Well, this month I’ve reviewed shows in the vein of Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, two of the backbone shows for my first Magical Girl May… might as well take on one that’s trying to be Madoka, right?
Enter Day Break Illusion, a show that seems to be taking design notes and tonal pointers alike from Madoka Magica. But this one has Tarot cards? As pitches go, I’ve seen worse.
So, this show actually slow rolls the open, which I kind of appreciate. We spend the majority of the first episode with the everyday life of main character Akari Taiyou, a young girl who works as a fortune-teller, reading tarot cards with her late mother’s coworkers. She lives with her aunt and uncle and a cousin her age.
While she’s chummy with her cousin at first, there seems to be some resentment there, and it blooms into Akari seeming cursed: an unoccupied truck rolls downhill to nearly run her over, and a reading for herself spells danger. Later, in her room at home, she’s attacked by some sort of plant monster, seething about jealousy, in what appears to be a dream world. In this state one of her heirloom tarot cards activates and transforms Akari into magical girl form, so she can skewer the beast and the card at its core. She seems to wake from that dream to her normal room… except her beloved cousin is dead on the floor, cut open. She seems to wake from her dream again and the day plays over… except this time in a world where her cousin doesn’t exist, seemingly deleted from the whole timeline.
Towards the end of that day, the house where her mother’s friends live and work turns into a blazing inferno. Akari rushes in to save the people she cares about and encounters a strange possessed man, which promptly deposits her in a fiery hell realm where he’s replaced by a giant monster. She once more transforms without understanding it, but the thing is a bit much for her. Other magical girls come in, dispatch the monster, and spirit Akari away, seeming to know much about her, this world, and even her mother.
They introduce her to their exclusive school that’s a front for an international organization dedicated to fighting Daemonia – shadowy monsters that prey on the darkness in human hearts to take possession of people and cause calamities. The only ones who can fight the Daemonia are the twenty-one chosen wielders of tarot card powers (After the major arcana, of course, because nobody bothers to use the other cards). Akari has inherited her mother’s place as the Sun card, and agrees to train with them in order to help save people.
We get some scenes at school doing normal school things, albeit with a tiny student body, but then Akari and the team she’s placed with (consisting of the magical girl wielders of Star, Moon, and Temperance as well as Akari’s own Sun) is sent on a mission. The girls are teleported to the labyrinth-like realm where the giant monster and all its minions await. Akari fights well against the Daemonia, but on exposing its core remembers her cousin and completely blue screens.
Thereafter, we find that her memories were erased because she almost became Daemonia fodder in her grief. As for everyone else’s, that’s just how it goes with Daemonia hosts: when they die, nobody remembers them and record of them is erased, like a Torch in Shakugan no Shana. This is important, because it means that the magical girl defenders of humanity will never have to answer to the law about all the (irretrievably possessed) people they kill.
Akari naturally takes this rather poorly, and we get the arc where she tries to run away from the fact that being a magical girl is suffering (and also repeated murder, which does seem to weigh on her other teammates at least, Star-user Seira Hoshikawa seeming particularly affected despite her status as the cool brooding sourpuss). As always, though, it’s naive to think you can escape from the plot. She runs into a Daemonia and engages it to protect a father and son it was trying to kill. However, when two other fighters (Magician and Fool) arrive on scene, she hears its voice, begging for help, and ends up protecting the monster long enough for it to escape.
This leads to Akari being arrested by the organization and thrown in the dungeon for a while, during which time she reveals how she’s heard voices and, on the other side, is taken care of by Luna Tsukuyomi (the friend from her team who uses, what else, the Moon card. The names in this show aren’t particularly subtle), who has a good chat about her own BSOD times.
Akari rejoins the fight, hoping to resolve what she heard, and in battle with the same Daemonia, Luna holds Seira (playing her role as the angry one to the fullest) back to give Akari the chance. Akari hears from the possessed person how he was promised his son would be resurrected if he killed enough children, but that didn’t happen and now the monster uses his body to kill more and more. He begs for death, and asks that she be the one to do it, which sees Akari finish him off and exit the battle now resolved to bear the full magnitude of both her responsibility and her crimes.
This is the plot (there’s a lot of it) and core emotional arc of the first quarter of the show. Yeah, all that is done in a mere three episodes, and with decent pacing to boot. This is the same amount of time it took Madoka Magica to show its true colors, so it’s a pretty good place to stop and look at what Day Break Illusion is doing.
