Tag: impressions

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions, The Manga Shelf

New Manga First Impressions: Cracking the Code on CIPHER ACADEMY

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

“μεμέ(τρηκεν)() ἰς̣() τὸ δη(μόσιον) (πυροῦ) γενή(ματος) τοῦ διελ(θόντος) ιθ (ἔτους)
Αὐρηλίων Ἀντωνίνου καὶ Κομμόδου
Κ[α]ισάρων τῶν κυρίων (διὰ) σι(τολόγων)() λιβὸ(ς) τοπ(αρχίας) [Σ]ερύ(φεως)() τόπ(ων) Κλάρος Διδύμου ἀγορανομή(σας)
[θ]έμ(α) ἀρταβαι() ὀκτο() χ(οίνικας) δ, (γίνονται) (πυροῦ) (ἀρτάβαι) η \χ(οίνικες) δ./ Διογ(ένης) σι(τολόγος) σεσημ(είωμαι).”

Shonen Jump’s rush to find their next big hit has produced its fair share of odd little manga, most of which don’t get the chance to run very long; from the still-in-limbo draconic slice of life that was Ruri Dragon to the sweet-tooth, axed-before-its-time battle shonen Candy Flurry, the casualties are frequent and litter the magazine’s pages—and that of its affiliates—like skeletons on a battlefield. Just the other day, it was this environment that Cipher Academy strove into; confident, swaggering, and about as qualified for the job as anyone could hope to be.

Cipher Academy‘s greatest asset is not actually anything within the manga itself, at least not yet. It’s the manga’s author; NISIOISIN, one of the modern anime / manga landscape’s great eccentrics. (On art, we have Yuuji Iwasaki.) You might not know that from reading Cipher Academy itself, though. So far, it’s actually been fairly tame by Isshin’s standards. Of course, that still means that this thing is pretty weird; the premise alone—our protagonist is a new student at an academy that specializes in teaching its students high-level cryptography—is fairly novel. Add in the general state of the manga zeitgeist, and the introductory chapter drops such shamelessly silly shit as AR glasses that help our hapless femboy protagonist bluff his way to Sherlock status (complete with “elementary!” as a catchphrase), a Jojo-posing mean-girl clique who threaten to indenture him on his first day, a habit of literally censoring some of its own dialogue (mostly, though I would be willing to bet not entirely, for comedic effect), and of course, this admirably-insane single page of exposition, which is, in its entirety, most of the worldbuilding that we’ve gotten so far.

As for what this thing is actually about, well, our protagonist, Iroha, enrolls essentially out of lack of better options. The titular academy is mostly but not entirely a girls’ school, and Iroha is in fact crossdressing throughout the entire thing, almost as a matter of fact. This might conveniently dovetail into some sort of harem setup later on, but the emphasis must be on the “some sort” there, given Isshin’s history with that genre. More importantly; he’s a total airhead and doesn’t have the slightest brain for cryptography at all. Enough so that, when he’s handed his first assignment in his home room (where he sits directly behind the beautiful and brilliant Kyoha. Keep her in mind), he has no real idea what to make of it.

Things seem rather dim for Iroha until he runs into Kogoe, who is on the run from Kyoha and her girls for reasons we’re not currently privy to. Iroha hides Kogoe, aided by the fact that Kyoha is immensely dismissive of him, writing him off as a “token boy”. (A meta-joke? Maybe.) Kogoe, grateful, offers Iroha these.

Google Glass, eat your heart out.

She then lightly teases Iroha about the possibility that she might be dangerous. Is this foreshadowing? Probably, although if she actually is a war criminal that’s less foreshadowing than one or two-shadowing. What we might make of her claim that she enrolled at the academy so she can become “a hero” without “resorting to violence” is similarly fairly up in the air. None of this is that strange; first chapters are supposed to have a lot of setup. (I also feel compelled to point out the SHAFT-style head tilt here. Look at that smirk; priceless.)

The real payoff of the first chapter comes when Kyoha and her circle confront Iroha again. Kyoha, correctly, accuses Iroha of having gotten someone else to do the assignment they were handed earlier. When Iroha denies the accusation, Kyoha forces a wager on her, and it’s here where things start to really take off. (Another sidenote; look at her face in that first panel. Positively Seto Kaiba-ish.)

As mentioned, those glasses that Kogoe gives Iroha aren’t actually just for show. They are, for lack of a better way to put it, hacking glasses. An AR interface that both solves no small amount of any given puzzle on its own but also directly aids Iroha in completing the rest. It seems like quite a handy thing to have at a school full of crypto nerds!

It’s a Unix system, he knows this.

The puzzle as-given turns out to have a fairly simple lateral thinking-esque solution (the cryptogram refers to someone, as Kyoha says, “amongst us.” Thinking about this for a few seconds will tip you off that the grammar there includes Iroha as well. Iroha himself, naturally, is the solution to the puzzle).

But we’re not done yet! In a final and very Isshin-y twist to this situation, this then happens.

Note the speech bubbles; that’s not Iroha himself talking. That’s the glasses. Or rather, Kogoe talking through them. During his very first day at school, Iroha has gotten Kyoha, earlier established not only as a brilliant cryptanalyst but also the heiress to a weapons company, under his thumb, through no active will of his own. Time will tell if that actually holds.

The opening chapter’s final scene is this cut back to Kogoe, squirreled away in some lair, where she casually ropes another definition of the term “crypto” into this manga’s world.

Cryptocurrency certainly works better as the proverbial treasure chest in what promises to be a wild battle-of-wits adventure than it does here in the real world, but more than anything, this scene did make me wonder if Cipher Academy might be more ambitious than I was initially inclined to give it credit for. Certainly, the “censored” speech bubbles are a funny joke, but they too could easily point to something more substantial. This early on, it’s hard to make strong claims, so firmly within the realm of speculation is where we remain.

In terms of pure quality, I’d call Cipher Academy more solid and promising than an out-and-out show stopper, but given that NISIOISIN is involved, it seems likely that even if it totally crashes and burns, it’ll at least do so entertainingly. The fact that Iroha himself is functionally just a pawn of Kogoe at the moment points toward some interesting possible dynamics; either one where Iroha is constantly shuffled between opposing forces, like a repeatedly-captured bughouse chess piece, or one where he must learn to leverage his limited assets in the form of the glasses in order to become a proper contender in his own right. There are a lot of open questions about how the world of Cipher Academy even functions, too.

All of this and more provides a number of opportunities for the manga to open up in interesting ways. I just hope that it actually takes them. If it does, you will likely see Cipher Academy in this column again.

Cipher Academy can be read legally, for free, in English, on MangaPlus.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: CHAINSAW MAN Revs Again

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

This column contains spoilers for Part 1 of Chainsaw Man.

Content Warning: The material covered here contains depictions of extreme violence.

Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with Chainsaw Man whatsoever. But sometimes, the stars align, and something grips you like it’s trying to choke you out and just doesn’t let go. Sometimes too, that happens just before a long-awaited follow-up is about to start. They say timing is everything because it is, and sometimes that timing works out in your favor. Hence this going up mere hours after the opening chapter of Part 2 drops on MangaPlus.

