Sky Wizards Academy is yet another of the seemingly endless ream of Battle School shows – anime series where somebody is at a school for wielders of combat-applicable super powers, learning to kick ass. I’ve reviewed many of these shows before, will no doubt review many more in the future, and often find their formula to be something of a guilty pleasure.
That said, for something to be a guilty pleasure you must actually be able to derive pleasure from it. For a show like Sky Wizards Academy, this can be a tall order.
This is one that starts us in media res, with the main character and his squad fighting off the half-baked Galaga enemies until the main character himself decides to stay behind, apparently sacrificing himself so his team can retreat. Odd call for the show. We then get the basic picture of the world, silently, that the surface overrun by copied and pasted mecha beetles while humanity survives on islands floating in the sky.
We also get the introduction of, presumably, our lead among the girls, via a letter she wrote in which she, despite being a failure in the loser class, repeatedly insists that she’s a goddess who will save humanity and that she should be treated as such. Before we even meet the character, you can tell that she’s either going to be hilarious or painful to watch. Spoiler alert, she is not hilarious.
The other characters get introductions through letters they wrote as well, like the well-meaning timid klutz who also tells us that, apparently, non-wizards lose all memory of people killed by the bugs. I’m not sure why this is a plot point. Lastly, we have a redhead, who we only learn has literally never won a bout. These screw-ups are all part of the same team, which therefore needs special instruction.
Cut to the main character, Kanata Age, being called in. Before he can get down to business, the third girl, literally running with toast in her mouth like it wasn’t a dated cliché when this show came out, runs smack into him. Somehow this ends up with the girl straddling him and the guy holding both her breasts, with the jelly toast on his crotch. Halfway into the first episode, and you can tell exactly how hard this show is trying.
This leads to embarrassing encounters with the other girls (like running into the narcissist as he tries to wash his pants, and then the timid anxious girl in the bathroom that he evidently didn’t realize was the girls’.)
Also, evidently, the main character is known as a traitor to some, including his arguable former maybe-girlfriend, Yuri, holding an impressive grudge. Obviously he’s not been considered guilty by the authorities or he wouldn’t be in the story, and soon enough we get the story that he mostly seems to be semi-retired via dereliction of combat duties after a traumatic battle (the one from the opening), but that is what it is.
And, naturally, when he finally does talk to the person who summoned him, he ends up assigned as the teacher (despite being not much their senior) to the three girls he ran into and got called a pervert by on his way there.
He quickly figures out the problems of the three: they’re a narcissist with no interest in teamwork, an airhead who will launch off on her own with no awareness, and a timid little mouse. He then gets to work trying to correct their issues, such as building the confidence of the timid girl (Lecty) by having her hand out fliers (in a maid uniform) and trying to teach the hothead (Misora) to focus by setting her to stalk the narcissist (Rico) and learn her weakness. This includes both general harassment and more implausible accidental boob grabs of Misora (which come with flat jokes, even though despite the other two being bustier she’s drawn as normal at worst) that do a terrible job of shaking the impression that our lead is a pervert. Honestly, the show would be a little more fun if he were on the level of Arata or at least Kazuma rather than the perpetually unflappable straight man in these jokes, but that’s a matter I will go more in depth on later.
And by quickly, I mean that just identifying how each girl’s one-note personality is holding her back takes an entire episode, and then another just getting Misora to follow Rico around and forcing Lecty to work food service, which snowballs into getting Misora into a bunny girl costume to help Lecty. It’s shameless even if quite tame, but it would be better if it were funny.
The actual training for Misora gets going by asking her to switch weapon types, which she evidently finds to be an absolutely unforgivable request. Evidently this is due to it having been the weapon of her (once ace sky wizard, now deceased) mother. We’re treated to an overdone flashback to her childhood, seeing them interact before mom dies on a mission and all non-mage-types forget her, which is highlighted as a kind of useless plot thread because recording media still exists and there are enough wizard types integrated enough in society that it’s not like they actually “disappear”. I’m all for character growth, but this does in probably ten small scenes and three plot points what could have been done in two or three scenes and one plot point. It’s so standard that there’s really not any reason to go on and on with mom rather than just showing them happy once, getting her dead, and having Misora vow to take up the mantle. It’s a basic arc that could stay basic to better explore who Misora is now if nothing else. There’s a degree to which this didn’t need to have a flashback at all; talking to dad (who knows enough to talk to our lead about it all) and seeing her having the breakdown she has at the end of the flashback would have carried as much weight as the half episode burned on that past.