First of all, we’ve seen four Daemonia, five if you count the repeat one gaining a train component in its second fight, and they have all been rendered in different creative and interesting ways. Even if Day Break Illusion matches up to its obvious predecessor in no other way, the visuals come the closest of any of the dark Magical Girl shows I’ve seen to capturing the phantasmagorical wonder that was Madoka Magica. Still a far cry from the original, but it tops the Vertex and that’s something.
The emotional structure is also… better than what you get out of the bad imitators of Madoka. Magical Girl Site and Magical Girl Raising Project failed to build investment, and their scenarios were more transparently just there to make everything suck. Day Break Illusion holds closer to its roots, giving us a scenario where being a magical girl is not nice, but also where it’s a necessary and meaningful thing. It’s a lot like the cover story in Madoka (ignoring the part where Kyuubey is actually to blame… which Day Break Illusion is already hinting it may not ignore, with the teacher magical girl having two oddly sinister familiars and cards appearing at the Daemonia cores to represent their humans) or the horrible truth in Yuki Yuna is a Hero where the magical girls have agency and do things, rather than just being super-powered victims, but their choices are between bad and worse.
In that sense, Day Break Illusion has a real chance. It looks good and it has very solid groundwork and a decent pitch. But, of course, the show is just getting started.
The next episode starts with a lengthy look at our Daemonia to be, an art student who resents a rich bully in her class, given that the bully succeeds without talent or effort and is, you know, a bully. She’s approached late one night by a mysterious man who gives her a tarot reading and offers to change it around some too, in a way that clearly means he’s triggering the Daemonia possession, hinting that we have an actual villain rather than just these monsters existing in a passive manner. There’s also apparently some corporate scumbag who’s working with the Daemonia Master for sinister but presumably greedy purposes.
The next one is a focal episode for Ginka Shirokane (Temperance), as we meet her father, and his close friend who she considers to be her uncle. Her uncle, though, is on the verge of losing everything and is targeted by the Daemonia Master, turning him into the next monster. Ginka ends up having to fight him while, through Akari, hearing his voice, which is a lot more coherent and regretful than the art student presumably both because his weakness was despair and because there’s a degree to which the Daemonia master (who takes various blue-haired forms, rather than just the young man we saw at first) is being a little heavy-handed and coercive this time.
We follow this with an episode to get Seira actually on board with her team. She makes some normal friends who get a lot of time focusing on them, so you’re kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and after we learn her backstory of having a dear friend killed by a daemonia (fueling her hatred for them and her harshness) sure enough it does: one of her new friends has a congenital heart issue and the other takes the advice of “just do what you can for her” to the level of selling her soul for an organ donor. Seira recognizes her friend in the fight and reluctantly agrees to hear what she has to say. This brings her both closure, and an understanding that Akari, hearing the voices and still fighting to the end, has quite a lot of resolve to her name.
With our main cast more or less set, we get a downtime episode before introducing the plot device that will carry the latter parts of the show: the existence of progenitor Daemonia referred to as Anti-cards. They’d apparently hidden away through history until now (probably emerging because of the daemonia-master shapeshifter villain, Cerebrum), but the rules about them are simple: they can only be defeated by their counterpart among the proper tarot, and doing so will annihilate both entities, deleting a Magical Girl but also a strain of Daemonia.
This comes to face our heroes pretty quickly, with Anti-Temperance showing up and, after some soul searching, Ginka deciding to meet her fate. They battle, with her photonegative opposite talking about eternal life and merging with Ginka, but the mutual kill goes off as it does in front of a horrified Akari, Seira, and Luna.
While processing this, Luna takes a leave of absence. “Akari” (actually Cerebrum in a surprisingly convincing shapeshift) comes to visit her, and after lifting her up for a bit breaks her heart enough to forcibly insert a Daemonia into her and convert her into a monster.
I’ll give the show this much: when switching into “kill the cast” mode it does at least retain its basic creativity with the scenario, not just having each character annihilate with their opposite but instead giving us some more dynamism to the horror. Keeping it fresh is a good thing.
