Here I go watching another card game anime. To be fair, the last one I went through, Selector, gave me both a good time and a good card game to follow. Luck & Logic… well it didn’t do the former which curiously makes me disinclined to investigate the latter.
This time, things are a little different; the characters aren’t playing a card game, but are instead the story that the card game represents… or at least I have to assume something like it.
The initial view of the setting is something like Yuki Yuna meets Fate – the world is under siege by the arrival of strange creatures that defy physical law (reminiscent, at least to me, of the Vertex) which have to be fought off by special people. These people form covenants with mythological beings in order to gain their powers (reminiscent, at least to me, of Fate’s Servants).
The term for all the magic stuff running around in the setting is, frustratingly, “Logic”. The humans capable of forming covenants and using magical powers are “Logicalists”, while their “Logic” is a term that refers both to their immediate magical power at hand and, in other contexts, important components of their self, the core concepts that make up a person. This last use could have been smart in a better written show, but here it’s basically a plot coupon for a couple of moments.
Our story starts proper with Yoshichika Tsurugi, a young man who is presently living a normal life in this world with his womanizing father and dead-mom-worshipping lovable brat sister. He is, however, a former Logicalist, who worked for ALCA (“Another Logic Counter Agency”, the space-time cops that protect the world from the outside beings called Foreigners) until using a dangerous forbidden technique caused him to lose a “Logic Card” from himself, the absence of which stripped him of his abilities as a Logicalist.
However, he ends up being approached (at a time when another Logicalist on-scene could help, no less) by Athena, one of the sorts of other-world beings who works with ALCA, and who has found his missing card and wants to both return it to him and be his Covenanter partner. Naturally, Yoshichika accepts, returning him to ALCA’s service.
From there, the rest of the show plays out less like Yuki Yuna or Unlimited Blade Works and more like Myriad Colors Phantom World, giving us character-focused monster of the week episodes that initially do little to progress the “main” plot that gets teased. And I thought Myriad Colors Phantom World was OK, but the entire setup of that show supported it being lower key while the setup of this show wants it to be something more dramatic. Even elDLIVE did more with its villains, and that show was terrible.
That procrastinated plot involves a Foreigner called Lucifer, who everyone is wary about even if Athena is able to parley reasonably with him. And perhaps they should be – when he briefly pings on ALCA’s sensors, he’s rated at 9.8, the highest entity ever seen on a scale that seems rather like the Richter scale. After that, he just sort of… drops off the map. For most of the show, if we cut to him (as does happen now and then) he seems to be womanizing at worst, and his conversations with Athena are more or less pleasant, as he suggests coexistence with humans and even ships her with Yoshichika at one point. A lot of this is framed in a sinister way, but all the lighting in the world doesn’t help if you don’t give him much real menace to his actions and persona.
Anyway, let’s talk about team Supporting Characters as they get their episode each for development.
First is Tamaki Yurine. She was the leader of the squad Yoshichika was assigned to until he was re-approved for field work and given command for reason of effective seniority. She’s smart and wears glasses, so you know she’s the kind of serious sort who would probably get along swimmingly with Chizuru Sakaki. She is, at least, a good deal softer than that, and also serves to an extent as the team mom. Her Covenanter is Venus, who sometimes scandalizes Tamaki with her flirty behavior and generally seems to do so passively by the fact that Tamaki’s outfit when merged with Venus in the Trance state that Logicalists use to fight is… fanservice central. At least it lets her be the party healer.
Tamaki’s episode involves her having to face the harsher side of their work. While, unlike in elDLIVE, a very serious attempt is made to take every Foreigner alive and no one is going to be simply allowing summary or unnecessary kills, the Logicalists are fighting in life and death scenarios, and sometimes have little choice. Or at least that’s how it’s framed in Tamaki’s episode. In no other point in the show is killing even seemingly on the menu of needed actions, but here the boss lady orders it and Tamaki ultimately has to obey, much to Yoshichika’s displeasure as he tried to support her in her love of all life.
Next we get the episode for Chloe Maxwell, the exuberant loon and sword-based damage dealer of the Logicalist team. She likes fighting, activity, and running off on her own and dislikes thinking too much, holding back, or being told what to do by Tamaki. I wouldn’t go so far to call her the Ayamine to Tamaki’s Sakaki, but that’s only because Chloe, as a fun and high-energy airhead, is about as far from that character as you could get. Her partner is Valkyrie, who gets the least personality out of the Covenanters, but who seems to be kind of no-nonsense and laconic. Naturally, Chloe’s episode is all about learning to follow orders and work in a team.
