This one is weird and dumb and I haven’t decided if it’s weird and dumb in a good way or if I never want to watch it again. I feel like the main girl would get on my nerves if I keep watching, and I feel like even though it’s a short-form show it should have been cut down to three to four minutes per episode rather than twelve.
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll come back to it to get a better idea, maybe I’ll totally forget about it.
?/10
Holy hell, this show looks awful. This is easily some of the least fluid animation I’ve seen in the modern day, there’s way too many chibi-fied moments (just because it works for Yuri on Ice! doesn’t mean it works for every sports story…) that aren’t in service of anything at all, the character designs are boring as hell, and basically apart from the art style everything about the production just screams that there’s a good reason I’ve never heard of Studio Hibari, as every decent production they’ve ever made has been with the assistance of a much better studio (see: Kiki’s Delivery Service, Char’s Counterattack).
In addition to being boring to look at, nothing about the story or characters compels me at all. I don’t get how they thought this concept could sustain a full-length series. Sure, Aoyama is decent at soccer, but his lame gimmick is that he’s a germaphobe. This is certainly following in the vein of other shows where the main character’s gimmick is the source of entertainment (Tanaka-kun is Always Listless, Haven’t You Heard? I”m Sakamoto) but this one isn’t even a comedy. It just expects you to take it totally seriously as a story with a totally unrelatable main character who gets shilled by almost everyone in the show to the point of annoyance. If you don’t get my meaning, that means that the show tries to get you to like him by having the other characters constantly fawn over his awesomeness instead of giving him any likable traits, and it just doesn’t work at all.
2/10. Man, this season is not off to a good start.
The concept of a school for magical girls hasn’t been done before, and it would have been nice to see an earnest shot at it here, but like its predecessor I ended up finding it to just be uninteresting in general. Any time the first episode looked like it might go somewhere interesting, it sidestepped in favor of more cutesy cute girls, and I already have the second season of New Game!! for that.
It’s an oversaccharine slog that shows that there are many ways to screw up an interesting concept, including just not focusing on it at all (THE SHOW ITSELF decides to shit on its own concept by pointing out that they don’t actually need to keep training these girls), and by the end of the first episode, we already have a hot springs scene, in addition to an accidental groping or two (by another girl? Gasp! How scandalous!), so yeah, this one isn’t gonna be for me at the very least. None of the characters were endearing in the slightest, the heroine’s stupid airhead schtick is already wearing out its welcome, and I know I can get better in this genre by just waiting a little longer.
3/10.
The Arcane Archive 