Suffice it to say we’re bending the rules here, too, since Chainsaw Man Part 2 is only a “new” manga with a fair bit of definitional stretching. (MangaPlus doesn’t even count it as a different series than Part 1.) So if you’re not caught up with the first Chainsaw Man arc, if you’re in the position I was in barely a week ago, I recommend closing this column now and go giving it a read, because I’m about to spoil the hell out of it.

It’s lurid, violent, bleak, coarse, and profane. The medium; a world where humanity’s fears materialize into living beings called devils, and of course, where humans called devil hunters must stop them. A story about bad people dying in worse ways that is not afraid to kill off even major characters sometimes suddenly and without warning, but never feels like it’s doing so for simple wanton shock value. It’s pretty fucking fantastic, easily a best-in-genre for the new decade without much in the way of competition. Part 2 has much to live up to.

The end of Part 1 marked also the end of the so-called “Public Safety Arc.” Denji surviving, nearly totally alone, after a wave of death and disillusionment that saw him shed whatever naivety he may still have had. But he’s come out the other side a better person regardless, even as he was one of just three named characters (four if you count Pochi) to survive the often-brutal first part of the manga.

It’s clear that some amount of time has passed, although perhaps not much. The main point to note here is the continued lionization of Chainsaw Man himself, Denji’s hellish heroic alter ego who now serves as both a source of inspiration to the general public and, going by the Curry Man buns we see in this chapter, marketing revenue. (That’s capitalism, babey.)

But anyone who’s main draw to the manga is Denji himself may be disappointed with the opening of Part 2. Instead, we follow a new character entirely, whose comparative mundanity is almost certainly a deliberate contrast to Denji’s dire circumstances at the start of his own story. Perhaps more importantly, like all of the best Chainsaw Man chapters, the opener for Part 2 begins with some off-the-wall crazy shit.

The logic behind this devil being weak is that no one is really scared of chickens. I feel like enough people have read Fourteen for there to be at least something there? Maybe not. It’s not like I’ve read it.

Our real POV character here is Asa Mitaka. An antisocial, and thus, profoundly normal, high school girl. The only real wrinkle here is that her parents were killed by devils, but that’s not particularly unusual within the context of Chainsaw Man. So the notion of the ordinary high school girl remains.

Don’t worry, she doesn’t stay ordinary for very long.

Mitaka seems to spend most of her days being vaguely annoyed at her classmates and, it’s pretty obvious even before it’s said out loud, jealous of their normal, healthy friendships with each other and, eventually, with Bucky, whose absolutely god-awful chicken puns inevitably endear him to the rest of the class. Meanwhile, the class president tries to get Mitaka to socialize a bit more and open up to the rest of her schoolmates.

Now, anyone familiar with Chainsaw Man would be easily able to tell that something was going to go south here, but I think a lot of people will mistakenly pin the suspicion on Bucky himself. Deliberate misdirection? Maybe. But maybe we’ve just been conditioned to be suspicious of devils over the course of the series’ run so far. Either way, he’s actually a genuinely affable sort by the look of it, and for a brief, split second, you can, if you want to, squint and pretend this is a happy manga where people are allowed to have personal realizations about themselves without an accompanying wallop of massive pain and loss.

Moments after this, she trips and falls, crushing the weak little devil to smithereens. It’s all rather nasty.

The fallout is immediate and predictable, and Mitaka takes this about as well as you’d expect.

The class president, as well as the two’s teacher, Mr. Tanaka, get the idea to visit the poor little hell-chicken’s grave. Tanaka is perhaps under the notion that this will make Mitaka feel better, but the class president quite quickly reveals herself to have a rather different motive, and things promptly get all sorts of gnarly.

In the fractions of a second Mitaka has before this monster—the Justice Devil, per the class president’s own admission—slashes her head in half, she feels relieved, because the president brags that she tripped Mitaka, so Bucky’s death wasn’t really her fault. Implicitly, she’s also relieved that she won’t be hurt anymore. That’s the kind of weapons-grade depressing you can expect from Chainsaw Man.

But it also wouldn’t be Chainsaw Man without some bolt-from-the-blue insane twist, and wouldn’t you know it, even with her head doing its best impression of a rotting pumpkin, Mitaka has just enough presence of mind to witness—and hear—a devilish owl perching on a nearby stoplight.

We don’t hear Mitaka think ‘yes’, but what happens next implies that either she did or the owl even asking was a formality. Not a page later, Mitaka—or at least, something in Mitaka’s body—rises back to her feet, only a truly wicked scar where her head was previously carved in half.

The natural questions follow; “Didn’t you just die?” “What the hell are you?” etc.

Reborn, “Mitaka” replies by doing this.

And introduces herself as The War Devil. What follows is, of course, an absolute show-stopper. Hyperviolence on a level that is hard to even describe with words; somewhere in there between the spinal cord longsword and the hand grenade reconstituted from the Justice Devil’s own actual arm, is the kind of bloody poetry that you really just can’t get outside of comic books. It all ends in an explosion and a shower of gore, because obviously it does, this is Chainsaw Man, remember? This kind of casual “I’m back, bitch” flexing is, if anything, hugely welcome in a medium that is only very rarely kind to even its superstars. This is mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto in a braggart mode he’s earned every right to be in.

Bring your own Black Sabbath.

The chapter’s last page establishes that everything we’ve just seen, if it weren’t already obvious, is an origin story. It’s never a safe bet to call any character’s longevity in Chainsaw Man, but Mitaka (or the War Devil? Or both? It’s a bit hard to say) seems like she’ll stick around for a long while. In the very closing moments here, she makes a comment about nuclear weapons that should be tossing up all kinds of red flags for any long-time Chainsaw Man readers; it’s been established before that those were among the concepts “removed” from reality by Makima’s makimachinations. (On that note; Makima is probably my favorite character in the whole manga, and I think about the only thing this chapter was missing was an appearance by her reincarnated self in the form of Nayuta. But! That will come in time.)

Trying to forecast almost anything about Chainsaw Man is a fool’s game, so I won’t pretend I’ve got anything sussed out. For me, the wait between the old and new Chainsaw Man was only a few days, and even I’m mostly just super happy to have it back. I find it difficult to imagine enduring the whole year-ish hiatus, so I know for sure I’m far from the only person who’s glad to see it again.

Chainsaw Man may well appear here on Magic Planet Anime again in the, ultimately, not-too-distant future, but until then, manga fans.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 1 – Night Flight

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) is having girl problems. Quite the opposite of the many heartbroken protagonists who litter his genre, Ko has recently turned someone else down, on the grounds that he doesn’t really understand what “love” or wanting to date someone actually are yet. Through a combination of resultant bullying and just plain ol’ feeling bad, this has made him want to stop going to school. So, he does. He skips class by day and walks about town late at night. The city is neon-on-black and blown out around him as he absorbs the relative tranquility of a small playground and rambles to himself.

