Someone seriously asked the question “What if we had Infinite Stratos but the super suits are literally powered by arousal?”. That idea got greenlit for real. And you might think, “Well, that sounds like a sorry excuse for a Hentai, but what isn’t?” I regret to inform you that I do not review Hentai. This thing actually thinks someone is going to take it seriously. Does it work? We’ll see.
To get this out at the start, we all know why they’re doing this: it’s an outright excuse to go full bore with the ecchi. Surprisingly, I don’t think this is conceptually dead on arrival: Captain Earth technically had mechas running on libido and owned the themes alright (its predecessor, Star Driver, did as well, but I liked Captain Earth better). Darling in the Franxx didn’t technically use an erotic power source, but had its mecha piloting be extremely sexual or suggestive, including the brilliant yet sanity-damaging innuendo and double entendre onslaught early on.
Seeking deeper roots, it’s not unusual in human culture and folklore for sex, intense part of life that it is, to be highly mysticized, and if you dig through comparative folklore and religion, you can finds lots of precedent for using sexual ‘energy’ as magical or spiritual energy – energy that can do work. But despite both those mythic antecedents and better anime approaches, I think it’s fairly safe to say that no creator who is going to use the trope in the way and to the degree that this show does it is going to use it responsibly with an eye towards seriousness. Roots acknowledged, it’s a shoddy excuse for some non-penetrative and thus not technically x-rated content meant to please the viewer.
On with the show.
After a random battle where we’re introduced to the concept of getting the girls off in order to charge their batteries, we cut abruptly to the actual opening wherein main character Kizuna Hida is brought in to attend the obligatory super school, at the behest of his big sister who is, much like the big sister in IS, a big shot who seems to know about some kind of special power that Kizuna holds. He gets lost on his way to the command center, like that kind of thing wouldn’t be signed, and runs into the mysterious white-haired waif of the girls, Aine. She is, unsurprisingly, a weirdo with a twisted personality because having someone react like an outright space alien to every stimulus and also be prickly is I guess a shortcut to having your girl not be generic.
The impression you might have right here is this: “It doesn’t make her good, but I guess she’s not generic.”
After putting up with a mercifully small amount of Aine’s bullshit, a crisis begins as the enemy “Magitech weapons” (giant armored skeleton mechas, mostly) attack, prompting Aine to strip down to her pilot leotard and do the super-sexualized transformation sequence in order to fight them. Kizuna considers his hang-up, the fact that his mom threw him out for “not having talent”, causing him to not don his own super suit long enough to have to be saved by the stuck-up prickly Japanese stereotype (or so she seems), Hayuru Himekawa, as well as the sexy blonde American stereotype (or so she seems), Yurishia Farandole. I’d complain more but the show goes on.
After they fly off, Aine’s battery bottoms out in the face of the enemy mothership, prompting Kizuna to activate his super suit, Eros, in order to fly up and catch her. He’s… kind of successful, but his own suit is super weak so he can’t even fly straight carrying a girl. After they crash a little more gently than she was likely to on her own, Sis phones in to give Kizuna his orders and instructions, and we commence with sexually harassing a semiconscious girl for the good of all mankind. Kizuna at least has the decency to protest this enough to get sis to frame her instructions in a slightly less rape-like manner.
It’s bad, but it could have been a lot more painful to watch, and it gets to the intended “battery charge” effect with enough time left for Aine to punch out Kizuna, wipe out the enemy, and get a little cryptic talk from Big Sis commander.
Big sis does the obligatory embarrassing of Kizuna in front of the whole student body to explain the new charge-up plan, and we get an episode that mostly sets up Yurishia and gets the Heart Hybrid (charge-up) with her. In the next one you’d think we’d focus on Himekawa, but all she needs is a scene, as she’s apparently easy enough that being caught from falling, with no actual lewd behavior, triggers her recharge at least once.
In the meantime, Kizuna looks into Aine and tries to understand her. This leads to some serious revelations that even aside from tossing Kizuna away like garbage, mom did some very naughty things in her pursuit of humanity defense weapons – like raising Aine as a lab rat with no socialization or humanity, and pushing at least one early test pilot deliberately and emphatically to her death just to watch it happen. The latter incident is in a recently-discovered log and reveals what the audience may have expected from how the girls get at low battery: if the charge drops all the way to zero on their implanted superweapon thingy, they outright die. This is a secret known only to big sis, her immediate inner circle, and now Kizuna. And clearly mom, wherever she’s gotten off to (in universe. She’s missing.) So, I guess if Kizuna was having any hangups about recharging them, they are now different hangups.
