It’s Magical Girl May, so you know what? Enough of this half-counting nonsense. Arjuna and Magikano may show up on lists of technically magical girl shows, but they’re not in tune with the core of the genre. Twin Angels Break, on the other hand, is about as core a Magical Girl show as you could hope for, with all the tropes of a post-Sailor-Moon action Magical Girl outing on full display. After how the last couple of weeks have treated me, that’s good enough in my book to be worth a watch.
Twin Angels Break stars Meguru Amatsuki, a transfer student from an island community to Tokyo, who dreams of being a hero. In Tokyo she meets her absurdly colorful supporting cast of quirks and, of course, the dour sourpuss to her energetic ways, Sumire Kisaragi. Soon enough, Meguru gets her chance to be a hero when a magic hedgehog recruits her with a full transformation scene, in order to fight an energy-draining shamisen player and his minions, all of which are embarrassingly lame even by dollar store hero show standards, what with the minions dissolving when lightly shoved and the boss, despite being an evil lieutenant of some rank, having all his powers fully restricted to shamisen-themed ones. Somehow this still gets the drop on Meguru, who is wrapped up in instrument strings and threatened with a vaguely pointy pick. This prompts the other Twin Angel magical girl to come in and dispatch the pathetic warm-up bad guy, revealing that she is none other than Sumire.
After the battle, Meguru couldn’t be happier with the arrangement… but Sumire is more than done with heroing and Meguru alike.
Thus, our first quest: befriend the sourpuss! If the evil organization is as dangerous as the first guy, I think that may well be the harder prospect. This takes one episode, and thus we’re fully in the loop, where we fight against the apparent top evil (Mary, who “disguises” herself as the school nurse in order to use sex appeal to get more of her way) and her embarrassing faceless mooks. Along the way we learn a motivation other than protecting the medals manifested from human feelings (and thus stopping the villains from making people slightly more jerkish). That motive is that the previous pair of Twin Angels were captured or esoterically zapped in an incident the hedgehog escaped from, and the hedgehog wants to rescue them.
From there we trudge through a lot more lame setups. One of the other evil lieutenants under Mary comes to school for an episode, but is so utterly incompetent she drops him down a bottomless pit by the end of the episode. Why does she have that? No reason, it’s pure comedy other than the fact that the character (annoying git or no) is easily presumed dead seeing how we established that baddies can die in episode one. Mary also imprisons Sumire’s big brother (who Sumire has an unhealthy obsession with) and converts him into an evil minion she dubs Nasty Knight and who basically looks and acts like an evil Tuxedo Mask. Her last lieutenant also proves to be a pair, a “brother/sister” idol duo who transfer into school due to befriending Meguru in the girl’s mortal identity.
And beyond this, we just sort of bat around “collect medals”. Even when Mary theoretically turns up her draining from skimming a little energy off crowds to having Nasty Knight drink deep from specific victims, it doesn’t seem like she does much lasting harm, nor is she ever given an evil motivation. I mean, I get that taking medals makes the person they’re manifested from a jerk or really tired for a little bit, but we don’t have a lot of reason to care when the Twin Angels lose a fight.
Note that I say “evil” motivation, as we do actually get reasons why the baddies want to collect Medals. Mary wants to use the power of the medals to resurrect a guy whose portrait he addresses. He looks like Manfred von Karma so presumably he wasn’t a nice chap, but we’re not let in on any way in which this would be bad for the world. Similarly, the idol duo are revealed to be androids and want the power of medals to become real humans. Which, okay? That really doesn’t seem evil.
Most of this show is incredibly harmless, but then we get things like the intro mook in all his lamemess being killed off, or the mad scientist henchman being dropped down a bottomless pit to his presumed death, scenes the show doesn’t want you to think too much about because they’d be harsh if you did. And we get the convoluted plot with Nasty Knight where he is brainwashed, then they say he isn’t, and Mary’s minions seem to gun him down though with no blood and no body you can kind of assume he’ll turn back up.
A lot of this show’s lameness could actually work if it were more of a parody, which at times it feels like. The transparent lack of any sort of disguise in the battle states for the baddies and magical girls alike, yet having to deduce each others’ identities? Could be funny. The pathetic nature of the evil minions and the lack of meaningful harm usually done by them? Fine in a comedy. If the show played this more like a classic cartoon like Wacky Races or a farce like KonoSuba, I’d be more forgiving. But that’s not how it plays. It’s clear that the show is trying to take itself seriously and wants to be taken seriously, burning the A-plot of something like five episodes on the Russian robot duo, trying to do serious cloak and dagger work with the (not) brainwashed brother, and so on. It’s trying to build stakes and an emotional bond but it doesn’t have the right skill set to actually pay that off.
So, forgive me if when, after an overly long attempt at catharsis where the robots are turned to the side of good, Mary blows them to smithereens with a kill switch she had hidden in her cleavage for just that eventuality, I don’t feel for Meguru having the demise of her friends heaped on her shoulders the way the show wants you to.
I feel like this show suffers bitterly in comparison to another Magical Girl show, Blue Reflection Ray. In Blue Reflection Ray, what the baddies do… seems to actually kind of help their victims on the surface level, taking away their pain and strife. But even from the start, before the whole “victim eventually falls into a coma” effect is revealed, we get that what they’re doing is actually harmful, in a meaningful and lasting way. When the heroes in that show fail to save someone, you feel the sting of that loss. And because there’s drama throughout, and the rest of the show supports that tone, you can get arcs about redemption and the inner turmoil of the minion-tier dark magical girls (not to mention the two leads of the dark team) and these land with actual emotional impact.