Scrolling post-sundown social media (never a great idea), he gets it in his head to try drinking, despite being only 14. He finds an alcohol vending machine—did you know those were a thing? I certainly didn’t—and, more than a little paranoid as he does so, slips a few coins in. The machine emits a yellow-amber glow all the while, almost sickly in its illumination of the scenery.

He is then promptly jumpscared.

That is Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), nighttime socialite, owner of a pretty cool cloak, and vampire. The specifics are less important than the broadstroke; Nazuna turns Ko’s life on its head over the course of their single night together, which takes up the entire first episode, with not a single second of concession to the morning after. She chats up drunk salarymen, she teases and prods Ko, she says she likes to help people who can’t sleep at night solve their problems.

She takes him to her apartment.

Sadly, she does not climb up the side of her apartment in lizard fashion.

An aside; Call of the Night is somewhat new territory for this site. Despite being the holder of the seasonal romcom slot like previous Let’s Watch subjects My Dress-Up Darling and Kaguya-sama: Love is War!, Call of the Night is not particularly similar to either, and it would be a mistake to lump them together simply because they’re part of the same genre. Call of the Night‘s pedigree is older, and puts the series itself in a more sensible context. After all, people being attracted to vampires instead of (or in addition to) being afraid of them stretches back to the very dawn of popular vampire fiction. They’re nothing new in anime, either, with more or less popular titles that are about or prominently feature a vampire love interest including, just off the top of my own head, Rosario+Vampire, Vampire Knight, Actually, I Am…. / My Monster Secret, Seifuku no Vampiress Lord, Vampeerz, etc.

These span several different genres, but what all have in common is that the vampire is portrayed, at least initially, and in line with their origins as a creature of the horror genre, as something dangerous. Something that warrants caution. This is true of Call of the Night as well, even as Ko himself throws that caution to the wind not long after discovering Nazuna’s true nature and he decides he wants in on the whole “vampire” thing, the framing never lets her seem too innocent for too long. For every cut that depicts Nazuna like this, where she says something goofy or outright dumb.

There’s another that portrays her like this; a predatorial-in-the-animal-sense midnight stalker. She’s a vampire. Let her bite you.

Now, while danger can certainly be scary, it can also be salacious, and unsurprisingly that’s the angle that most of Call of the Night‘s more intense scenes take. Even less surprisingly, the attempts to play up Nazuna’s conventional sex appeal don’t work nearly as well as those that focus her vampiric features. The former are simply too clean. There’s a shot in here where the camera rotates around her body in an attempt to show off her midriff and it just looks absurd. (What is she, a sports car?) This is without mentioning what looks a lot like airbrushing on parts of her body, it just all looks too silly to take seriously.

The latter though? Well, there’s an old joke in some circles about how you can tell when they get someone who’s “into feet” (or into whatever) to animate a given scene. I think Call of the Night‘s team has someone who’s into teeth.

If they could only nail one, though, it’s actually better for it to be the latter. Ko, after all, is not so much attracted to Nazuna yet as he’s attracted to the idea of becoming a vampire, as is established not long after Nazuna reveals that she is one. We need to see this stuff through his eyes for that desire to make sense on a literal level (and on a less literal one, depicting some kind of temptation only works in any context if you can successfully convey said tempting). Fill in your own vice or vices here; is “vampirism” code for sex? Drugs? Booze? Just the general nightlife experience? There’s no reason it can’t be all of the above, and by keeping the metaphor fairly broad and open to finer interpretation, Call of the Night‘s first episode mostly succeeds in its aims of making Ko’s attraction to Nazuna—or perhaps more, what Nazuna offers—understandable, in spite of some minor flaws.

Call of the Night does also zero in on one particular thing. Nazuna, at one point, asks Ko why he thinks people stay up late in the first place. It’s a rhetorical question, and she provides her own answer.

This is an interesting notion, and certainly one that maps to why a lot of say, millennials like myself stay up too late, but the way Nazuna plays it is even more interesting. Later in the episode, Ko expresses that he knows he shouldn’t be doing “something like this”—that is to say, this whole skipping school and staying out at night bit—in the first place. Nazuna, who seems to have taken an interest in him despite herself, responds to that thought by hovering above the ground, and asking him this.

The question pierces the thematic heart of Call of the Night in general. How does Ko feel about all this? He says to himself, remembering back to the incident at school, that he tried to do the right thing. Nazuna cuts in—literally invading the flashback—to ask why he even cares.

It’s clear that Nazuna, for whatever reason or reasons, wants to bring him over to the very literal dark side. He can be a creature of the night too, if he wants to be. And that is, abstractly, what the show says for anyone; the only requirement for being an outcast, after all, is that you are cast out. Ko, at least in his own mind, already has been. The freaks come out at night, the question for Ko—and more broadly for anyone—is simply whether they feel they fit in more with them, or with the normal folks who thrive while the Sun’s up.

On another level; the extent to which Nazuna is a shamelessly bad influence adds further knots to the already twisty question of how “okay” any of this is. But personally, I’m less interested in the question of if Nazuna’s actions are in some way moral and more in the question of if this resonates both with its intended audience and more generally.

That’s a question that it will take the rest of Call of the Night’s thirteen episodes to answer, so for now, it’s an open one. But! I think this first showing is promising. Toward the end of “Night Flight”, the episode earns its title, as Nazuna gives Ko the thrill of his life whether he wants it or not.

She kicks him off of a roof, and lets him panic mid-freefall for a moment. Of course, she swoops down to save him, picking him up and carrying him away as ED theme kicks in.1 In that moment, Call of the Night is pure black magic. If it keeps figuring out how to do that, it has nothing to worry about; the night is still young.

1: Also called “Call of the Night”, and after which the manga was originally named. I did not know this when I wrote the article and have updated the phrasing here and added this footnote to reflect the reality of the situation.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Something is Wrong in SMILE OF THE ARSNOTORIA THE ANIMATION

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

As we stand in the blistering spring wind,
we are resolute, humble, and decorous.
We are Pentagrams,
and with the pride of flowers,
we learn and study hard.

I really must, before saying anything at all about this series, direct even site regulars to the warning in the header. Arsnotoria is the sort of thing I’d recommend going into as blind as possible. (Even saying that much is a bit of a giveaway, but there’s a certain amount of that which can’t be helped.)

But let’s get into it, shall we?

You get them a few times per year; anime whose premieres just make you go “huh?”

Often, they start out as one genre and then take a left turn into another. Or their tone does a total headstand somewhere in the first episode or two. Something like that. By me even mentioning this, you can guess that Smile of The Arsnotoria: The Animation—clunky title and all—is an example of this, but it’s worth explaining why even bringing that up is noteworthy. These days, these kinds of swerves don’t have much impact anymore. Somewhere after Gakkou Gurashi people started to almost expect them, and most modern examples don’t even bother waiting until the premiere to tip their hand, with, for example, one of Arsnotoria‘s contemporaries Lycoris Recoil not even keeping up the facade for all of its preview trailers. So, if nothing else, if the entire rest of the series is a total, out-and-out bomb that drops off the face of the Earth after it finishes airing, it should at least be noted for its restraint.

