So, this is a show about a grade school girl who discovers a magic staff and then learns that she has to harness the power of magic in order to gather a set of mystical cards that are currently incarnated as magical beings and causing trouble around her city. She has a crush on a high school boy known to her, her closest magical contact is kind of a self-important jerk sometimes, and she ends up competing for the cards with a rival her age who is initially overly serious but with whom she eventually becomes good friends.
Oddly enough, this girl is not Sakura Kinomoto. It’s Illyasviel von Einzbern, at least in the Magical Girl spinoff of the Fate franchise, Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya.
One might remember Illya from Unlimited Blade Works. There, she was an older-than-she-looks homunculus sort of unnatural being with immense magical power and a fairly tough to counter summoned Servant, the Berserker-class Heracles. She lived alone (minus some homunculus maids even less human than she was) in a giant mansion and had a connection to main character Shiro Emiya that wasn’t too deeply explored on that route. Still, she was powerful but tragic opponent in the Holy Grail War until her fairly brutal demise. And, I guess she was also popular enough that she got her own alternate universe spinoff.
In this show, Illya appears to be more or less a normal girl, the daughter of Kiritsugu Emiya (Shiro’s deceased adoptive father from F/SN) and Irisviel von Einzbern, who are happily married. The family is rounded out by the homunculus maids, who also seem to be humans with actual personalities, and Shiro Emiya, Illya’s foster brother on whom she has a massive and poorly concealed crush.
Illya’s everyday life as a grade-school student takes a turn for the weird, though, when Rin Tohsaka and Luvia Edelfelt (Rin’s blonde rival with the haughty laugh who only appeared in the epilogue in Unlimited Blade Works) come to town, tasked with retrieving the “Class Cards” (unexplained mystic cards tied to the Servant classes of Fate) and, to do this, armed with the Kaleidosticks Ruby and Sapphire, sapient and outspoken magic wands that allow their masters to transform into magical girls with vastly upgraded power.
Rin and Luvia, of course, get along about as well as you’d expect, and despite being technically partners on their mission are almost immediately attempting to destroy each other rather than do anything about the cards. This causes both Rin’s bratty stick Ruby and Luvia’s quiet and careful stick Sapphire to abandon their current bosses and fly off. Of the two, we follow Ruby as it locates Illya (while she’s in the bath, for extra comedy) and tries to coax her into becoming a magical girl. Despite being explicitly a fan of the genre, Illya is hesitant, but Ruby doesn’t take no for an answer, and even cheats a little to get the contract sealed. This turns out to be something along the lines of just in time, as Rin shows up shortly after Illya’s first transformation, royally pissed off and intent on recovering Ruby. She can’t do so by force given that Ruby has taken another Master, though, and thus recruits Illya into the whole card-gathering mess, training her to use her new powers.
Rin already has the Archer card and Luvia the Lancer card, for the record, and the first target for Rin and Illya is Rider. The not-quite-Heroic-Spirits that are the manifest forms of the cards exist in a mirror dimension overlaid on the city, which Rin is able to access via spell at night, getting us the great setting for that typical highly saturated and colorful darkness that Fate seems to love to do its battles in. I for one can’t really complain: it looked good in Unlimited Blade Works and it looks good here. Rider proves to be, perhaps, a little much for Illya, but before she can be defeated (or pull out a last-second reversal) a new challenger arrives, finishing Rider off in a single blow.
This is Miyu Edelfelt, Sapphire’s new master and thus Luvia’s new apprentice. From my understanding, they share a surname because Miyu was a homeless starving orphan when Sapphire found her, but that’s somewhat extrapolating from the material, and later material at that. For right now, Miyu is a girl Illya’s age (she even transfers into Illya’s class, surprising no one out of character) who comes off as extremely cold, serious, and aloof. She’s also hypercompetent, wowing all of Illya’s class when she’s miles ahead on coursework and even manages to beat Illya (established to be the most athletic girl in her class even if she doesn’t look it compared to some of her incidental friends) in sports. For all her amazing qualities, though, Miyu seems uninterested in making any friends, a fact that seems to hold firm as the two pairs enter another Mirror Universe to take on a different card.
The card they face this time is Caster, using… much more impressive zappy powers than she ever did in Unlimited Blade Works, to be honest. Her onslaught from above is so impressive that both magical girls and both mentors are forced to retreat with their collective tails between their legs, and a new strategy to counter Caster must be thought up. The answer is flight, in order to not simply be strafed to hell from the skies, and this reveals a chink in Miyu’s capabilities: she’s too rigid in her thinking. Illya masters flight magic pretty much effortlessly, because to her, magical girls fly, it’s a fact and she can picture it perfectly. Miyu, however, can’t get over the fact that, despite having magic and despite seeing Illya do it, humans can’t fly. She’s unable to picture herself levitating or soaring, even after intensive lessons and, in an effort to harness Illya’s power, intensive magical girl anime binge watching, simply can’t pull off the trick.
By the time the girls are ready to face Caster again, Miyu has devised her own sort of hackish solution (creating forcefields mid-air to jump off of or stand on, letting her gain height), but she never does master true flight, and this starts what seems to be her admiration of Illya as a “natural.”
The second fight against Caster goes much better, but once she’s down it’s clear something is wrong. That something turns out to be the presence of a second card in the same mirror universe, and it’s none other than the infamous “strongest” class, Saber. The fight with Saber takes the better part of three episodes, and is the kind of long and involved slugfest with a bunch of special powers and spells being used that you want to see out of a Fate show, ending when Illya “installs” the Archer card and defeats Saber as a hybrid of herself and the Archer holy spirit (Red Archer, no less, with has some meta-humor to it). She doesn’t remember anything about the Install, though, and believes that Miyu saved her again when really it was the other way around.