Predictably, we then get an episode all around would-be “goddess” Rico. This one wastes time in the best way of the lot – leaving Rico on the curb with her bad attitude and mostly focusing on Lecty and Misora gearing up for a ranking bout, while Rico proves difficult to convince to even participate. Technically she’s handed some pathos in that she’s trying to catch up to her sister, who is a character in administration we meet, but she landed on the side of being just unpleasant and obnoxious so anything that gives her less screen time is a plus in my book. I’m even fine with the other seeming time waster, an E-tier plot about Yuri (Main Character Kanata’s tsundere ex-partner, recall) getting a weird stalker with a crush. That’s been threaded through these episodes so far, one would guess to keep Yuri in the show for later. Oddly, it ends up perhaps being the most important thread here.
Finally, Rico is convinced to play along (without breaking in her pride much if at all) and we move on to the match. This is interrupted by a beetle swarm attacking, which takes up an entire sequence that, thanks to the beetles being reprocessed foes that barely move, is probably even less technically of quality than the finale of Hundred. Now, Hundred was terrible in plenty of other ways that Sky Wizard Academy is not, like how the characters here are marginally less obnoxious and the show occasionally convinces you it’s actually animated, but we’re still scraping the bottom of the barrel.
It’s also jarring how much this just jumps the stakes from nothing to everything, with the city being invaded by the beetles. When Infinite Stratos had an attack on the tournament sequence they both gave us the tournament and had it be a lesser attack that served as a hook for further plot.
At least we do eventually get a kaiju-sized beetle coming in and wrecking things, which provides some entertainment as Kanata enters a weird glowing black super mode to take it on, presumably being something related to his semi-retirement from ace combat.
And, somehow, we manage to end the episode by having the three idiots display none of their field skill and lose that tournament match in a flash. This leads to the team ending up enrolled in a tournament with expulsion on the line. Meanwhile, Yuri’s stalker both finds a creepy eyeball from one of the big bugs, and is met properly as a member of the research division, where humans study the Devil Beetles, dissecting them (which seems to reveal they’re machines under their shells), and also evolving in a way that threatens the future of humanity. Show, it is too late in for you to try to build an oppressive atmosphere.
It also turns out Yuri is mentoring a higher ranked trainee team, as she makes a wager to join the E-team as a member if they win. That’s a plot flag so obvious I think it’s visible from a few shows away.
The next two episodes are not the tournament but puttering preparation for the tournament, capstoned by the creepy stalker mad scientist turning into a slasher and attacking first a succession of nobody wizards to grind his skill and then Yuri to make her “accept his love”. Kanata is there and saves her from the guy, but he gets away to have more conversations with the evil bug eyeball that’s manipulating him. Not that he wasn’t way off before, but he’s impressively deranged now.
Since Kanata fought the guy off, we get two more episodes where Misora, Rico, and Lecty actually up their teamwork and do the tournament, including the bout with Yuri’s ace team in the final match, which of course they actually win to the displeasure of Rico’s big sister, the highest authority figure we see. At the very end of that episode the stalker shows up again, even more juiced on evil beetle eyeball serum and still absolute in his creepiness towards Yuri. He actually manages to get a hit in on Kanata, slowing him down, which is when Kanata’s team intervenes to kick off the last episode fighting… this guy for our climax.
He does at least have the decency to turn into a giant bug man monster with tentacles and super powers that forces Kanata to use his black aura mode again. Stalker also spills, on seeing that, that Kanata must also have received Devil Beetle power just as Kanata mentions knowing the whispers that drove the stalker mad (well, more mad). And this happens where Yuri can hear.
Kanata takes a gaping chest wound and is actually out for most of the final fight, though he still acts like an unflappable mastermind while bleeding on the floor as his team help Yuri score the win over the psycho bug stalker (though the epilogue shows him alive and returned to human form). The team gets to stay together, though they’re screwed out of most of their rewards thanks to their nasty collateral damage habits. Yuri joins up per her bet with Kanata and even confesses her feelings, though Kanata is somehow too dense (willfully or otherwise) to pick up that a cake decorated with “I love you” is directed at him. Thus, the show ends while the adventure presumably continues.