Speaking of that, the next episode sees Fool and Magician clash with their Anti-Cards; they’re rescued at the last minute but rendered comatose. Akari and Seira, meanwhile, are accosted by berserk Luna, who gives Seira a vampire bite that seals off her tarot powers, meaning Akari is thereafter run ragged doing all the fighting on her own. To cap it off, Cerebrum has his corporate scumbag pal incite an angry mob to burn down the school on grounds of witchcraft, forcing what’s left of the team to vacate.
We then get a fair whirlwind of stuff for our ending. The same shadowy organization, it seems, “controls” both Cerebrum and the Tarot users. Cerebrum, however, is acting out – and his objective is Akari, presumably since Akari’s father was Daemonia-possessed somewhere around her conception, making her the child of both halves of the Tarot powers.
To get at her, Cerebrum tries his normal tricks and when that doesn’t quite take, takes advantage of Seira being on the investigation to trap her in a cage match with Luna. Akari, once told the full facts, finds Cerebrum and agrees to go with him if he’ll save Luna and Seira. Which, oddly enough, he keeps to his word on, restoring Luna’s humanity and Seira’s powers as he spirits Akari away to a deeper level of the psychic otherworld most of the fighting takes place in.
There, in order to get Akari to accept being propositioned (since his goal is to mate with her, though it might not be via human mechanisms) he has her enter a weird mental plane where she’s run through her worst day – the day her cousin died by her hands – over and over in order to break down her will. Seira and Luna manage to find their way to the first layer of this and fight the guard tree monsters, when they’re joined by a surprise in the form of a glowing superpowered Ginka. I suppose her demise was esoteric enough, but for a show that had held fairly tight to the theme that death is real and everything sucks, it feels a little weird that we’re just restoring Luna’s soul and Ginka’s existence at this stage. In Ginka’s case, ascending to a higher plane in what looked like a mutual kill was apparently just the start of an evenly matched fight, which she eventually won thanks to hearing Akari’s voice calling out for her. So call her Ginka the White I guess.
Unfortunately for Cerebrum, Akari actually manages, at her lowest, to talk with her cousin, have them hear each other out, and come to terms with what she had to do, breaking the cycle without falling to him. He decides she needs to die for this, but the shadowy organization lets the teachers use their powers, and they crack open that weird pocket dimension, spilling Akari and Cerebrum back out into the world where everyone else is. Cerebrum takes on his best giant monster form, the girls soundly reject his stupid “humans are awful” speeches, and ultimately he’s able to be put down.
In the aftermath, the school is set to be rebuilt, Ginka reunites with her dad, and everything seems to be well enough. The battle against Daemonia goes on, but Akari holds out hope that some day she may understand enough to save the people who are possessed rather than killing them. The End.
Day Break Illusion’s biggest sin is that it keeps one foot in the realm of the dark and miserable and the other firmly planted in the hopeful realm. This is also, arguably, one of the show’s biggest strengths. If you’re looking for a thrilling, uplifting action romp… you don’t get it. There’s enough loss and misery here, most of it not cheated or redeemed, that it’s not going to scratch the same itch as a more generally positive action show. On the other side, if you like the dark misery, the last act is going to feel really bad, because the show does spend the last few episodes being more optimistic.
If on the other hand you’re looking for balance… congratulations, Day Break Illusion has it.
And I understand it’s a tenuous line – to me, Day Break Illusion earns its happy ending by how it put the characters through the wringer and how they managed to grow from their suffering. When Seira, powerless, faces Cerebrum, Luna is initially unconscious. He gives her his magic knife and tries to tempt her to kill Luna while she’s still asleep before locking them in together. Seira… really thinks about it. The show even fakes you out for a while so you think she’s done it while Akari is trying to piece everything together. However, she ultimately looks at herself, reassesses what’s important to her, and decides despite the temptation and despite her former harshness to not murder her transformed friend. And it’s clearly a painful choice, because Cerebrum was more or less right when he said it would probably be a mercy (on the base assumption she couldn’t return to humanity). That’s a good moment for her and it shows how far she’s come and what her battles have meant to her.
Similarly, when Akari finally reaches catharsis with her cousin, it’s a good moment. And we see her go through that hell time and time again, becoming ever more run down by the repetition and the fact that she doesn’t fully understand why someone she loved turned into a monster that wanted to kill her. It’s the resolution to this burden she’s been carrying for the whole show, and it’s not cheap to get to. Even Ginka, while she has a much quicker turnaround, makes an interesting case for herself when she chooses to face her Anti-Card in single combat – she initially said she’d run away from the scenario, but when faced with it she shows that she has more conviction than her flippant attitude would indicate.
