Anti-Magic Academy: The 35th Test Platoon is the story of Takeru Kusanagi and his misfit friends, a team of trainee witch hunters who may not assess well, but who end up thrown into harrowing situations where they can prove themselves. They’re students at the titular academy, where they learn and apply techniques to fight witches, people who use magic to threaten humanity. It’s a sometimes bizarre and usually dark take on the super-power battle-school scenario with a hearty side-helping of Harem elements. In some ways, there’s fairly little to talk about, while in others it’s absolutely worth a lengthy analysis, if for no other reason than to pick apart the underlying structure of its genre, and how its elements blend or don’t.
At the start of the show, Takeru’s team consists of himself (a close-combat specialist), Usagi Saionji (an easily flustered sniper) and Ikaruga Suginami, a playful pervert who supports them with tech and information. However, they have a new member placed with them: Oka Otori, the show’s humorless Tsundere, and a prodigy who’s position in the squad is a punishment for doing too much witch-killing rather than witch-arresting in her time with the full-fledged Inquisition. Oka is, of course, not pleased with this outcome, or anything related to her new and unreliable teammates, though after being subjected to as many boob grab jokes as she was it’s rather natural. She decides to solo missions rather than letting the idiots help, but Takeru sticks his foot firmly in the metaphorical door and invites himself along, discovering her anger issues and tragic backstory (family murdered by witch, causing her to violently despise all magic and all witches) in the process while preventing her from murdering any more subdued foes.
They end up set against an evil witch terrorist organization, Valhalla, from which the audience meets Mari Nikado, who seems to be principled with a strong drive to not hurt innocents, and a character usually just referred to as “The Necromancer” (though he does have a name, Haunted) who is… anything but.
The Necromancer is a kind of interesting villain. That is, the choices made in writing him are interesting; the character himself is utterly flat and utterly single-noted and… that’s basically what makes him work, which is the interesting part. Essentially, the Necromancer is evil and loving every minute of it. He revels in every dastardly deed he does or wants to do with the infectious joy of a kid on Christmas morning. Because there’s no humanity in him, no redeeming traits or deep study, the show is willing and able to have him ham up his enjoyment of his own wickedness to a level that at least borders on the comical. He is loud and he is proud, entering scenes with an explosive “hallelujah” and cheering and laughing the whole way. This must have been a fun role to act, since he goes big and cuts loose all the time in the way that only the hammiest villains can. I don’t even know if the show has been dubbed but if it were in English this performance would need to come out of someone like Tim Curry, Jeremy Irons, Nicholas Cage, Gary Oldman… a good actor with the ability to turn off all pretense of subtlety and just go. That’s how crazy this guy is. He’s horrible, and racks up a nasty body count of gruesome deaths every time he appears, but he’s also one of only two characters (the other being Ikaruga) who seems to have any fun in this show.
Because of that, even though his thoughts and motivations are about as interesting as those of a tornado (that is to say, something with none), he actually carries quite a few scenes in which he appears.
His game the first time out is to summon a powerful magical warrior (with human sacrifices, of course!) and send it at the Anti-Magic academy to spring captured Witches and generally cause havoc. Takeru and Oka intercept, with help from the other squad members, but after Oka has her power-up shut down by the headmaster playing some sort of sinister game, Takeru protects her and gets mortally wounded for his troubles. This ends up with him forming a contract with Lapis, a magic weapon that sometimes takes the form of a flat affect loli, becoming a “relic eater”, a powerful fighter with a cool weapon and a transformation sequence into power armor. Oka sort of is one too, but thanks to her distaste for magic her weapon technically answers to the headmaster, not her (thus the scenario) and she can’t/won’t fully transform. They beat the magic warrior and save the day, with Takeru having earned Oka’s respect and possibly affection.
The next arc sees an odd addition to the team: Mari, the principled witch who had been grudgingly working with the Necromancer. There are a couple conditions. First, she’s experiencing magic-induced amnesia, and second she’s been outfitted with a Gleipnir, a collar that will explode and kill her if she tries to use magic (which is a better connection to the mythological source of the name than anything in the show by that name, but I digress). All the same, Oka is quite upset about having to protect a witch, and when Mari is told she’ll be living with Takeru (the headmaster’s idea, to bait out Valhalla), she gets exceptionally flustered with the situation and insists on joining in, with a solid side dish of harem antics to be had.
Eventually, it’s revealed that Mari was framed for the murders for which she was arrested, and shortly after the Necromancer shows up in a bloody entrance, declaring his love for Mari, his intent to kill Mari because what he’s really in love with is her despair, and for an encore he dispels the amnesia on her to reveal that the orphanage kids she was friends with that he was holding hostage to get her compliance have been slaughtered. In the resulting battle, Oka defends Mari (whose innocence she was the one to discover) and the Necromancer is ultimately fought off by Takeru and the team, after which Mari, in full possession of her mind, really “joins the team”.
The next two arcs are dedicated to Usagi and Ikaruga, respectively. In each one an evil plot unrelated to anything that came before or that comes after fires, but we get a lot of time and effort dedicated to resolving the emotional traumas of the leading lady of the arc. In Usagi’s arc, we find that she’s faced with an arranged marriage handled by an unsupportive family, and carries deep guilt over her brother’s death. Her fiancee is a complete jackass who over the course of the arc both helps a body-snatching fiend infiltrate the school and attempts to rape Usagi, so you can cheer when he’s beaten, disgraced, and any match well and truly off.