So, when looking over the whole thing, the first element I have to notice is that the show is really wasteful with its time. It’s good to have character beats and actually show us things, but there’s also an economy of storytelling where you should be doing something interesting or worthwhile with that time as well, especially in a format that needs to be as tight as a twelve episode anime. Because really, what happens? We have Kanata assigned to his team, they train, there’s the beetle attack, they train more, and then we beat up the stalker. There is more nuance to it, but that’s really the gist of it. If the show wasn’t obsessed with drawing out every tired old moment, we probably could have gotten the Devil Beetle attack in episode three and fought off the stalker in Episode 6, giving us an entire half a season to deal with the bugs being sentient and choosing humans to imbue with dark power. And, had we done that, we easily could have kept at least the vast majority of development for all the characters involved.
Look at the pacing in Rising of the Shield Hero for what I’m talking about – the first Wave is encountered in episode three. We don’t get the second and the introduction of Glass until Episode 11, but they do a lot more subplots in the meantime and had twenty-four episodes, not twelve, to tell their story. Even Infinite Stratos (perhaps a more comparable show), which has to juggle doing a full harem, trots the first Golem out in Episode 4. This isn’t Pilot Candidate levels of bloat, but on the other hand I think Pilot Candidate might have shown us material with more interesting and unique value.
Another problem comes from the characters, in that they are pretty much all annoying. I think the only character who was both overall watchable and had enough screen time to prove it soundly was Yuri, and even then she was on the edge between a watchable tsundere and a frustrating one. Kanata’s other old teammates were fine but hardly in the show, and the leads… let’s go over the leads.
First we have Kanata. Kanata is far too perfectly calm and in control all the time. I see what they’re doing with him to an extent; he’s the wish fulfillment of the ultimate badass who can’t be beat, even in minor ways. He can’t be flustered or frustrated or make mistakes because someone along the line thought that making him more human would make him less cool. This is an archetype I personally despise because it’s easy to think it’s okay from a bird’s eye view but it ends up being terrible when it’s actually executed. If a character can’t suffer, fail, stumble, or feel or express their emotions, they cease to be entertaining because you can’t connect to them as a human. Decent characters who play something like the archetype, where they’re usually a step ahead and cool under pressure, like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, still have to have something going for them, some inner world that we can relate to or get invested in.
Now, like most anime fans, I’ve seen enough “harem comedy boob grab” moments to be sick to death of them, but that also means I’ve seen enough to be able to dissect when and how something like that is supposed to work. Broadly put, the comedy functions because there’s cause and effect; or, to put it another way, because the reactions are what’s funny. In the orthodox version, the joke is that the characters are embarrassed, and the guy is suffering disproportionate retribution for an honest accident, which is largely communicated through his distress at being yelled at, hit, or so on. It’s not necessarily a good joke, but it is without a doubt an actual joke.
You can mess with the formula by having a different reaction happen, or having something happen to somebody else, but there still needs to be some sort of actual reaction. If the girl throws some sort of attack and hits a third party when her mark ducks, that can be funny. When Arata, in Trinity Seven, decides to totally own the grab much to Lilith’s horror, that can be funny because turning things around usually gets a bigger reaction out of the victim and it’s playing with genre expectations. When Kanata acts like nothing is wrong, and we have no indication that he’s acting or covering, and the scene just sort of dies off, we get nothing. Kanata never feels anything, and Misora’s reactions are just sort of standard “shrill girl” reactions and not really big or comedic. Kanata gives us nothing, so we have nothing. He’s not a straight man in a comedy routine; the straight man is a sane person in an insane world, and can express their frustration with the comedic scenario they’re trapped in. He’s a concrete wall against which the comedy can find no purchase.
For that matter, not much else can find purchase either. Because Kanata is mostly infallible, the first half of the final episode being the only point where he seems to feel anything other than bland satisfaction at his work, even dramatic scenes can fall kind of short with him, victims of the fact that he doesn’t emote or portray much humanity. This is a serious problem with the show, possibly the single biggest.
The girls are a little simpler to break down: they’re one-note characters. Misora is the hothead, and nothing else. She is every hothead character you’ve seen in other shows, but without the uniqueness and charm of even a poor example like Ayano from Kaze no Stigma. Lecty is the shy and anxious one, and nothing else. She is just about every shy and anxious character you’ve seen in other shows, but without the uniqueness and charm of even somebody like Frey from Unbreakable Machine Doll. Rico is, I will say at least, not exactly the cookie cutter example of an archetype since I haven’t seen many other characters who cope by insisting they’re perfect deities, but she is no more dimensional and significantly more obnoxious than the others.
