So, the last entry, while technically a show grounded around school, may have been a weak pick for Back to School. Let’s remedy that with a hearty double helping of ye olde battle school, the kind that’s just like you remember.
And, I’m going to get this out of the way at the start, it’s just like you remember presuming that you remember Chivalry of a Failed Knight. We have a swordsman whose powers are basic and non-flashy in their essence but way beyond what most people give them credit for. He goes to a vaguely futuristic school for super-combatants, where he duels and then teams up with with the princess of an alleged European nation, who wields the power of flame and has hair in the red spectrum (this one is pinker). Together, they will face a massive over-the-top tournament arc, and that’s the show. Hopefully now I’ll be able to save any references to Chivalry until the end.
Our male lead this time is Ayato Amagiri. He’s involved in this battle school harem business because he’s looking for his sister, who went to school in the same place some years ago and went missing (with it heavily implied to the audience that she’s dead or otherwise in a bad way after some sort of underground pit fight). To that end, he needs to have access to more of the artificial-island-school-city (those really are all the rage in anime), which would come with ranking in the tournaments the schools hold, which are called Festas.
The pink-haired European princess this time is, and I looked this up, Julis-Alexia Marie Florentia Renate van Riessfeld. Let’s just call her Julis, I don’t think even the show can be bothered to say that whole thing more than once. She’s looking to win Festas in order to get the prize money and save an orphanage in her home country that she cares about deeply, because it’s not like royalty has the disposable income to cover the operating costs of a modest orphanage. However, she has a problem in that the upcoming Festa, the Phoenix Festa, is a doubles tournament and she doesn’t have a partner on account of being far too tsun.
We get the usual back and forth where Ayato tries to do something sort of good for Julis (returning a handkerchief she dropped from an upper window), he sees her changing, and she tries to murder him in a duel. The duel is broken up before we can get a proper conclusion, of course, and we learn that there’s something of an assassin going around, targeting ranking students. A category that Julis seems to fall into, likely as the next target in the crosshairs.
But there are more girls on the scene. A young-looking childhood friend of Ayato, Saya, is one. She’s the daughter of a weapon developer and isn’t terribly relevant yet. The student council president, who seems to have some personal emotional tie to Ayato not explained by their brief interactions, is the other. She seems to know some things about Ayato’s sister, who has otherwise been scrubbed from all records, and acts as Ayato’s primary link to that search. She allows him to gain the use of the dangerous and powerful special weapon his sister once wielded, Ser Veresta, and asks him to look after Julis.
The request seems to be easier than one might expect, since after their duel Julis is actually fairly well-disposed towards Ayato, and takes seriously her “promise” to show him around the school and the island, leading to both the two of them bonding and the two of them running into assassins. They escape trouble at that time, only for Julis to be lured into an obvious trap with bait she can’t ignore. The “assassins” are revealed to be not the gruff guy we were led to suspect, but robots commanded by agents from another school. Ayato is able to rush off and save Julis, unlocking a burst of his full potential in the process and earning a place as her partner presumptive for the Phoenix Festa.
Yeah, about that “burst of full power” – years ago, that lovely big sis Ayato is looking for sealed his magical powers, so he can normally only use very little. With extreme strain and effort, though, he can unlock more, even breaking through to something like his full ability. However, he can’t stay in full power mode long, and it takes a lot out of him afterwards, meaning he might not be okay to go again. Yeah, I know I said I was going to contain the references but that sure does remind one of that other show, in effect if not in cause.
The next arc introduces what else, a new girl: Kirin Toudou, an absolute master of the sword with the handicap that she’s not a magic-user the same as most of the students, even if she can usually trounce those who are – including Ayato in their first spar. She’s not the #1 rank in the school for nothing
For Kirin being a phenomenal third wheel, I actually think her material is some of the best in the show, as we use her arc to explore her experience in this world and her conflict with her controlling and abusive uncle. The latter she puts up with because he is supposedly helping her free her wrongfully imprisoned father, but really he’s only out for profit. After some random encounters (thanks to a trolling other-school puppetmaster) Kirin and Ayato gets closer together and they have a second bout, with Kirin’s freedom from her uncle as a stake if Ayato wins, which of course he does this time. This also lets her pair up with Saya for the Phoenix Festa, which mercifully gets both of them more scenes not predicated entirely on Ayato.
This brings us to the last arc of the first season: the start of the Phoenix Festa! It also introduces our first “boss” with an enemy team that’s set after Ayato and Julis’s throats – sisters Irene and Priscilla Urzaiz. Really, though, it’s Irene who does the fighting, wielding one of the special weapons like Ayato’s. Hers is the scythe Gravisheath, which possesses massive gravity control powers and also, because the special weapons in this setting are all jerks, turns Irene into a vampire. Priscilla is just there as a walking blood bag power-up.
Irene doesn’t particularly like her masters, who come from one of the big time jerk schools, and Priscilla especially wants to see Irene freed from her fate and their control, even though Irene is keeping on for Priscilla’s sake. Irene particularly comes off as the girl of the arc, but though the first season ends with the tournament bout between the sisters and Team Main Character in which the final blow (after an appropriately grueling combat) is Ayato managing to obliterate Gravisheath itself, neither she nor her sister really join up in the way you would expect of a more traditional harem affair. They will be seen now and then, and Irene is a bit adorably awkward about interactions, but it’s nothing much.