Before this can be processed properly, a massive enemy incoming appears, and during the fight, Aine burns through her energy way too fast. Kizuna manages to recover her and in the med bay where they both wait nearly tapped out they have… honestly, a shockingly good and effective talk. Learning all about Mad Science Mom explained a lot of Aine, but hearing her talk about her own experiences and feelings of worth or worthlessness in her own words, what it means to her to have been a lab rat with no purpose other than to deploy a weapon and yet to not have the kill count of her peers… it’s good stuff, as is the two of them bonding over the fact that the same woman gave them their assorted traumas, just from different perspectives. Kizuna passes off some words big sis gave him that salvaged his mentality right after he was thrown away, and that finishes emotionally breaking through with Aine.
Something that I do feel deserves a little attention here is the timing. The lewd scene that follows is a big one, pushing Aine through two levels of Heart Hybrid (the basic “turn her on to recharge her” one followed by an explanation and execution of “get her off to supercharge her”, letting her use a badass ultimate weapon and allowing Kizuna to fight at her baseline level in the battle that follows) and takes around three and a half minutes… but the conversation beforehand was more like nine minutes, making up the meat of the episode. For a show that’s torn between a concept and some required scenes that want it to be outright porn and an apparent desire to be taken seriously as anything else, this was a good choice when it came to being an actual show.
We get some hints that there are humans (or close enough) behind the invasion forces from the other world, and from some memory fragments that Aine might be foreign herself, but by in large the show then takes a breath by giving us some actual time and focus on Himekawa. Since she’s hard to get close to, big sis starts trying to force matters, and while the non-lewd top-up earlier clearly helped, there’s little doubt she’s running more on fumes than either of the other girls. After testing the new date-focused holodeck on Yurishia, it’s time to actually get a little close to Himekawa, who naturally given her character type makes this difficult.
Because getting through to her is probably not going to happen in a non-crisis scenario, or at least not without the same kind of emotional catharsis Aine got, we go on another mission and there encounter one of the Otherworlders, a green lady who wants to kill the team and take their cores, and is particularly interested in Aine. She summons a purple King Gidorah mech, which is an enemy that holds particular ties to Himekawa’s past trauma over failing to save people she was meant to protect, and Himekawa goes berserk. She gets beat, but the others don’t do much better, and they have to make a hasty retreat, spared pursuit only because the enemy is too low battery to follow, complaining about how her magic runs out.
After getting back to base, Himekawa runs off again to face the otherworlder, but the whole team comes to her rescue in the nick of time. Big Sis even drops off the holodeck so that Kizuna and a rather drained Himekawa can get their climax off. Naturally, they talk out her problems before getting to lewd behavior for power-ups. It’s not quite as intense as Aine’s version, but it’s still pretty good, addressing her feelings of inadequacy over not saving as many people as she could in the past and encouraging her to think of what she has done rather than what she couldn’t. The dang-near-H-scene after is a little lamer, but that’s this show: it doesn’t have the ability to go all the way but it’s going to do as much as it can. Except apparently kissing, for some reason that never really makes it into the blocking.
Himekawa powered up, she takes out the Gidorah impersonator that traumatized her in the past, and the otherworld fighter gets put on the back foot until the cavalry arrives. First hers, a whole fleet coming through a dimensional rift to pick her up. Then team hero’s, as the American base rises from the waves and disgorges its elite fighter squad, at which point the otherworlders decide to shove off. The day is saved, but it seems that Yurishia isn’t done yet – after all, she hasn’t had a heart-to-heart or full climax hybrid – and her arc is set up with the leader of the American squad seeming to hate her guts, which you can probably guess right away has something to do with her not being with them.
Well, while the show goes on to address some of that, getting wacky hijinx with the American team lead, Scarlet, where we find that in a lot of ways she and Yurishia are on the same wavelength to the point where they should be the best of friends, and also learn her grudge against Yurishia (that, apparently, Yurishia sent her and other squadmates to die softening up an enemy, only to steal the kill and the glory for herself). However, rather than resolve it we start following multiple lines with Aine trying to track down the secrets of her origin and the otherworlder (Aldea, to start using her name) and her boss/lover Gravel doing things back home, like having a triumphal parade, victory lesbian screw, and plotting to seize Aine and/or her (recall, implanted and fatal to have bottom out so probably fatal to remove) Magitech Armor (as they call the Heart Gears).
