backstory.

…but hey, the Noise are gone! So, uh. Hooray!

A couple years go by, and Hibiki is studying at the totally inconspicuous musical academy Lydian, with Miku by her side. On her way to buy a new Tsubasa CD (because capitalism never stops, even in grief), a Noise attack erupts, and Hibiki is forced to escape with a young girl she discovers in the crossfire. Despite being outnumbered and overwhelmed, Hibiki is determined to protect the kid. She echoes Kanade’s words. “Don’t give up on living!” And then…

(Content Warning for Barbie Doll Anatomy silhouettes for the cast as they transform. If you’ve seen Sailor Moon, you know the drill. If you’re reading this, you probably have.)

From here, Hibiki gets caught up in the machinations of Section 2 (which boil down to “protect the world” and “throw employment parties”), the actual machinations of a mysterious antagonist and her right hand edgelord who is perfect in every way (and a preemptive how dare you to anyone who disagrees), and her own fractured teamwork with Tsubasa, who has been utterly broken by the loss of Kanade and hardened into someone who sees themselves only as a sword, a weapon meant to be wielded in service of the world—or, at least, Japan.

Hey, why does that sound familiar?

Eh, it’s probably nothing.

I’m not in the business of anime recaps (yet), so I’ll leave the plot summary there, but needless to say: Symphogear is… a lot. Its main appeal is its brightly-colored costumed superheroes in bombastic, character-driven, lore-heavy adventures filled to the brim with kick-ass music. It carves out its own, unique niche by using the medium of animation to go far beyond what a similar series might be capable of in live action. Lavish fight scenes, musical interludes and showstoppers that belt out character exposition in those same fight scenes, and plot points that define the one “there was a point we needed to stop” meme to a T. As it proudly declares by the start of its fourth season, sometimes you just gotta fight nonsense with nonsense. 

Symphogear revels in taking its themes, its concepts, and its beliefs and bashing you over the head with them until you’re loopy enough to be completely on board.

Just what are those themes? 

It depends on the season, but a core throughline for the show is the power of friendship—WAIT WAIT HOLD ON COME BACK

I’m being entirely serious here when I say this—if there is a central idea, the thesis of the multi-season essay that is the Symphogear canon, it’s that friendships make up what makes life worth living—the willingness to extend your hand to someone else in understanding, or in a desire to understand. Our ability as a species to connect to one another through how we communicate that friendship and love for one another—through words, through action, through song. It’s easy to fight with one another, to clench your fists against another—whether they hold a weapon or your own fury within them. Hibiki puts it best: 

It’s really good, basically.

Is this a perfect show? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, there’s a lot that I look at with a firm side-eye. I’m not the biggest fan service fan, and this show plenty of both the classical definition (things deliberately designed to make fans hype) and the modern definition (T&A galore), and its handling of legitimately serious topics like sexual abuse, human trafficking, and modern warfare ranges from “oh wow, that’s really insightful”, to things that make me just yell at the screen—

But if you’re willing to give it a try, Symphogear is the kind of show that only the medium of anime could have come up with.

LOOK, EVEN CRUNCHYROLL AGREES!

Now, this kind of approach is what a show can do when it is freed from the limitations of a live-action filming format.

What kind of show would you get if you did try to make something like this in live action?

…I dunno, something like this.

TOKUSATSU IN A NUTSHELL

Symphogear, at its core, can be defined as the distilled essence of tokusatsu media into anime form. Tokusatsu, for the uninitiated, is a style of filming popularized by the kaiju films of the 1940s to mid-1950s and onward in Japan—but really, anything can be tokusatsu if you put your mind to it. The word means “special filmmaking,” in a broad sense, and it’s a style that prioritizes practical effects in its construction. As such…

Star Wars? Tokusatsu. 

Marvel? Tokusatsu.

Fantasy and sci-fi films in general? Absolutely tokusatsu.

The term has taken on a more specialized meaning over the years colloquially, referencing those original kaiju films, sci-fi and fantasy epics (along with some war or horror films besides), and—extremely pertinent here—of the Henshin Hero. Henshin is the Japanese word for transformation, and it tends to be used a lot in reference to when a character undergoes a significant physical change—like with Ultraman, the defender of justice from outer space who takes over a dude like a meat Gundam. The most well-known example of this trend is the Kamen Rider franchise, a franchise created by famed manga author and absolute madman Shotaro Ishinomori. Its main appeal is its brightly-colored costumed superheroes in bombastic, character-driven, lore-heavy, extremely homoerotic adventures filled to the brim with kick-ass music.

…wait, why does that sound so familiar—

(Look at either of these and tell me there’s a straight explanation, any at all.