There are 22 minutes in Arsnotoria‘s first episode. About 20 of them are extremely pleasant, almost iyashikei-esque slice of life coziness. Let’s talk about those minutes first, since they form the bulk of the episode.

Right from the top, we’re dropped to the goings-on in a magical academy of some sort, and into the lives of five schoolgirls. These are Arsnotoria herself (Misaki Kuno), Mell (Miharu Hanai), Ko Alberta (Miyu Tomita), Picatrix (Eri Yukimura), and Abramelin (Eriko Matsui). No, I don’t know why Ko is the only one with a last name either (although there is brief mention of a Grand Alberta, also. Maybe they’re related).

They fall into familiar and broad character archetypes; Arsnotoria is the cutesy and naive one, Mell is rambunctious and michievious, Ko is a sleepyhead who’s more aware than she lets on, Picatrix is an ojou complete with ending most of her sentences with “desu wa”, and Abramelin is the serious, responsible one. These aren’t the most compelling or deep characters, but they work in the sort of easygoing, slice of life mold that most of the episode traffics in.

“Easygoing” might be underselling it, really. Much of the episode is positively languid, and it’s telling that a solid 10 minutes are taken up by the characters discussing tea. This admittedly gets a little boring toward the end, but it’s to Arsnotoria‘s credit that it manages to actually keep this fairly engaging for most of that time. Discussions of what side one butters their scones on recall the (in?)famous chocolate coronet scene in Lucky Star. And at one point, Ko tries to bash a sealed jam jar open with some lavishly-animated and quite powerful looking magic wherein she summons a huge, bandaged hand to punch it.

Aside from this, there are a few setting details. The school this all takes place at, the “academy city” of Ashlam, seems to basically be a furnishing school for young arcanists, which is perfectly fine as a setting and it’s one plenty of other things have done (in anime alone you have everything from Tweeny Witches to Little Witch Academia to Mahou Girls Precure to, perhaps most relevant for this part of the episode, Mysteria Friends). A fair bit of proper terminology gets lobbed at us here. Not quite enough to be a Proper Noun Machine Gun, but maybe a Proper Noun Slingshot.

And mixed in with all this are some interesting bits about London being on “the surface”, which seems to both imply (somewhat surprisingly) that this takes place in a version of our world, and that Ashlam is actually physically above the ground.

All of this may seem irrelevant, given the total tonal 180 that you’re all aware, if you’ve gotten this far in the article, is coming, but there is one other detail that seems significant; the opening of the episode sees our characters return from a “watch” shift. A watch for what is not a question I thought to ask while first viewing the scene, but it’s certainly on my mind at this point.

Because, yes, in its final two minutes or so, Arsnotoria completely tips its hand, in perhaps the most dope slap-blunt way possible. A cut to black, the word “WARNING” inexplicably written across the screen in bright red, and then this.

A scene of total, apocalyptic ruin. (Complete with some very nice billowing fire animation.) Inquisitors patrol streets and slaughter citizens for being “Negatives,” explaining nothing with their cryptic comments as they do so. It does not even look like it’s from the same universe as the entire preceding 20 minutes, and with just that little bit of footage, Arsnotoria goes from being enjoyable if predictable to a total fucking wildcard.

None of this necessarily means that Arsnotoria will be good. It is entirely possible to have an interesting structure but fail on any number of other counts (or even all other counts), but it’s at least a good sign.

The Takeaway: Really, this one is pretty simple. If you enjoy throwing caution to the wind and gambling on something that no one has any real idea as to where it’s going, you want in on this. If not, you can probably skip it.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Logged in and Losing it in YUREI DECO

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Entertain this particular dystopian thought for a moment; what if the world ran on Twitter likes? That, more or less, is the backbone of the society envisioned by YUREI DECO, a neon-block dystopia where the Metaverse has grown beyond its Silicon Valley bounds and swallowed the real world whole, such that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the two. (This isn’t me reaching, it’s literally called “The Hyperverse” in-show.) Social media tokens called “Love” equate one to one with the sum total of your personal value, and seemingly the whole world is overlaid with a second digital layer of reality that there is no meaningful escape from. Dual implants in each eye, the DECOs of one half of the title, ensure that everyone is plugged in at all times. Truly, Yurei Deco‘s world is one where we are all terminally online, and there is no logging off for anybody.

This is the setting we’re dropped into, handy explanation and all, at the start of this series’ first episode, as we sit in on our main character, Berry (Mira Kawakatsu) and the glorified Zoom class that she calls school. Immediately, we get the sense that Berry is someone who plays outside the rules, as she pulls off some minor computer wizardry to be able to talk to two of her classmates without their teacher noticing. Passing notes for the cyberpunk age, perhaps.

(Somewhere in his lecture, which also serves as our introduction to the setting, Berry’s professor calls the city they live in “the purest expression of liberalism ever to have existed.” Subtle!)

We soon learn that a mysterious person—or perhaps a force—called Phantom Zero has been hitting whole neighborhoods at a time and draining their Love accounts, a big deal in a city where Love is both money and social status. Berry is obsessed with Phantom Zero, and it’s through her eyes and ears that most of this first episode takes place. Including when one of her DECO implants starts glitching out, and she finds a strange origami flower stuck to a lamppost.

That flower, we eventually learn, is the doing of our other main character, a slang-tangling hacker-conman who initially seems like they might be behind the whole “Phantom Zero” thing, given that one of the first things we see her do is sucker a random influencer out of most of his Love. This character’s name, incidentally, is actually just is Hack (Anna Nagase), although you’d have to look at supplementary materials to know that at this point, since it’s not said outright in the first episode.

.hack//Cool Visor, Kid

Berry of course becomes fixated on Hack, who she believes to be responsible for the Phantom Zero phenomenon. Without indulging in an overabundance of detail, she turns out to be wrong, and the real culprit is someone even more mysterious.

The show’s actual plot details aside, what do we make of YUREI DECO so far? Personally, I’m happy to have it around. It’s been a bit since we had a show with interesting visuals that tried to tackle Serious Subjects, or at least, one that didn’t flame out disappointingly. (Sorry, Tokyo 24th Ward.) The series definitely reminds me a fair bit of DECA-DENCE, another colorful cyberpunk series with an all-caps title. More distantly, it recalls Kaiba, and while I’ve not seen Dennou Coil I know enough about it for the multiple comparisons I’ve seen between the two on social media to make sense to me.

A lot of lofty expectations tend to get placed upon anime like this, and this one in particular also happens to be its director’s first TV anime (Tomohisa Shimoyama, though it’s worth noting that he has various credits on things going all the way back to some animation work on Chobits. There’s a show you probably haven’t thought about in a while). While this first episode is a pretty good indication that YUREI DECO is up to that challenge, I do hope folks won’t lose the forest for the trees. There’s a lot to love here already, regardless of where it ends up going.

The Takeaway: If you’ve been looking for the next visually interesting Big Ideas show to come along, you should absolutely be watching this. As for anyone else, I think it’s certainly at least worth checking out.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 1 – “Operation Strix”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

“Papa is a huge liar. But he’s such a cool liar!”