The world is… kind of a mess. The setting is like someone took leftover scraps of Muv Luv Unlimited and tried to reprocess them into Infinite Stratos with a little Shakugan no Shana salt thrown on for no good reason. We’re just sort of thrown in, with no explanation of how things came to be this way even though there was a clear shift, to a world where Devil Beetles that make normals forget the people they kill have overrun the surface, humanity lives on one or more islands floating high in the sky, and there are flying wizards who fight back against the evil that’s constantly attacking. For a show that loves to waste time showing us irrelevant things, it’s remarkable that they just expect you to fully accept this weird setting that might be a future or an alternate world or just a fantasy universe without any sort of preamble or explanation. They’re not necessarily wrong, but the setting is so thinly sketched that it’s sometimes difficult to be sure what’s supposed to be surprising.
How big a deal is Kanata’s black aura mode? We can guess that he would get in trouble for having it, but is it the trouble of an unknown thing where scientists would love to pull him apart to see how he ticks or the trouble of a known thing where he would be much more seriously branded a traitor? Is it well known, at least in the military upper echelons, that the Devil Beetles are capable of sapient thought and even communication with humans? Do people get tempted and corrupted regularly or is this a freaky unknown thing? I could make some guesses but the show doesn’t really give me the resources to do so in a way that is legitimate and fair.
And, adding to this laundry list of issues, the action and flying aren’t very good. They’re just the vanilla kind of poor where there wasn’t the spark of genius to get really inventive with them nor was there the budget to put a really astounding vision on the screen. Flying around through the skies, doing magic, and fighting monsters should really look amazing. Think of the flying scenes in something like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (not a fair comparison). Hell, look at some of the aerial stuff in something as generally lame as Granblue Fantasy, it does better. If the viewing experience had been something really impressive, like they took 200% advantage of the whole “sky wizard” thing, I might have been able to forgive a lot more of the show’s foibles. As it is, well… I compared the Devil Beetles to Galaga at the start, and that’s really what most of the stuff feels like, with the final battle against the mutant stalker being the only thing that stands out as generally adequate.
So, suffice to say, I have my fair share of problems with Sky Wizards Academy. But, on the other hand, there are some redeeming features. The characters are flat and can be annoying, but they do at least have a number of calmer scenes where they talk like actual human beings, which is more than I can say for a lot of bad shows. The action is lame, but it’s not painfully lame. Every now and then you’ll see a crumb of effort; it’s not a great deal, but it is there. The world is thinly sketched nonsense that we could really do to understand a little better, but at the same time it’s not that much more absurd than your standard fantasy world. All in all, it’s bad… but not so bad.
And, there is one notable bit that’s done well, or that’s at least interesting from a broader point of view: how Yuri relates to Kanata. I’m going to focus on Yuri’s side because, again, Kanata is a concrete wall… but it’s fairly complex and well done. Yuri acts quite spiteful towards Kanata for a lot of the show’s run… and why shouldn’t she? It’s made clear that she had a crush on him for a long time, and looked up to and admired him as well. So, when he stopped doing sky wizard things, she felt personally betrayed by her beloved senpai and partner abandoning her. This leads to her lashing out, because she’s still in internal conflict between her affection for the person who was close to her and always looked out for her and her resentment of him born of these feelings of betrayal and abandonment.
The fact that this is markedly better executed than anything else in the show helps the second arc tick. If you’re watching mostly for Yuri rather than the three idiots, you are more invested in her being stalked by the creepy stalker guy than in what Kanata’s team is doing, and the stalker serves as the backbone of the final arc. True, there’s the tournament, but Misora and pals preparations are liable to be mostly dead air even if you like them, while the scenes with Yuri, the Stalker, and Kanata are tighter overall and provide the show’s most acceptable action sequences besides. Because of this, Yuri becomes the glue that holds the show together, as both the most human member of the cast and essentially the most plot-magnetic when it comes to the run of the show as a whole.
Given all that, I grade Sky Wizards Academy as a D. There are many, many things wrong with this show, but there’s at least one big thing right with it, and the things that are wrong are wrong in fairly limited and forgivable (if not excusable) ways. It won’t hurt you, but it also might not really entertain you, so while I would personally recommend against watching the show, I wouldn’t consider that warning to be a particularly strong one.