This ends up forming the climax of the episode when Gravel first demands Aine in a parley and then, when the short-lived negotiations break down… pretty much beats up everybody. She seems shocked to see Kizuna, a male, fighting and tries to make a “Join me” offer to Aine, but has to fly off because her timer is too low to keep going.
On the plus side, it’s also revealed that humanity has gained the tech to seal the portals the otherworlders use, and thus plans are underway to take out the portals at Okinawa and Tokyo in order to reclaim Japan for Earth. And, wouldn’t you know it, Gravel has stationed herself to be the big roadblock for Okinawa. Big sister’s scheme to gain the power needed to defeat her? Threesomes!
Let it not be said this show is anything but shameless.
And of course the roster for the first is set to be Kizuna (as required), Yurishia, and Scarlet. This goes about as well as you’d expect, with the truth of their falling out getting aired (Yurishia sent Scarlet to somewhere she thought was going to be safe) and everyone getting into it enough to earn their power-ups. At which point Gravel and Aldea can be fought at Okinawa. Aldea gets knocked out defending Gravel, and Gravel is ultimately overwhelmed by Kizuna borrowing Yurishia and Scarlet’s powers at once. Gravel grabs Aldea and flees, but not without dropping some more cryptic unfinished hints about Aine.
This segues into the next arc where, Earth-side, Aine is making herself scarce because her slowly-returning memories (Heart Hybrid by Heart Hybrid) have her afraid of what she might discover, clearly suspecting the truth. Meanwhile, Aldea and Gravel are tortured and brainwashed by a different otherworld authority, who apparently has ties to mad scientist mom, alive and well on their side. Mom joins the assault force which, of course, hits Kizuna and Aine pretty hard. They confront her and she pretty much takes the chance to insult her offspring and say that they’ll meet again in Tokyo. Her presence is revealed as a hologram, her fleet flies off, and we spend time to gear up for just that.
By this point the routine is familiar, as is the emotional play of the girls. There’s a sequence where Kizuna, instructed to get a backup member for the squad, recruits the cute lower-grade girl, Sylvia, who has acted as an attache so far, and while the writing is decent the age gap makes it pretty painfully awkward. Mercifully while still R-rated the actual scene with her is much shorter and more tame than normal.
Despite knowing it’s some sort of trap, the operation to reclaim Tokyo begins. Kizuna makes his way in, only to go through a tunnel and emerge in… a completely normal modern Tokyo where nothing bad has happened. This is quickly revealed to be an illusion. It is, in fact, Mom’s lair, and a place where she has many normal people trapped in that illusion in order to harvest their life energy on a broad scale for magical power. Working with the otherworld empire, she hopes to expand this small patch of Tokyo to a planet-wide system, a magical reactor where those living in it won’t know they’re fuel.
So, evil scheme covered, Kizuna also gets the memo that the cores can’t be removed nonlethally and thus everyone with one, including the little girl he just helped reach for her dream of fighting back, is basically doomed to an early grave due to how the things use their bearer’s life energy. He flips out and start a fight, but while Mom doesn’t seem to have any combat capability of her own, she brought elite goons.
The girls show up and make a fight of it, but ultimately have to be saved by the arrival of the Sylvia who, rather than a skimpy pilot suit with a couple of weapons, gets a badass mecha dragon with pile bunker fists and probably half a dozen assorted turrets that she can ride fully inside (in her slightly-less-skimpy-than-normal pilot suit). She beats the miniboss fairly handily, but said miniboss decides to self-destruct and turns her armor into a bomb that threatens to wipe out the whole Kanto region. Sylvia’s got that too – she uses her ultimate to pull a Final Fantasy style summon of a giant green lady and suck the entire doomsday fireball into a black hole that can then wink out of existence.
This is the kind of stuff that makes no sense, but dang it, they make it look awesome.