His codename is “Twilight,” alias Loid Forger (Takuya Eguchi). His real name unknown and unknowable. He is a spy; an international man of mystery. A shadow, a whisper. No one knows his name. In what is not said to be but clearly is the cold war, a certain nation stands divided in two. There, Loid is deployed for the commencement of “Operation Strix,” his toughest assignment yet. What could possibly challenge this earl of espionage? This master of manipulation?

Well, domestic life, for one. Loid’s assignment: find a wife and adopt a child, blend in as seamlessly as possible, and send said child to a prestigious private academy to get close to one of the nation’s top political leaders, a man of near-paranoiac caution who rarely makes himself available except at events for that very school. So begins SPY x FAMILY, Wit Studio and CloverWorks‘ adaption of the wildly successful Shonen Jump manga. So also begins our second Let’s Watch column of the season. We’re in for a ride, folks. Strap in.

For Loid, the first order of business is procuring a child. Time is of the essence, so doing so the—ahem—traditional way is out of the question. As such, the first major undertaking our big heroic superspy sets out on in SPY x FAMILY is a trip to a run-down, skeevy orphanage. There, he adopts Anya (Atsumi Tanezaki), a six-year-old girl with a very cute hair style.

Seriously though what ARE those things on her head? Antennae?

She’s also telepathic, which leads to quite a few shenanigans. Namely; it takes Anya only a few moments to learn that Loid is a spy, being able to read his mind and all. This creates a fun dynamic wherein Loid thinks he has to hide his profession from Anya, who knows what he’s thinking at all times anyway, but who in turn also hides the fact that she knows what Loid really is. The implicit comedic observation that SPY x FAMILY makes here is that children, like spies, have thought processes that are pretty incomprehensible to the rest of us.

Anya is also afraid of what might happen if Loid finds out she can read minds. We’re told upfront that she’s been adopted and then returned to the orphanage four times before. This is a cloud that hangs over all of Loid and Anya’s interactions and provides an interesting shade to even Anya’s silliest antics. Her deep and abiding love of peanuts, for example. (Atsumi Tanezaki also deserves some real credit here for lending a believably childish air to her vocal tics.)

SPY x FAMILY is not a drama, really. But you could make the case for “dramedy,” perhaps, if heavier on the “edy” side. It has the good sense to cut its comedic side with more tonally complex moments, creating an actual emotional core as opposed to just a parade of gags. Anya fucking around with Loid’s spy equipment is funny. Her then panicking, wondering if she’ll be sent back to the orphanage if he finds out, and flashing back to her days as “Subject 7” in the facility she was born in? That’s sad. And like any good dramedy, SPY x FAMILY can juxtapose these polar opposites without making either feel out of place. This is, after all, a little girl that we’re talking about. Kids do think like that, and Anya’s been through more than most.

That’s not to say that all of this totally works. Later in the episode, after a great action sequence where Loid rescues Anya from the direct result of said equipment-fuck-arounding, he engages in a bit of self-lionizing, and we get some rather leaden backstory. This comes too early and too unearned to really hit the way the show seems to want it to. (This is to say nothing of it bumping up against the fact that, you know, real spies are generally not great people. SPY x FAMILY generally renders the profession too ridiculous to feel like it’s glorifying it, but it does occasionally come close.) Thankfully, it’s brief, and not enough to seriously ding the episode in any real way.

The episode ends with Anya successfully passing the exam to get into the private school that forms the crux of Loid’s mission. Perhaps more importantly; it ends with Anya snuggling up to her adopted dad on a couch (and him slightly freaking out about it. He fell asleep in front of someone! That’s a huge no-no for a spy). Then things, as they always do, hit a slight snag.

But we’ll discuss the full implications of that next week. See you then, anime fans.

Oh, I think I already have, episode title. I think I already have.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: BIRDIE WING Tees Off

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

“The Symphogear of Golf”

-Blurb for a now-deleted ‘review’ of the first episode by Anilist user SolidQuentin.

From the start, I suspected there was something strange about this one. Even by the standards of the “cute girls doing cute things” pseudogenre, golf is a reach. Pairing up a genre of anime that already gets criticized for being dull with what is unquestionably the most boring major sport in the world seems like a recipe for disaster, on the surface. Thankfully, Birdie Wing isn’t anything like that at all. Instead, it’s one of those shows where a random game or spectator sport–golf, naturally, this time around–is taken with a seriousness by absolutely everybody that, in the real world, is usually reserved for matters of religion and politics. Late in its first episode, someone in Birdie Wing calls golf a “sacred sport.” They are not being ironic.

That said, with apologies to SolidQuentin, Birdie Wing is not nearly visually dynamic enough to be “the Symphogear of golf.” At least not yet. (And really, that’s no knock, that’s a hard bar to clear.) But it does manage to make an honest run at the “most unhinged show of the season” title in a season that also includes ESTAB-LIFE. That’s worth something on its own.

The trick here is that our protagonist, the mononymic Eve (Akari Kitou), is not really a golfer. She’s more of a….golf mercenary. A golf secret agent. A golf hitman. The first thing we see her do is impersonate a pro golfer–complete with a latex disguise–and play a qualifier tournament to said pro’s specifications (fourth place, nothing showy.) After she’s paid for that job, we eventually learn that she, her friend / girlfriend / something Lily Lipman (Akira Sekine), and Lily’s older sister live and work out of a bar, where they also take care of three orphans. Yes, really.

Eve’s golfing habits are half moneymaking scheme and half personal obsession. Over the course of the first episode we see her take on a masked, harlequin-themed golfer in the middle of the night and handily win 6,000 Euros in a bet. (Which she later loses by buying off a crooked cop harassing Lily’s sister.) She trains by bullseye-ing golf balls into rusty paintbuckets from a distance. There’s a flashback, which is inexplicably presented like a sepia-toned music video, where someone (presumably either her father or a former coach) compares golfing to firing a gun, saying that one should mentally destroy their opponents and “pierce their hearts.” All this in greyscale while Eve’s hair glows a fiery orange and she’s surrounded by whiffed shots.

Oh! And Eve has a nickname; The Rainbow Bullet.

It makes a kind of sense.

Despite all this, Eve mostly plays for money, downplaying her shonen protagonist-level skills by dropping this particularly great line.

She’s akin to an absurdist extension of the classic “perfect swordsman” trope. And it’s off that absurdity that Birdie Wing mostly gets its charge, as of now. (I could not help but laugh when, in her second match of the episode, Eve deliberately aims for a tree branch and breaks it with her shot, completely bypassing the course’s main obstacle.)

If you want to reach for themes, you could maybe dig up something about rich, establishment folk being more preoccupied with appearances than actual accomplishment. (Note how Eve’s second opponent first denigrates her for her appearance. And then tries to bail on the aforementioned broken tree branch match because she doesn’t want to “throw off her game for [a later] tournament.”) But that does feel like a stretch, this early on. And really, something this wonderfully stupid doesn’t really need themes, it just needs to keep up the absurdity.