The second season is mostly focused on the continuing saga of the Phoenix Festa. We fight some quirky miniboss pairs along the way introducing our big antagonists. On one side, we have a school boss known as Tyrant. He seems to want Ayato to fail for undisclosed reasons, seemingly more related to Ser Veresta than Ayato himself. The other is the tournament’s pair to beat, AR-D and RM-C. As one might guess from the names, the two are robots, AI drones acting as proxies for their creators. AR-D is a huge, masculine bruiser with a seemingly impenetrable defense while RM-C is a feminine flying speedster. They’re also unspeakably powerful, trouncing their way through the early rounds without having to reveal much in the way of their technique and full ability.
When I first watched this show, I thought AR-D and RM-C were the most interesting characters and… I still think that’s kind of true in a sense. Having reached the end, Julis gets her fair share of human development, but with how the robots and their interactions with their notable opponents and masters alike are written, you can really feel that the creators had a lot of care and attention to the background and the ideas behind their AI. They’re not just written as metal normal people and they’re not your typical robot stereotypes, they’re a little off as these beings that are learning, and that their makers admirably want to learn, what it means to be human.
I think the most particular scenes for this come in and around the match between the bots and the Kirin/Saya team. For the first time, they’re required to use all or almost all of their abilities in order to combat and win, and in the process Kirin carves a gouge in AR-D’s faceplate… which, consistent with his dialogue with her during the fight, he asks to keep during maintenance as the physical record of something that he learned, essentially, as a person.
This sort of gives me a convenient segue to the one omnipresent detail of Asterisk War – it usually feels like it’s “all there in the manual”. The story of Asterisk War is, as one could probably guess by now, nothing special. The characters are better than bog standard, I like them well enough, but they’re also not really award-winners on their own. At first glance, it seems like every other poorly excused Battle School dregscape. But where something like Sky Wizards Academy or Infinite Stratos is predicated on a foundation of paper-thin handwaves that disintegrate when viewed from the wrong angle, there’s some real meat to the construction of Asterisk War.
Oddly, not all of that really gets onto the screen. It’s hard to describe, though, but there is a palpable sense when there’s more groundwork rather than less behind what we’re seeing. I think it has to do with how the characters act and react on the subtle level. For instance, while Tyrant’s scenes give us some indication that Ser Veresta is a matter of concern for him, his reactions are not exactly fear. We don’t get to know what his history with the sword, if any, might be, but because of how he acts with regards to Ayato, we know that there is an expansive history, and likely a whole lifetime of details informing exactly how he reacts.
It may be apocrypha, but I’ve heard the creator of Asterisk War self-describes as the kind of person who reads RPG manuals for fun. And you know what, I’m that person too, so with that idea in mind, it’s easy to see where that energy is in place, the will to create an overly complicated backstory and all the details to have this world live and breathe… and then to show you the surface that you would naturally see, because most people are going to be more interested in the story than in the dark depths of what would normally be cordoned off into the appendices.
In any case, Tyrant strikes before the championship match. He kidnaps a maid friend of Julis and has a hired assassin hold the girl hostage to force Ayato and Julis to at least sacrifice Ser Veresta (and their chances against AR-D and RM-C with it). They bluff him on that, and Kirin and Saya rescue the girl in time for all the stops to be pulled out against the bots, in a very dramatic final fight to the Phoenix Festa.
Oddly, the show is not over. After the Phoenix Festa there are three more episodes, representing a small arc centered around Julis that really helps to sell her story and circumstances and builds up for the continuation that’s not happening unless you go to the Light Novels.
In this arc, we (meaning both protagonist teams and the Student Council President) visit Julis’s home nation, as she experiences a hero’s homecoming as the victor of a Festa. All is not well though and we get a lot more about her situation, including how her family is really at the mercy of various sinister interests. Also, assassins trying to kill Julis and/or Ayato, so that’s fun.
We thwart the assassins and a mastermind (who is more of a second level hired goon) who uses monsters to attack the kingdom, particularly saving the orphanage. Along the way they encounter two major future plants: an orphan friend of Julis who was made a super-powered fighter by mad science and who now stands with the enemy, and a proposal from the Student Council President that all involved (her and the two pairs) should be a team for the next Festa, which is a 5v5 affair.
The arc does go big, but it still feels like something of an added tail on to the story of the Phoenix Festa. I guess I like it more than I don’t, since it gets us the extra development Julis needed on screen, but it’s still a bit of an odd inclusion.
And with that, we’re at the end of the show. How does it fare?
Asterisk War has one and only one thing really going for it: the texture of the show feeling like it has a whole living world behind it. That ineffable sense is its one claim to fame. The animation is standard, good enough to look at but nothing to write home about. The characters are fine, but less is really explored about most of them than is implied. This could work if the show was philosophical and left you a lot of time to think, but this is a battle school harem action show, so it really supports louder characters by nature. The story is essentially Chivalry of a Failed Knight with more moving parts but less compelling emotional stakes, which is not a superb place to be in. Nothing is particularly bad or substandard, but nothing except that presence is really good or notable either.
Asterisk War is certainly a show that you could go without seeing, but for my part… I can’t bear to rate it lower than a C+. Why? Because it did exactly what it meant to and got me intrigued enough that I don’t think I’d mind reading the Light Novels, where that one advantage that’s giving the show the plus in its grade could be realistically leveraged in a far better way. A battle school harem action show doesn’t really support detail-oriented world building or hinted character arcs going on out of immediate sight. A novel, even a light novel with those same themes, can. The C+ grade is for the anime as it is, without having read or being properly able to judge the books.