After that’s beaten, there are still more enemies. Big sis has the holodeck dropped off in the city, and we catch up with the flash forward from episode one as Kizuna and Himekawa go in to charge up. Back in Episode 1, this sequence ended after they emerged with Aine taking her turn out of turn, and this time we get her emotional inner monologue as to why, feeling that she can’t be who she is if she’s not powerful.
Unfortunately the henchwoman of evil mom with the mind control power is still running around outside. She disarms Scarlet and the American squad and traps them in wet dreams before going after squad main characters. While Aine and Kizuna are still working through her exhibitionist sex fantasies, the big bad boss disables the otherwise outright busted Sylvia, and then goes for Himekawa and Yurishia and takes them out without a real fight too.
Aine fails to power up all the way despite a messy Hybrid scene, and the holodeck gets flipped, prompting them to go out and see their defeated allies and the boss enemy awaiting them. She gloats and we see that the girls were sent to their worst nightmares: Himekawa being surrounded by her failures and dragged down by the innocents she failed to save, Yurishia alone in a world where the comrades she cared about were slaughtered with her to blame. Boss then sends Aine into a coma of lost memories, but elects to fight Kizuna head-on.
Kizuna fights as best he can with only partial power, Aine busily goes on a memory tour, and finally Kizuna’s feelings reach out and stir Himekawa, Yurishia, and Sylvia from their nightmares enough for him to harness their powers. He trashes the boss, leading to her pulling her apparently ultimate trump card: Mind Controlled Aine. Of course, she makes her will save in the nick of time, enters the super mode she didn’t quite get earlier, and wipes out all the enemies with a world-healing wave.
The portals around Tokyo close, the day seems won, evil mom seems to think this is still Just As Planned, and after the credits some new girl appears, identifies Aine as the princess of the otherworld empire (we could kinda guess that) and her big sister, and the show stops with a “To be continued” that probably never will be seeing as the studio behind this thing went out of business.
So, how does the show stack up?
Well, in a sense it’s going to be impossible to give it a fair grade because so much of how any given viewer reacts to it is going to have to do with how they react to the erotica. I can’t even say “oh, well you can skip those scenes” like you could for some works because they’re very much plot-relevant and include some character building worked in with all the assorted ass-grabbing and boob-fondling. If you can’t watch that, you can’t watch this show.
So whatever grade I give, it’s going to have an asterisk the size of an actual star next to it. That’s just the way it is with works like this that go, if not all-in, at least most of the way in: either you say it’s hard to watch, but if you’re up for the almost-porn it might be good, or you say it’s good but if the almost-porn kills it for you then dead it is.
For my part… I weirdly respect this show. When I think about bog-standard battle school shows, the ones that really seemed to be trying to leave a minimal impression… pretty much everything in Hybrid x Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia is a cut above that. The action is probably the weakest part, but it at least understands the basics of how to choreograph a fight. The story is blatantly unfinished, I dare say even still gearing up, but it’s entirely serviceable.
The characters range from Kizuna, who is almost perfectly bog standard, and up from there, with the main three girls being fairly explored and developed people. They’re far from the best characters to grace anime, but they are head, shoulders, and massive boobs above the level of stale nobodies that populate less competently written works. At the very least I understand their weaknesses and foibles, what encourages them and pushes them forward, what holds them back or gets them down, and how they’re supposed to be unique from each other. They look like two stereotypes and a space alien when they’re introduced, but by the end they’re a trio of damaged yet strong girls who have made real progress and put themselves together. This is the exact opposite of the annoying cycle where a girl will be introduced, made interesting, and then when her intro arc is done she’s hit with the Harem Ray to turn her into a generic clingy jealous unwanted girlfriend.
But how far can I really upsell it on “it has actual character writing!”? Honestly, not that far. The show still has its dumb moments, its stale beats it feels contractually obligated to include, and a rather weak opening because, let’s be honest here, it’s stuck opening for a concept that probably shouldn’t have been greenlit for non-X audiences. I’m probably more glad it was greenlit than not, but that’s a mild thing.
In the end, I’ll offer Hybrid x Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia a B-, erring on the side of a high grade. It has marked advantages over the generic baseline, and few ways in which its truly deficient. The biggest turn off is how the ecchi goes over and above, and as stated before that just becomes a massive asterisk next to the grade rather than a factor I can really say moves it up or down. But it’s not a stellar product, just one that comfortably passes a standard inspection, no more and no less.