Eve does meet someone who seems like she might become a worthy opponent–a short Japanese girl named Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto) who, despite her small stature, totes an utterly absurd four-foot golf club–but we don’t actually see their match here. That’s presumably for next week.

The fact of the matter is that Birdie Wing‘s first episode works because of the sheer friction between the subject matter–again, one of the most boring sports known to man–and the shonen-esque seriousness everyone applies to it, especially Eve. And this is to say nothing of the dialogue, which serves as ample evidence that the folks behind this show aren’t taking it any more seriously than we are.

Golfing!

That’s a trick that works fine for now, but the show can’t simply coast for twelve weeks. It’ll either have to continually top itself (a difficult prospect, but not an impossible one), or it will have to actually wring some meaning out of all this absurdity (likewise). But I’m at least interested in finding out if it manages to do either of these, and if a first episode hooks you in, then it’s largely served its purpose.

The Takeaway: Fans of the sublimely stupid and of ridiculous premises should put this one on the priority list. As for everyone else, it’ll take you about five minutes tops to find out if this is “your thing” or not. There’s no reason to not at least check out the premiere.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Soothing World of HEALER GIRL

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Before we even talk about Healer Girl, Studio 3Hz‘ new original anime project, let’s briefly discuss its trailer.

Released inconspicuously back in December, this PV is absolutely spellbinding. As recently as a few days ago, I’ve previously called Healer Girl an idol series, and it does have an associated idol group. But the actual Healer Girls are more Wilson Philips than AKB48, and as the soft, light pop music flows out of your speakers you’ll eventually notice the visuals, too. Our girls fly in the air, their songs extend literal beams of music outward, raising stone pillars from the ground and healing all who hear them. They’re dressed in all white, like they were angels. It’s one of the most singular PVs in recent memory, and Healer Girl the actual show has a lot to live up to.

Let this much be said: it must know that, because it puts a strong foot forward. It is exactly three and a half seconds into Healer Girl before we get our first piece of music. Before the opening credits even drop, Kana Fujii (Carin Isobe), our lead, sings a soft little song to a group of schoolchildren who were roughhousing. The scrape on a little boy’s knee disappears in the blink of an eye. One boy points out to another that this isn’t “magic,” it’s healing. This is a pretty bold first step for your show to take, and it speaks to a lot of confidence on the part of the writers.

After the OP finishes, we get some explanations for what exactly is going on. Healer Girl takes place in a world where “Song Medicine” is an accepted, scientific form of treatment. (Here referred to as the “third major branch” of medicine. My brief time working at a pharmacy does not qualify me to speak on how real either of the other two are, I have no idea.) The few pieces of terminology we get throughout the episode are–obviously–audiomedical technobabble, but that’s fine. The point is made; these girls are less like idols and more like doctors. Or med students, since our three leads are apprentices. They mostly train rather than do anything more involved at this stage in their careers. There are pushups.

The first half of the episode plays out like a reasonably typical work or school life comedy, albeit one set in a world with key differences from our own. Healer Girl is certainly not short on the merits that the better examples of these shows have; there’s a lot of colorful animation, some interesting directorial decisions (the series has a fixation on rotating the POV of a shot), and the coveted Good FacesTM that seal the deal on any character comedy. Kana’s co-stars are fun, too, with simple personalities that avoid being one-note. Reimi Itsushiro (Marina Horiuchi) is the straightlaced one, but she has a fixation on the apprentices’ collective teacher, Ria Karasuma (Ayahi Takagaki). The crush she harbors on Ria is hilariously unsubtle. I might use the word “thirsty.”

Hibiki Morishima (Akane Kumada) is soft-spoken and eccentric, at various points in the episode she professes to be scared of manju(?) and white rice(??) and tries to freak out her fellow apprentices by claiming there are ghosts in her bedroom.

On top of all this, Healer Girl is also kind of a musical! There are, by my count, two proper songs and a medley in this first episode. Which, combined with those aforementioned strengths, would make Healer Girl recommendable on its own.

Before we get to the last thing about the show, though, we should back up slightly. It’s established that that little stunt that Kana pulled in the opening minutes isn’t something mere apprentices are actually allowed to do. For reasons left ambiguous to us, healing music is strictly regulated. Apprentices doing so much as singing away a knee-scrape is very much not okay.

Which leads us to the closing act of the episode. A little girl named Yui pounds on the front door of the clinic while Ria and the other in-house doctor happen to be out giving a conference. Her grandmother is in trouble, and she doesn’t know what to do. Our apprentices, accordingly, spring into action; dialing an ambulance, trying to get ahold of Ria, and heading to Yui’s house to comfort the patient, respectively.

It’s Kana who takes that last job, and good lord does she ace it. She knows–and we know, from earlier–that she shouldn’t try to heal this old woman, so she improvises, instead singing simply to stabilize her and calm her down while the ambulance arrives, and it is as she’s doing this that Healer Girl goes from having a good first episode to having an amazing one.

The central connection that Healer Girl makes, even this early on, is between music and medicine. One heals the soul, the other heals the body. Healer Girl‘s main trick is to make that connection literal with music that can soothe both. Other anime in and around the idol genre have occasionally flirted with spiritual, magical, or religious imagery, but, speaking personally, I’ve often been frustrated by how hesitant they are to commit. If you’re going to draw up grandiose metaphors, go hard on those metaphors! Restraint is for suckers, and it makes most popular art worse! Go fully unhinged! Have your idols literally heal the sick! Do it! Madonna wasn’t afraid to compare herself to Jesus and you shouldn’t be either!

Healer Girl seems to agree; when Kana sings to this poor old woman, a flower blooms beneath her feet, she levitates in the air and tiny poppets in her own image materialize from the ether to calm her patient down.

It is a beautiful thing to watch, and the show damn well knows it, because when Ria does arrive, she excuses her apprentice’s kinda-sorta rule break, and is as impressed with her display as any of us are. This is not the face of a woman who’s unhappy.

There’s some more exposition here–apparently this transcendentally luminous phenomenon we just witnessed is called an “Image”, and the fact that Kana’s changes while she sings is somehow notable–but mostly everyone is just happy that the old woman is okay. Kana, deservedly, takes some time in the episodes final moments to bask in a job well done.

If you’re a certain kind of person I could see finding Healer Girl‘s whole thing offputting or even creepy. There is no denying that the little worldbuilding we get here also raises some odd questions about the setting. (What is the role of non-healing music, for example? Does it even exist? Does all of it sound like early 90s light pop?) But I can’t pretend to be part of that group, I’m all in on Healer Girl. I have tried to refrain from making predictions about a show’s success (doing so last season ended, I would say, embarrassingly), but I certainly want this one to keep up this level of quality.