Because of this, and because Ginka’s “death” and Luna’s transformation were carefully handled to make them feel less total than the normal Daemonia possession and killing, it doesn’t feel like a complete cop-out to have them make it through the story as wiser and happier people, rather than just getting wrecked.
Day Break Illusion wants you to think it’s another of the Madoka imitators banking on the dark and twisted side of the genre that such a famous show first explored, when actually it’s a much more classical “harrowing journey” sort of story.
That’s not to say there aren’t other faults that should be addressed. The most critical of these is that the three major arcs don’t necessarily flow together well. There’s Akari’s orientation, which ends dramatically with Akari stating what her goal is. Then we get the character episodes, where we build up Luna, Seira, and Ginka. These arcs are sort of okay together, and make up what I consider to be the real first half of the show.
The first half really is like someone looked at Madoka Magica and said “I want to explore the Witches more. I want to know their stories and why their monstrous forms are symbolically appropriate.” And you know what? It’s really a success in that regard. It’s less subtle, of course, but the visual design is on-point enough that you do somewhat forgive the show for some of its foibles on the grounds that it is showing us something interesting.
That’s entirely dropped in the second half. Once Cerebrum does more than lurking evilly around these disasters, we don’t explore the stories or psychology of any more Daemonia. It’s now about the shadowy organization, conspiracies, anti-cards, and so on. Cerebrum still tries to have psychological scenes, with his temptation of Luna (actually well-done) and attempted temptations of Akari and Seira, but it’s not the same study of a case, and the cut between them is actually somewhat jarring.
On the good side, though, the characters are well-rounded and well-done. I like that while all four of them have their typical team archetypes, at least three (sorry Ginka) actually have a lot more play. Luna is the quiet chick. It’s implied she loves Akari in a more than friendly way (well, less implied and more outright stated) but we actually see the dark, jealous side of that love thanks to Cerebrum, rather than playing it for comedy like so many other shows do. Seira is the harsh hardened fighter, but we’re brought in to what made her that way, and also see that she’s still a human being who gets hurt, feels lonely, makes friends, and the like.
And of most note is Akari. Akari’s base type (which gets called out a lot in the ending, not that you can really take Cerebrum’s breaking speeches at face value) is the always-positive always-chipper smiler. These characters can often get really annoying because nothing can get them down, and if they won’t be hurt or depressed by anything than it’s almost impossible to empathize with them. They’re cheerful and friendly, but to a fault, turning them into annoyances. Akari is… not that. From the very start we understand that her optimism is sometimes a fault, sometimes a burden, and often tested. She has bad moments, even bad days. She gets sad, even traumatized. She gets angry. She fails to friendship speech the world into submission. Rather than reality bending to a winning smile, Akari is forced to accept her status as a killer and come to terms with what the role means to her. She isn’t allowed to stay the “hands always clean” perfect heroine. She’s a good kid, but she comes off as much more human than saintly.
In my mind, darkness and misery in a work are like spices. Using them can improve what you’re creating, even drastically. If you don’t have some sort of struggle, you don’t have any flavor. Even some very intense dark and bitter notes can find their places and really make a whole story come out better for them. But you can’t overuse spices. You can’t overuse darkness and misery and just keep running them out and running everyone down. People will get fatigued, or just won’t enjoy what you’re showing any more if you just heap on pain after pain in the vain attempt to derive quality from that, any more than you’d like a dish entirely crusted with something you’d want a dash of.
For me, Day Break Illusion manages its blend well, and that’s a really critical success. That, the creative and colorful visuals, and the characters are balanced against these minor faults: Cerebrum is a kind of confused villain. The last arc has some very uncertain stakes (other than Akari, which is enough). The shadowy organization is never explained or dealt with in any way. The show has that fracture line separating before and after the downtime episode in terms of its content.
All in all, I consider Day Break Illusion to be B+ work. I considered an A-tier ranking, but I asked myself if it was really moving and the answer was… no, it was a good adventure with a good level of spice, but I don’t think it really reached for greatness. The mythos and setting were hard to deal with, and the emotional weight was hurt by the shifting focus and stumble around it. But it is a good, solid show, one that I would recommend fairly quickly to anyone interested in a Magical Girl show that’s dark… but not too dark.