Third comes brooding sniper Mana Asuha, who is the type who never smiles and is closed off to everyone. Her Covenanter is Artemis, who loves speaking in poems and riddles and is otherwise soft and motherly. Her episode involves delving into her past as an abandoned child, and how she needs to let go of her pain without letting go of her present and future. She even tries to use the dangerous technique (called Overtrance) to take out the enemy of the episode, despite the fact that it could utterly destroy her mind and spirit if it were to go really badly, only to be stopped by Yoshichika and a good friendship speech. After that, she starts to warm up a little.
For the next after that (Episode 6 overall) we focus on Yukari Nanahoshi. She was the team’s legitimate new hire – or, more accurately, their new conscript, taken from her quiet life of managing her high school soccer team to be a Logicalist. She doesn’t have a Covenanter yet, and the episode is concerned with getting her one. Specifically, she ends up talking into submission Quetzacoatl, the Foreigner who was the previous episode’s enemy, when he breaks out of prison. She’s nice and avid, sort of a midpoint between Tamaki and Chloe, and forms a comic relief duo with “Quetzie” (who when not possessing a helpless human as Foreigners do is a little green snake pokemon with the personality of Garfield the Cat) as well as a flying scout role from here on.
We then get what is essentially Yoshichika’s personal episode, when the team is invited over to his place on their day off, courtesy of little sister lying and saying it was his birthday. This gets us the conversation with Lucifer that really tries its best to defang him since he just wants to chill, and some random fanservice with Tamaki and Athena (who, along with the only other male member of the team, stay overnight) in the bath. I guess they’re supposed to be the two main love interests, but Luck & Logic throws a total gutterball when it comes to any sort of romantic chemistry, so it’s hard to say about Tamaki or that Athena’s interest is more than an informed attribute.
In this episode, Athena and Yoshichika also have a fight over her having a chat with Lucifer and Yoshichika being… kind of unreasonably angry at a being he’s never met, that the local “Earth” (called Septpia, the other-world being Tetra-Heaven) doesn’t seem to have established mythology about, and who while actually evil is mostly just chilling at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, Lucifer is a bad dude and the show wants you to believe that, but it also wants you to believe that Yoshichika is out of line yelling at Athena about him and it kind of sells that part better.
Finally, we get an episode for the boss lady, Veronica Ananko. Her Covenanter is Nemesis, a complete troll, and while she’s mostly the one giving orders, when she deploys herself to the field she’s the heavy artillery, conjuring loads of magical bombs. Her episode is a little heavier than most of the others, involving her having to confront the Foreigner who damaged her mentor and put him into a coma. She wants to kill the creature, but it turns out that Veronica’s mentor was involved in a secret evil experiment and tried to do an artificial and forced Overtrance with it, resulting in his coma and the thing more or less losing its mind. Veronica is stopped from killing it, and while she tries to resign on realizing she wanted to take a mostly innocent life, she’s sort of told it was an honest mistake and she’s wanted to remain on.
That, all together, is the first eight episodes of Luck & Logic; two for the introduction, and then six for individual characters. There’s one relevant character left. I mentioned him in the house party episode, but more specifically he’s Olga Break. Olga is a Logicalist, and an extremely prideful and faintly chuuni person to boot. In the second episode, they try to build him up as a scary rival before revealing that his deal is that his pride is not well-founded, because he doesn’t have a Covenanter. Episode 9 is effectively an episode for him, but it’s also the kickoff of the four-episode final arc that actually brings Lucifer into focus. I suppose that’s twice as much time as Myriad Colors Phantom World gave its climax arc, but again, that show was much more comfortable with the Phantom of the Week than this show is with Foreigner of the Week.
This starts with a new prison guard, a sweet girl who seems to be under Lucifer’s control, and Lucifer presenting himself to ALCA for a meeting. The reason? He wants to be a Covenanter. Olga jumps at the prospect, but ALCA’s director (a man named Utsutsuno Jarno, not Veronica) says hold your horses, we need to get to know Lucifer first, maybe do a background check with other Tetra-Heaven residents, that sort of stuff. This doesn’t please Olga at all, leading to him questioning a captured Foreigner known as Enlil, who has a grudge against Veronica and some knowledge of Lucifer.
As he does this, Enlil escapes and possesses him to take its full-power form. The situation is framed to make you think Olga let him out in order to get some answers about Lucifer, but while they do have him tempted, there is still a mind controlled guard lady so it’s not exactly a great bluff. The team manages to beat Enlil and rescue Olga, but being possessed by a hostile force caused him to lose some Logic Cards from his self, which will remove his Logicalist ability until the last AWOL card is returned (essentially putting him in a position similar to where Yoshichika was at the start of the show.)