And if any of you have a problem with the fact that there’s no straight explanation, you’re in the wrong goddamn fandoms.)

Let’s break this down.

KAMEN RIDER’S STORYTELLING FORMAT IN A DIFFERENT, BUG-THEMED NUTSHELL

Okay, so, let’s hash this out. I’m going to give you a broad story outline, and you tell me if it’s Symphogear or a Kamen Rider show from the last…oh, let’s say 25 years, to make it fair.

A young protagonist is affected by something in their past that either directly causes them to or influences them later into taking a very specific track in life, themed around a very specific, marketable subject matter that still winds up leaving them looking vaguely insectoid. They’re called into action because their heroic nature will allow them no less, and wind up in possession of a transformation trinket that lets them unleash their full profitability—er, power. They encounter a rival that sees them as an interloper into their own story, usually due to their own tragic backgrounds and circumstances, misunderstandings that have led to poor career choices on their part, or just someone who’s a prickly jerk for the sake of being a prickly jerk.

They find themselves trying to navigate interpersonal conflict, conspiracies involving government organizations, or even darker rivals who either reform and join the gang, or who still somehow end up on their side when the chips are down, Shadow the Hedgehog style, while they face down an endless parade of weirdos who want to take over/destroy/conquer the world, or some variant thereof. Eventually, larger villains end up affecting the story and the endgame becomes a race against the utter extinction of the human race, where only the power of camaraderie, love, friendship, or some other intangible aspect of human nature can even allow them a chance to win the day. Oh, and there’s usually a lot of same-sex attraction that’s so pervasive they might as well just kiss already.

Catch all that? Good. I’ll give you a minute.

All set?

Good.

The answer, ladies and gentlemen: They’re all the same show. You could slap this on the page for Kamen Rider Ryuki, Kamen Rider Decade, Kamen Rider Den-O, Kamen Rider Gaim—most of the Kamen Rider series in the last few decades rehash this formula with some new ingredients and flavors, and Symphogear acts (in the best possible way) like the purest distillation of this idea—just without the masks. And maybe a few less motorcycles, but even Kamen Rider’s been forgetting about those, so let’s move on.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Sure, it’s easy to say shows in a similar genre will have similar plots. But there’s a lot in there that tells you that Kaneko and co. really, really want to be in the director’s chair the next time Toei decides to go absolutely off the rails and bring someone in from the anime industry, despite their mixed results in the past—

YES, I’M TALKING ABOUT YOU, GAIM, I LOVE YOU AND I HATE YOU, GO TO YOUR ROOM

The action sequences in the show aren’t directed like what you expect from some of the industry’s greatest animated fight scenes. Think about, say, the animation studio behind some of the most viral anime out there, UFOtable. When you watch a fight by UFOtable, whether in Fate, Demon Slayer, or if you’re the one person who watched God Eater the Animation—these fights are the kind where the highest level of quality goes into making it all seem unreal and abstract. Swords fly out in arcs that no blade could ever strike, but that look so smooth that you just don’t care. Speedy attacks and clashes cause grand impacts, and the sakuga—a catch-all term for “THIS LOOKS SO GODDAMN COOL” animation—is just divine. It comes at the cost of being a blink-and-you-miss-it nightmare, though, but the vibes wash over you enough that you don’t notice it.

Symphogear takes a different track: filming the utterly absurd and making it seem like your average, two-guys-in-suits fight scene from a tokusatsu show. Monsters are fought and it looks neat, but a bigger focus is on making sure the fight is comprehensible—you know how Hibiki’s fist gets from one end of the Noise’s… not-face to the other end, you know very clearly who is winning and losing the occasional clash of blades. Even when you’re seeing things like a missile barrage, chases on motorcycles across a heavy highway—itself a Kamen Rider staple, even if it’s an intentional 1:1 recreation of Yu-Gi-Oh Card Games on Motorcycles’ setting (and that’s a running trend, to say the least)— or the earlier rocket rescue, you know exactly what’s happening at a given moment, and the backdrops feel like the wide-open (or sometimes deliberately enclosed) combat arenas you might see a Kamen Rider battling a monster in, especially in the second, third, and fourth seasons where the series revels in its dramatic duels.

(Spoiler warning for Symphogear XV, but if you can uncover significant plot points just by watching this clip, you probably either have already seen enough of this show to guesstimate or you’re just a savant.)

Even the “hey, we remembered we have budget” moments—like final battles or climactic showdowns—feel readable in a way that’s very familiar to anyone who’s seen a first, middle-arc, or final episode of a Kamen Rider show. They want you to see what’s going on and follow along, because you wanna let the roller coaster stay on its rails just long enough so that the jumps, loops, and occasional mine-cart leaps onto the next track feel fresh and exciting.