Speaking personally, I had a very bad morning before I sat down to watch Healer Girl. A morning filled with medical anxiety, even, complete with missing prescription refills and an agonizing wait in a doctor’s office. Healer Girl made me feel better, too, and I cannot give the series a stronger endorsement than that. Early in the episode, Reimi compares recorded healing music to OTC drugs. But what can I say? Sometimes the over-the-counter stuff works.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Reckoning with MAGIA RECORD: DAWN OF A SHALLOW DREAM

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Here we are, again and at last. I have written about Magia Record; the anime adaption of a mobile game spinoff of the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica, again, and again, and again over the past two years. This will, barring something truly unexpected occurring, be the final time. Dawn of a Shallow Dream is the final “season”–really more of a movie with intermissions–of the series. Part of me will miss it.

Magia Record on the whole is, to use a term I consider neutral, but some would call a denigration, messy. Its pieces do not all fit neatly together. It overreaches, and from a purely technical point of view, it’s a serious mixed bag, marrying near-immaculate directing with consistently inconsistent quality of actual, y’know, drawings. Its three seasons are all very different and its cast of characters is too large for it develop them all equally-well. Its core theme–persistence in the face even of impossible odds and crushing despair–is arguably overdone within this genre, and is better-executed by its parent series, by Symphogear, and perhaps even by distant cousins like Day Break Illusion. Aren’t we all a bit tired of this by now?

Well, if you’re reading this, you probably know how I feel about these things (and if not, you will soon enough.) So, it will not surprise you that the answer from me, the woman who thought Blue Reflection Ray was really underrated, is “no, I’m not tired of it at all.” Bring them on a hundred strong, I say.

My thoughts on Magia Record have shifted a bit several times since the first season originally aired, but I remain resolute on a key point. As a “Precurification” of the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s general idea–that is to say, a vehicle for delivering and iterating on “Madoka stories” within a fixed format–it absolutely kills. Shallow Dream is its swing at a grand finale. It doesn’t hit every target perfectly, and I will discuss what bones to pick I do have a bit farther down, but it makes a good show of things in its own way.

Magia Record‘s plot has always been a point of contention; the show is very cognizant of its own worldbuilding. Lucid, even. But that doesn’t translate to it always being clear to the viewers. This is probably the simplest it’s ever gotten, and thankfully things are conveyed fairly strongly here. Even so, to sum it up I can only offer something like; Iroha (Momo Asakura) and friends stop Embryo Eve by weaponizing the power of human connection. Not perfectly, of course, because this is Madoka, but, you know, pretty well. Along the way we get some long-overdue explanations for what was going on with Iroha’s sister and their two friends. Also because this is Madoka, about a quarter of the cast dies along the way. You can’t win ’em all.

I completely understand why MagiReco’s insistence on burrowing so heavily into its foretext is offputting to some (I would argue it’s still in service of a solid thematic goal, regardless), but it does mean that for the hardcore magical girl fan, Magia Record has been a treat of well-done henshin sequences, fight scenes, and just in general, deliciously weird imagery that nothing else in the genre quite touches. We don’t get as much of that in “season three” here as we did last year for season two (there’s really only one fight in the whole thing and it’s pretty brief), but it remains a pleasure to look at, even when the character art goes headlong into “why is SHAFT like this?” territory.

The background we get for Touka (Rie Kugimiya), Nemu (Sumire Mohoroshi), and Iroha’s long-missing sister Ui (Manaka Iwami) fill in a lot of the gaps from the first two seasons, which does have the nice benefit of making this all feel a little more like it’s one thing instead of three discrete shows under a broad umbrella. Their turn from good intentions to total villainy makes sense in hindsight. From just wanting to save Iroha, to trying to loophole their way out of the magical girl system entirely–which of course, horribly backfires and is why Ui goes missing in the first place–and finally to their full villainous, cult leader-esque incarnation from seasons one and two, it’s all compelling stuff, a story of how the best of intentions can go horribly awry when met with poorly understood circumstances.

Elsewhere, Momoko (Mikako Komatsu) and Mifuyu (Mai Nakahara) give their lives to free as many of the girls trapped by Magius’ “witch factory” as they possibly can. The sequence is heartwarming and tinged with a cosmic all-is-love energy. Nothing in the Madoka universe comes without sacrifice, of course, but we would all be lucky to go out, if we had to, while helping so many others.

Not everything works quite so well. In particular, I can’t help but be a touch disappointed with the treatment of Kuroe (Kana Hanazawa), who becomes a witch here before being killed off, mostly to teach Iroha a lesson about how she can’t just impose her own worldview on other people. This feels like something that should’ve come up more strongly than this earlier in the series, and Kuroe being offed when we just got to really know her does leave something of a bad taste in my mouth. Even so, the sequence is undeniably pretty damn cool.

The last battle against Eve, in which it is only just barely prevented from merging with Walpurgisnacht, is suitably epic, even when it gets interrupted by the ranting, raving, honestly a little out-of-nowhere? Hijacking by Alina Gray (Ayana Taketatsu).

These scenes are all notable individually, and there are a number of others I’ve not discussed here. (Yachiyo (Sora Amamiya) makes up for her absence from much of the season by getting a lovely, touching reunion with her late partners, or rather, the magic they held that lives on inside her, for example.) But you may ask what this all adds up to. It’s a fair question.

The truth of the matter is that Magia Record is, again, messy. It is not an immaculate distillation of its core values down to a euphoric four-episode package. It does not “transcend” and become “more than the sum of its parts,” perhaps. But I challenge anyone with even the slightest shred of affection for this series–Madoka, not just Magia Record–to watch the closing shots; where the surviving magical girls band together and push forward, heads held high even in the face of their unenviable, tragic situation, and not feel something.

Magia Record ends with a literal closing of the book; the white-gloved hands of a Goddess (Aoi Yuuki) shutting it with an affectionate finality. The girls narrate that no one knows of the battles they fought and what they sacrificed. That no one knows of the dreams they held that were lost. Of their picking up the pieces and starting again. The existence of the series itself, and of this review, is proof otherwise, of course. And you could interpret this as a tragic ending, if you were so inclined. But what, really, is more positive than starting again? I have said this before in other columns and will say it again in many more. The true essence of hope–that nebulous thing–is to live on, and to help others do the same.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [4/2/22]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

Hi folks! I’ve been crazy busy this week with impressions articles (a trend that will likely continue at least somewhat into next week and possibly even the week after), so I haven’t had a ton of time to write much else. (Especially considering that for administrative reasons, it’s arriving a day early.) Still, I hope you appreciate the Priconne writeup below.

Before that, though! The Community Choice Poll has concluded, and in hindsight the victor was perhaps a bit obvious. Still, I didn’t expect it to absolutely crush its competition in the way that it did.

So! Our previous community choice winner–My Dress-Up Darling–was a CloverWorks-animated romcom. Congratulations to our new community choice winner. SPY X FAMILY, a CloverWorks-animated romcom.

Jokes aside, I hope you look forward to my covering the series. I’m sure you’re all as excited to see Yor animated on the silver screen as I am. And I’m sure the rest of the show will be pretty good, too. Best of luck next time to the runners-up Nijigasaki High School Idol Club Season 2, The Demon Girl Next Door Season 2, and BIRDIE WING.

Wait, really, BIRDIE WING? Huh.