The Caster Rematch/Saber Fight is a very good sequence, but I do have something of a problem with it in the context of Prisma Illya as a whole: Prisma Illya is only ten episodes long. Granted, we do have ten episodes to capture a mere five cards (since Archer and Lancer started captured, leaving Rider, Caster, Saber, Assassin, and Berserker) meaning an average of two episodes for each, but this arc still feels like something of an endurance test. This would be fine if it were the climax of the season, really throwing everything at the biggest and most impressive battle, but it’s not. And, while they do at least have some extra emotional satisfaction in the climactic encounter, they don’t really top Saber in terms of the typical “Now there’s this thing that’s more powerful than the last thing that was way too powerful!” escalation, meaning that in terms of actual combat challenge, it falls just a little bit flat. There is an attempt, it just can’t quite go the distance, which is a shame.
In any case, we continue primarily with Illya and Miyu’s feelings. They bond with each other (including certain events flipping a switch in Illya, so that she’s interested in Miyu fanservice at least for viewer comedy) and we deal with Illya feeling worthless since she has (to her knowledge, and that of everyone but Miyu really) never successfully done the card capture thing. Miyu, meanwhile, feels responsible, and isn’t quite sure what to do with having her first ever friend. This comes to a head in the (fairly truncated) battle with Assassin, where there’s a near miss from one of Assassin’s blades and, after the fight, Miyu says she doesn’t want to enter battle alongside someone as carefree as Illya any more, which pushes Illya over the edge into moping and staying home rather than going out for the last capture, Berserker.
Of course, we see (and others around Illya begin to intuit) that Miyu’s motivations were not harsh in actuality – after Illya got sick following her Install, and was nearly sniped by Assassin, Miyu became afraid for her dear and only friend and wanted Illya out of the fight not to hurt her but rather to protect her from the life-and-death struggle of being a magical girl in this setting. This kind of backfires on Miyu when Berserker’s immortality and vast strength prove too much for her to handle, and she starts getting her rear kicked in a cage match with no backup.
After an acceptably long hang time on Illya’s momentary retirement, she shows up to save Miyu and the day. Between the power of friendship and the power of overwhelming destructive magic, Berserker is done in, and all the cards are well and truly collected. Rin and Luvia prepare to return to London, but after a surprisingly civil parting with their little apprentices, get into a helicopter-crashing fight over who turns the cards in, leaving Rin the last one conscious to receive the phone call from their teacher that, while he’s open to taking both on a true apprentices, they need to learn common sense before they can learn higher level magic, and are thus to stay in Japan to run errands. To be frank, those two do kind of deserve whatever comedic pain they’re put through.
Thus, with the implication that more remains to be told and Illya and Miyu best friends forever, we have reached the end of the show.
I think much of the show is going to be informed by the tension between the parts that are more like Cardcaptor and the parts that are more like Fate/Stay Night. Illya in this is very familiar to Sakura Kinomoto, having to learn how to get along with her friends, win over her rivals, and use magic despite being kind of a scaredy-cat sometimes. Ruby, the obnoxious nonhuman magical contact, feels a lot like a more mean-spirited Kero. Miyu, while ultimately handled quite differently, plays a lot of notes in common with Xiaolang. There’s a degree to which this, at times, wants to feel like a classical cute girl Magical Girl show rather than a Post-Sailor-Moon or Post-Madoka entry in spirit.
But at the same time, this is still a Fate show. Ruby is much more mean-spirited, the despair is a lot harsher, and the battles are matters of life and death. It has the Fate look and Fate battles down, and that counts for a lot. This season at least keeps the horror and bloodshed mostly off, but if you’re looking for cute girls doing cute things in this, you’d better be comfortable with those cute girls also being beaten to within an inch of their life on a regular basis.
Despite what seems like irreconcilable differences, though, the ten-episode season does come together fairly admirably. The comedy is funny, the emotions are functional, and the action is that gold standard that you want to see, at least for the most part. It doesn’t feel like a jumble of spare parts, it feels like it all goes together, because there’s that darker and more insane undertone to the light stuff and Illya herself helping inject some hope and friendship into the dark stuff, weaving the two together.
Long story short, the final grade I have for the season is a B-. It’s mostly a B affair, worth distinct positive regard but not really anything great, but it’s held back in a couple of places with regards to the pacing and storytelling. I think the fact that this is a ten-episode series goes a long way towards hurting it. To compare it to Unlimited Blade Works, Illya and Miyu the same number of targets here that Shiro and Rin did in the Holy Grail War (not counting surprises or each other), and they have the same massive fights that want to have this big, operatic feel to them. But where as Unlimited Blade Works was 24 episodes and really supported the scale needed to be this bombastic, often chuuni-feeling roller coaster of desperate battles and magical powers, Prisma Illya is a mere ten episodes, which is fine for the Magical Girl story it wants to tell, but makes the degree of focus on the set piece battles sometimes just… feel wrong. I mentioned this when talking about the Saber fight, and it holds up. Where UBW was pushed forward, Prisma Illya is held back… to a degree.
That said, it is still a show that I would recommend. If you just look at it as an action-heavy magical girl show, it does fine. If you look at it as a Fate show giving you characters you already knew and liked through a different lens, it’s worth watching for that too. Even if I don’t think it’s precisely the best it could be, it is still more than good enough.