Twin Angels Break couldn’t really decide if it wanted to be a silly show or a serious show, and it’s critically broken because of that.
Speaking of broken, how’s Meguru? She’s not doing well, blaming herself because nobody thinks to remind her that, ya know, it was actually Mary who did the killing and that maybe not listening to the opinions of an evil psycho would be for the best. As her heart breaks, Mary goes ahead and snatches her, and we finally get some exposition about what’s going on.
Briefly, and this is about as fast as the show pushes it out, Meguru is actually from a cursed family who were cast out of the society that produces Twin Angel pairs. However, despite her potentially having a cursed darkness power sealed inside her, she was brought on because there was nobody else left to pair with Sumire. Now that Mary has activated the darkness by breaking her heart, she could use this to turbo-charge the medals she already has, and in so doing complete her goal. It is here, in episode ten, that we actually learn that the cravat-wearing old dude whose portrait Mary gushes over is some kind of demon king who would drown the world in darkness. You think that might be relevant a little earlier? I get not telling the girls because, okay, it’s a lot to take in, but how about the audience?
In order to to evil things, though, Mary is hauling Meguru (in an evil science pod of some sort) to the island of her birth. This leaves Sumire, the hedgehog, a butler highly reminiscent of Norman from The Big O, and whatever other forces happen to muster to… well, as Brendan Frasier put it in the 1999 version of The Mummy, rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, and save the world.
The last two episodes of climax dial up the madness. The mad scientist who was dropped down a bottomless pit? Alive, seemingly swimming to the island. He fights the shamisen player, who Mary resurrects as some kind of fighting shade, letting Sumire keep going.
Sumire gets trapped with a sadistic choice between slowly drowning and the turned-to-stone previous twin angels blowing up. The hedgehog makes it through the air ducts to said predecessors thanks to a guiding pigeon (it happens) and they all wake up and transform. Also it turns out the hedgehog was a transformed girl this whole time, and the third of that set of twin angels.
The hedgehog was the pink one front and center
Sumire and the Yesterday’s News gang run into the Shamisen player again, except now he’s a robot with laser eyes. I guess something had to peel off the extra fighters so it could be team hero in the end. Also, Sumire’s big brother is alive, here, and doing good-aligned Tuxedo Mask things, reintroduced as Misty Knight, apparently tied to the old Twin Angels group, just to make you feel like there was a first season you missed. I guess it has that in common with Blue Reflection Ray as well.
Sumire tries to go rescue Meguru, but gets de-transformed by energy-draining tentacles. Mary then doesn’t finish her off, like an idiot, and focuses on that whole demon overlord resurrection thing. This gives ample opportunity for Sumire to crawl over to Meguru, free her, and have a heart to heart. Thus the two recover lost memories of being friends as toddlers, transform up, and prepare to fight the final boss. The Twin Angel Senpais actually come in and shoot the purple goo monster away. This causes Mary, seeing her beloved demon lord reduced to ash, to self-destruct.
And if that sounded like quite the anticlimax… it wouldn’t have been if the show were written well, and it’s not exactly because somehow Mary killing herself summons a giant space battleship with island-nuking doom cannons.
They do explain that it was her revenge weapon, programmed to go on an evil AI-controlled Macross rampage if Mary died but… she had a giant space battleship this whole time? As it flies off to go ahead and shoot a planet buster at Earth, the senpais run out of transform juice, so it’s up to Meguru and Sumire to save the day.
Sadly it’s not as simple as one last hit since the ship eats them after Meguru gives an overly long hero speech to it, and inside it’s revealed that the robots left their cores attached to the ship for just this eventuality. They can’t stop it, but they can provide escape pods so that the girls can return to earth while the ship self-destructs. So they get to die again, I guess. Well, other than that (and a random hook for a hopefully not happening sequel) the ending mostly just montages us people being happy back on Earth with the evil defeated. So all’s well that ends well? I guess the girl who had been turned into a hedgehog turns back into a hedgehog so maybe they should look into that?
This show is… not well. It spends five episodes in pathetic puttering, five in the robot arc that would have been way more impactful if it had constructed itself better from the start, and then two on this climax that goes absolutely insane throwing every setup at us all in a row. The final episode alone felt like a marathon with at least two beats where it should have ended before it actually did.
In the end, the uneven nature of the thing is its biggest downfall. It’s trying to run this light action but still dramatic magical girl hero show on “parody in how lame it is” hardware and it can’t keep up. It’s focused extremely tightly on Sumire, Meguru, and just a couple of baddies… except when it decides to just have an explosion of side characters for no reason. If Mary had been a bit more threatening from the start rather than a theatrical goof in a skanky ant Halloween costume, if the early action had been a little less outright tragic and the first couple of henchmen not so overwhelmingly pathetic, the attempts at some real cheesy pathos were there. It never would have been a great show, but it would have been a watchable show, an utterly forgivable low passing grade.
As it is, though, Twin Angels Break gets a D. The characters were reasonably watchable, the art was perfectly fine, and while the plot made no sense in how it was constructed it at least gave a couple half-decent turns. I like that we proved that Meguru could actually feel emotional pain, and that Sumire did seem to legitimately grow into a warmer person. But that can’t save the show from being a wasteful mass of quirks that fails to truly live up to its ambition.