In any case, you can look forward to seeing those shows covered here on MPA as well to at least some extent.

Not on the Frontline Report though, because this is the last edition of this column.

By which I mean, I am changing the name. The column will be on hiatus next week, since I have more premieres to cover and some real-life stuff to get done. (Taxes, ahoy!) When it returns, it will be under the name Anime Orbit Weekly, a name that better fits my site’s loose “planet” theming and….frankly is just better in every way. I’ve never really liked “Frontline Report” and have largely stuck with it out of inertia. The new name is catchier and also easier to Google.

Anyway, on with the column!

Weekly Anime

Princess Connect! Re:Dive

They really didn’t have to go this hard. That’s what I kept thinking as I finished up the second season of Princess Connect! Re:Dive. This episode is a finale, so it should look good, but the fact that they were able to do this without visibly sapping resources from elsewhere in the production–aside from maybe a single filler episode near the middle?–is astounding. Shows just being produced this cleanly is a rarity in of itself. Add to that the following; Princess Connect‘s season finale is a symphony of magic fireworks; magical-digital floating spell circles, fuckoff-huge sword beams, gloopy swarms of shadowy darkness, CGI metallic projectiles, pick a favorite visual trope that a fantasy-action anime of the past 10 years has come up with, it’s in here somewhere.

But I fear that in my coverage of Priconne I’ve maybe over-emphasized the production merits and made it seem like that’s the show’s only strength. So, all I’ll say further on this front is that I wouldn’t be shocked if this whole damn episode was on Sakugabooru.

Fundamentally, the finale is a huge tug-of-war between the Gourmet Guild and Omniscient Kaiser. It is, in a lot of ways, super basic. The heroes triumph over the big evil villain via (spoiler) the power of friendship. But if, in a meta sense, Princess Connect has any core thesis, it’s that you can build a perfect machine from imperfect parts. There is not a wasted moment in the whole episode; every line sharpens the show’s emotional core just a little bit more. You’d have to be a real stone-face to not grin while watching this, its sheer enthusiasm for its own genre, its strength of belief that this is an impactful story that will light a fire in your heart, is infectious.

Kaiser even gets a somewhat sympathetic backstory squeezed in here, where the sheer ennui of being a tyrant in the name of a failed utopia quite literally consumes her alive; she’s eaten by the mostly-dead shadow clone we thought died last episode, in an honestly pretty damn gruesome bit of body horror for something that’s generally been pretty conservative with even showing blood.

In the last raising-of-stakes available to a VRMMO series, it’s made clear that if Kaiser dies while under the Shadows’ influence that she’ll be gone for good. And that’s just not allowed, of course. So the show’s big final act is our heroes venturing inside this giant End of Eva shadow lady to bust Kaiser’s soul out like this was the world’s most high-stakes heist movie. Karyl does most of the actual convincing Kaiser not totally give in to nihilistic solipsism, but Pecorine performs well throughout the episode, too. Throughout the whole series, Pecorine has felt like the “real” hero, and it’s cool that she mostly gets to ride that status out here as her kingdom is finally restored to her at episode’s end.

Yuuki gets a great showing here as well, and honestly, this is probably the most he’s ever felt like the protagonist he ostensibly is. But even with all he gets done over the course of the finale, he still only gets eight total lines–I counted–and two of them are just “Go!” and “Nice.”

Still, it’s worth noting that the final battle does technically ride on him–he refuses another pass through the time loop from Ameth, choosing to live or die by the bonds he’s formed with his friends. That faith in them pays off, and all present are, in fact, able to defeat Omniscient Kaiser, who is returned to her normal state.

It’s Labyrista who sums up the episode’s–and really, whole show’s–theme best.

It’s simple, but simple works for Princess Connect, a series that–despite its ostensibly complicated “lore”–is very much focused on the fundamentals. The show’s very few problems; Said lore’s complexity, Kokkoro not getting much of a role in the finale, and arguably the oddly showy outfits, do not really ding it at all. At the end of the day, Princess Connect is just a really damn good fantasy anime. When the Gourmet Guild officially reforms and the World is Once Again Saved, it feels like the most logical ending possible for such a pure, warm series. Even here, there’s one last fun little character detail; Karyl is the one who cooks the Gourmet Guild’s first meal back home after their big adventure, and we see the scrapes and burns on her hands from prepping the food.

Everyone settles in for some good, hearty food, and the credits roll. Will we meet the Gourmet Guild again? It’s not impossible, but if this truly is the last episode ever of Princess Connect, it’d be hard to complain. What else could you ask for? Everyone lives happily ever after.

This section is pretty long this week.

Seasonal First Impressions: Get Away from It All with ESTAB-LIFE: GREAT ESCAPE

ESTAB-LIFE isn’t the best thing airing right now, but it might be the weirdest, as the two episodes since that have involved a mob boss who wants to be a magical girl and KGB penguins have proven.

Seasonal First Impressions: Conquering the Pop World with YA BOY KONGMING!

Ya Boy Kongming! is a weird one, a solo-focus idol series with the bizarre high premise of said idol’s manager being Chinese military genius Zhuge Kongming, who was brought to the present….eh, somehow. It doesn’t really matter. The first episode of this was surprisingly affecting, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

Seasonal First Impressions: THE EXECUTIONER AND HER WAY OF LIFE is a Knife in Isekai’s Heart

The Executioner and Her Way of Life is what we call a “banger,” friends. God knows if it’ll keep up the impressive visual quality and interesting–if a bit edgy!–storytelling throughout this whole season, but I certainly hope it will.

Seasonal First Impressions: AHAREN-SAN WA HAKARENAI is a Sleep Aid in Anime Form

I don’t get it.

Seasonal First Impressions: The Dream Lives On in LOVE LIVE! NIJIGASAKI HIGH SCHOOL IDOL CLUB SEASON 2

The first season of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club was one of my favorites when it aired back in 2020. This first episode of the second season doesn’t quite match up to some of season one’s highs, but I have confidence that it’ll get there. Plus; the new girl introduced in this episode is just a deliciously excellent heel. Girlboss fans everywhere, eat your heart out.

(REVIEW) The Lost Legacy of FLOWER PRINCESS BLAZE!!: How a Forgotten Toei Series Shaped 15 Years of Magical Girl Anime [April Fools’]

Finally, there’s this. As I’ve now indicated in the article name, this was just an April Fools’ prank. One I inexplicably decided to spend like 2 months working on. It’s a review of the fake magical girl anime from My Dress-Up Darling. Except, given that that show doesn’t exist, most of it is just made up. This was a fun creative writing exercise but also a huge amount of work, surprisingly. So, I doubt I’ll be doing it again. Enjoy this odd-man-out of my website; file it next to the Mao Mao review and the ENA writeup. Huge thank you to commenter momomanamu for playing along in the comments, it made my day.

And that’s about all for this week. There may or may not be articles tomorrow and Monday (my schedule is a little off, right now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by the fact that I put up three articles today. Something I almost never do.) But articles should resume on Tuesday at the latest, where I plan to cover the BIRDIE WING premiere.

Until then, anime fans!

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