The team combs the battlefield and even the city for the missing card, but Lucifer found it first. He then has the guard lady convince Olga that he’ll be fully blamed for Enlil’s escape, and then visits personally with Olga’s missing card. This leads to Lucifer taking Olga back to his base, where we see that he’s attracted a whole cult of the lost and broken, rather than just womanizing. There, he convinces Olga to covenant with him, in order to bring about a paradise where Foreigners and Humans coexist. So, Lucifer’s entire convoluted evil plan was to have Olga do the thing Olga already wanted to do.
The remaining three episodes, at least, are the kind of action-heavy fare that the premise seemed to promise. Olga does go with Lucifer, who it also turns out is responsible for the hostile Foreigners crossing over at all. After a first fight with Olga-Lucifer goes poorly for the heroes, he invokes his final plan, covering the city in bad and unleashing hordes of Foreigners with his cultists as willing possession hosts, while yammering on about creating Paradise.
We have a big fight throughout the city, beating all the Previous Episode Foreigner rematches, and another loss against Psycho Olga in round 2. This leads to Yoshichika and Athena agreeing on an initially unheard plan, which is of course that the two of them mean to Overtrance. The power boost from that is fairly huge, so as Round 3 starts in earnest, Olga and Lucifer Overtrance as well.
The final duel (just a duel because none of the other teammates are ready to go again) goes about where you think, with Olga and Yoshichika beating the tar out of each other until something interrupts. In this case, it’s the rest of the team throwing themselves in Olga’s way, and Olga being unwilling to probably kill them with his attacks (since they aren’t empowered in Trance)… mostly because he is laser focused on Yoshichika and doesn’t want to fight anyone else. This starts to push Olga and Lucifer out of synch, which eventually allows Yoshichika to beat them. They de-merge, Lucifer is captured, and then Athena and Yoshichika de-merge… and both get all set to play 52 Logic Card pickup.
A week later, only one card remains delinquent for both Yoshichika and Athena. However, they’re fairly important: Athena is missing her ability to feel sorrow, while Yoshichika has lost his memories. Athena vows to find Yoshichika’s lost card, and for their own reasons as well as a desire to help the search, the other goddesses (plus Quetzie) will stay in this world for at least a while longer. After some time of this, Yoshichika escapes ALCA protective custody and manages to, in his fugue, find Athena’s last card on the hill where they first met. He returns it to her, she has a good cry and promises to fix him up, and… the show ends.
I guess we can assume that Athena will manage sooner or later, or the fact that Tamaki and the others are also looking the world over for the missing card will pay off, but that’s basically the important parts of the ending covered. I guess it’s also relevant that Lucifer disintegrates in prison (refusing to take back his missing card representing his dream of coexistence, which is instead installed in Olga) and Olga isn’t too punished (he has bombs following him around in case he goes megalomaniac-style evil, but actually climbs the chain of command). In general though, the show just sort of stops with one half of the “putting our leads back together” bit done.
Luck & Logic isn’t aggressively bad so much as it is really lackluster. How’s the action? It’s not the worst, but it’s not great either. How are the characters? Well, at least they do get screen time even if their development is mostly paper thin. How’s the story? For a monster-of-the-week with a capstone both the monsters and the capstone work, but it’s overall fairly weak. The list goes on. Even the fanservice is kind of okay, but something that the show usually felt like it was a little afraid of. Not enough to leave out a bath scene and some rather sexualized transformations, but enough to avoid lingering on them. The show sort of goes half way with everything, which means it never really hits with anything.
And it can’t be overstated the basic level failure in pitching a tense action show with the atmosphere in episode 1 and delivering more of a light action nothing, or the degree to which Lucifer was a distinct non-menace until he merged with Olga. This show needed its villain to be stronger sooner, or to frame itself more as a “case of the episode” sort of affair than an “ongoing crisis” deal. It tried to straddle the line between the two, and that flagrantly did not work in its favor.
All in all, I give Luck & Logic a D+. Plus, because every now and then there will be something fun to watch – Chloe, Tamaki, and Quetzie can all play scenes pretty well, but the main boy and his goddess would-be girlfriend are about as interesting as cardboard, and everything the show does is handled better somewhere else. If you want the mythological beings in battle, watch Unlimited Blade Works. If you want the monster-of-the-week cases, watch Myriad Colors Phantom World. If you were interested by the potential in Olga’s struggle with his insufficient specialness or the contention of whether or not humans and inhuman beings can learn to live in one world, go watch Shakugan no Shana. Don’t watch Luck & Logic; it was my misfortune to view the irrational mess on display here, but it doesn’t have to be yours.