Rinne no Lagrange (season 1; with season 2 addendum)

aka Lagrange: The Flower of Rinne, Flower Declaration of your Heart

Number of Episodes: 12 (first season) + 12 (second season) + 5 mini-OVAs

What Viz Media via Myanimelist.net Wikipedia says: "Madoka Kyouno is an energetic girl who is full of passion. As the proud, and only, member of the Kamogawa Girls' High School Jersey Club, she goes around helping people in need.

Madoka's life is turned upside down when she is suddenly asked by a mysterious girl named Lan to pilot a robot. Motivated by her desire to protect the people and city of Kamogawa, Madoka agrees to pilot the resurrected Vox robot to fight against extraterrestrials that have come to attack Earth."

What tTPO says: From one Madoka to another in the space of three reviews. Compared with Puella Magi though, this series is a bit less coherent and tries just a little hard to be too many things. Describing it as a slice of life-mecha-space opera would not be too far off the mark, but it doesn't really succeed spectacularly as any of these things. The issue for me was that it tended to lose a bit of momentum as it swayed through the different aspects to the series, leaving me a little disconnected with the characters. Having said that is it not an epic fail either, and there is enough character, plot (with the odd hard hitting surprise), background plot and occasional humour to maintain some level of interest. I suspect this may end up being a series that would be better served being seen all at once, rather than week to week as I did, when I found myself asking myself 'so where are we up to with this?' More focused series leave me in no doubt where things are at and looking forward to the next episode despite the gaps between viewings.

How About the Music?  For me the ED ("Hello!" by Megumi Nakajima) was the highlight of the music, capturing the generally upbeat mood of Madoka. Not to say the OP ("TRY Unite!" by Megumi Nakajima) was bad, it just didn't work quite as well for me. 

So how does it end? (Spoiler Free.): This actually ends in a pretty satisfactory manner, so long as you think the Empire Strikes Back ended in a satisfactory manner - with character development and distinct closure to this chapter, but without closure to the whole story. This clearly is heading into a second season which apparently will start around July 2012. And there is an OVA coming too. I must admit I find it a bit sad that average shows like this get second seasons when better shows (like Chiarafuru) probably won't.

Overall Grade: Grade C. This series is almost the definition of a C. Mrs tTPO thought so to. It did not too much wrong, but really was not otherwise outstanding in plot, characterisation, ideas or execution to rate higher. I am not sure if I will bother with the second season to see how things turn out. We'll see.  

Season 2 Addendum:  Season 2 is virtually a direct continuation of season 1, to a point where if you are going to sit through this, you should do all 24 episodes, or (more wisely) look at some other and better series. Now that is not to say that this is a bad series. On the contrary, season 2 deals with all the left over plot points from season 1 and wraps them up, and even has a bit of character development. However it does none of these things particularly well, with the various plot endings not really particularly well explained or satisfying, with more than a little deus ex machina required to pull everything back together. Apparently I should have listened to my own advice above. 

Still grade C.