That’s not even getting into—

THE MUSIC

So, let’s do a quick detour into how music works in a lot of Japanese media—or, at least, speculative fiction/anime/the stuff that’s meant to make the big yen. This is all from a very amatuer perspective, mind you, so this isn’t a definitive overview; it’s just what I’ve happened to learn and come across at this time. Expect edits if I later on down the line realize “oh no I’M WRONG!”

In a vast majority of modern tokusatsu shows, especially the ones released by the media conglomerate Toei (Super Sentai and Kamen Rider), the shows are vehicles for a lot of star power (or star-power-yet-to-be). Idols, actors, anything in-between: it’s all fair game to try to launch people into their next big breaks, whether that’s film, music, or the occasional magazine or two or three or nothing but those.

As such, one popular trend is for the studios to release Character Albums: musical releases with a few different songs sung in the voices of the characters of a particular show (some of which might, if they’re bangers, make it into the show itself), that showcase a bit of personality, background, or insight into a particular character’s motivations. For example, Kamen Rider Geats dropped a song for each of its four major players, Ace, Keiwa, Neon, and Michinaga, that gave a peek behind the curtain of the show into what they feel and hinting how their arcs would progress given their current states of mind. Similarly, Kamen Rider Gaim had a series of albums and insert songs near the end of its run that made it clear where its characters were at mentally by that point in its run (which is to say, not very well).

Ranbu Escalation by Gaku Sano & Yutaka Kobayashi, English Translation courtesy of the Kamen Rider Wiki

Surely, nothing but stable, not-at-all at-the-end-of-their-ropes characters here.

Symphogear, by comparison, is…well…

A bit more out there.

Ahem.

YOU’RE LISTENING TO

AXZ-XV-FM

SYMPHOGEAR RADIO

WHERE WE PLAY NOTHING BUT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, TRAUMA PROCESSED THROUGH LYRICS, EDGE WITH JUST A HINT OF SINCERITY, AND ALL THE CELTIC FIDDLE YOU COULD EVER ASK FOR EVEN IF YOU DIDN’T

THIS ISN’T YOUR MOM’S ANCIENT RELIC MUSIC

…yeah, it’s that kinda show. It takes the concept that shows like Kamen Rider do the best and somehow does it even better. Two songs at minimum per character in the first season, each developing the characters in unique and thematic ways—a character may express doubts in an early song only to find conviction in another or be confident as hell in their beliefs before mellowing out and recognizing where they failed, and they always show up at the most dramatically appropriate moment. There are even more songs with all the new characters added in as the series goes on, and over one hundred-something tracks at least if you count the mobile games, and the… Mega Man-styled chiptune album? Yes, please.

You go, you 8-bit hellraisers.

It’s clear the creators of Symphogear saw the potential within Kamen Rider not just for the musical careers of those involved to erupt like a—[INSERT A LOUD, BLARING AIR HORN WITH THE TEXT “SPOILER REFERENCE, GO WATCH SYMPHOGEAR”] —from the end of Season 1, but to really take the core idea of characterization-through-music and give it a life of its own.

It’s something special.

…it’s also never getting out of my head, and I hear that fiddle in my dreams.

THE POINT

So, what’s the point of all this? To say Symphogear ripped off Kamen Rider, or that it improved on the Kamen Rider formula? No, and not quite. Kamen Rider is an ongoing franchise with a multitude of writers, directors, and other creatives all trying to tell unique stories. Symphogear is a serialized narrative with arcs taking place mere months after each other. They’re trying to go for different storytelling focuses, despite their similarities.

The point is to recognize the influence of an industry giant on a story that clearly, deeply loves the genre it belongs to, taking from the past to create something new and fresh. Symphogear would not exist were it not for the tokusatsu legends of the past, Kamen Rider at the top of the list, but it doesn’t just take the trappings alone—it takes the ideas and concepts behind its construction, from music to storytelling styles to even filmmaking—filmmaking! It’s animated, they have all the choice in the world, and they choose to tell it like it was a show you could tune into on Sunday mornings in Tokyo, with real people and real action (outside of the occasional dips into the truly, utterly impossible).

Kamen Rider and Symphogear aren’t just cut from the same cloth—they’re part of the same tapestry of artistry and creativity that, I hope, will continue to have new adventures woven into across both franchises. I highly recommend you do yourself a favor and fall in love with both.

…so with that in mind, where’s season six, Symphogear? Where’s the movie? Where’s the fighting game, goddammit?! I know you want to make one! For God’s sake, Kaneko, give me s o m e t h i n g here—