Ikaruga’s arc was more interesting, delving into her backstory as an artificially created prodigy who broke from her programming as a super-scientist by learning to care for one of her own creations. We get some decent study of her warped psychology as she’s drawn back to the alchemy lab that her sister (fellow clone/design child/whatever) now runs, over a cell sample of the extinct Dark Elf that Ikaruga stole on the way out. While the meat of this arc is the emotional drama over Ikaruga’s humanity, there is some extra plot as Ikaruga reveals some new powers (namely, the ability to use the cell she implanted in herself to temporarily become a Dark Elf) and the Necromancer appears to finish off Ikaruga’s sister at the end and summon a cyber dragon for a final boss, before escaping again.
The final arc, after the obligatory beach episode, then, is essentially concerned with Takeru. More accurately, it introduces his little sister, a sweet girl who loves her brother but has to be kept in absolute magical maximum security because her body is in a demonic state that means she’s immortal, and needs to be killed time and time again, almost constantly, to stop her from overwhelming the world with a gray goo-esque flood of mutated demonic flesh.
And of course, after one of the brief visits Takeru is allowed, she escapes from containment. Despite her demonic power busting her out, she doesn’t initiate a disaster scenario just yet, and finds her way to Takeru and his friends as a relatively normal-looking little girl. After they have something of a day on the town, the little sister is recaptured and prepared to be shipped off to a new facility that might be able to contain or remove her dark power, but the Necromancer and his Valhalla lackeys, naturally, attack the convoy. Takeru and company try to defend, which gets Takeru stabbed, causing little sister to flip out and completely lose control, resulting in the climax taking place in a stretch of city utterly overrun by her demonic growths, with the team struggling both against the Necromancer and the little sister’s demons. Eventually, with some serious effort, mid-battle emotional support, and a distinct lack of help from the Headmaster who’s just watching, shooting the breeze with a Valhalla witch, the little sister is rendered safe again, the demons dissolve, forcing Valhalla to retreat. Some cryptic bull about ancient wars and the Headmaster being an old magical thing are thrown around, and all’s well that ends well.
So, how does Anti-Magic Academy hold up?
Despite its overall dark tone and feel, I think that Anti-Magic Academy works much better as a Harem anime than it does as an Action anime. I say this because despite the traditional harem comedy beats being fairly weak, the harem aspect is what the story focuses on and where the investment is. Each arc is focused on a girl, exploring her character, exposing her inner demons, combating those inner demons, and establishing and exploring her bond with Takeru.
The first arc belongs to Oka, and establishes her grudging respect for our lead turning into affection as he offers to help her shoulder her burdens. The second focuses on Mari, and how her experience with Takeru develops as a powerful friendship formed as he’s the one to trust and believe in her even when, because of her amnesia, she can’t trust and believe in herself. For the third arc, it’s really all about Usagi and Usagi’s terrible self esteem, as we see her gain the strength to fight back despite being meek, and how Takeru acts as someone who validates her worth because he values her for who she is as a person, which is what she desperately needs. For Ikaruga, we explore her strange psyche and see that Takeru acts as her tether to humanity, a big part of the reason she can be a person more than a thing. Finally, we take on the little sister character, and the grief she shares with Takeru and the complicated feelings between them as she has some desire to finally die to not cause or suffer any more pain but Takeru still wants to save her even if that’s not her wish.
In all this, the Necromancer and Valhalla aren’t really the point. The combat scenes exist to give a high drama, high tension place for the characters to work out their emotional issues, support each other and apply what they learn about themselves and each other. They’re interesting mostly for how they allow or force the characters to grow and feel first, for the fact that the Necromancer’s bloody destructive capering is amusing on its own second, and for whatever technical stakes are up for the world a very distant third. We never really understand Valhalla’s goals beyond simply causing chaos even though they’re supposed to have something. Necromancer pretty much just hams it up and eats babies for breakfast, and that’s the extent of what we ‘get’.
Yet, despite this, the show does have a decent balance. Neither the dark material nor the harem comedy material interrupt or detract from each other the way they do in shows that aren’t put together as well, which means that even though this is more a dramatic Harem anime than a dramatic urban fantasy Action anime, it can be appreciated for its action and story if that’s the sort of thing that appeals to you. It’s bog standard in that regard, but it’s not deficient.
To an extent, this mirrors what I feel about the show as a whole. It doesn’t do all that much special, but it does do things well. I think the biggest advantage the show has is how well it studies the girls. This is something that’s critical for a Harem show, because for the Harem quandary to work you need to have the audience form a connection with each girl and believe in their romance for the lead, and the necessity of that is part of why I don’t dislike the propensity for Harem shows, since when executed decently they result in at least the female characters being rounded and developed. There is a ton of that on display here in Anti-Magic Academy.
Still I ultimately find this to be something of a C+ show. When I get down to it, the fact that this is a serious show with a dark storyline in which tons of people are hurt or killed and we don’t really care about the intrigues of terrorists, witches, and ancient wars does drag it down somewhat. I was invested enough to watch the whole show without complaint, but it did never matter to me what the headmaster’s whole game was or what secrets he was hiding, I just wanted to see Takeru and the girl of the arc work out their issues. And maybe, if there was time, I wanted to see the Necromancer make a mess again. Anti-Magic Academy is a show that I bear no rancor towards, that I think did several elements legitimately well, but that I can only offer a tepid recommendation.