Matoi the Sacred Slayer is a magical girl show where, say it with me, a teen girl gains mystical powers that allow her to transform into a prettied-up super state, and with which she’s able to fight monsters that secretly threaten humanity. In short, it’s got the same pitch as just about every other action-skewed Magical Girl show. What’s Matoi’s unique claim to fame?
Well, the show seems to want you to notice that when she comes out of magical girl state, she does so nude. So at least we have that.
We actually start in media res with a different girl battling a shadowy monster, introducing us to the typical threat, before picking up with Matoi herself. She’s a middle-school girl who is very happy with an ordinary life, a slightly strained relationship with her father despite affection for him, and the annoyance presented by her somewhat junior friend and her part-time job at the local shrine.
Matoi’s friend, Yuma, is the daughter of the head priest and is a fairly excitable dreamer obsessed with the idea of mystical powers and fighting evil as an exorcist (or, well, a Magical Girl, though Yuma avoids the term). Some agents from a shadowy organization are interested as well, and check out the shrine, convincing Yuma’s ladies-man father to open the vault, from which Yuma acquires a scroll about ancient rites and such. The agent types are also interested in the work of Matoi’s father, a police officer tracking a case that is actually related to the supernatural.
The situations collide when the possessed suspect attacks the shrine. Yuma attempts to perform the rite on the scroll to power up and fight evil, but Matoi accidentally makes the correct final pose, resulting in the power going into her instead, as she becomes capable of “divine union” with a mysterious god who seems to become her Magical Girl regalia. The transformation ages her up enough visually that no one quite recognizes her, and in fact her father briefly mistakes Matoi for her missing mother (causing her to deck him). As poor and uncontrolled as her power is, she manages to save the day, and then ends up having to streak home, mercifully unseen by anybody but Yuma.
This showing gets the shadowy organizations really involved, monitoring Matoi. Eventually, she’s properly prompted to transform again, when her father tries to talk down a bank robbery where the perpetrator is possessed. Matoi doesn’t do so good on the shiny battlefield, but the experienced magical girl Clarus shows up. She defeats the monster, and then tests Matoi, seeing that her god is not also one of the bad ones. This leaves Matoi topless with it partly shifted out of clothing form, resulting in another streaking incident, this one in the city.
After Matoi dodges any crowds and receives a change of clothes from Yuma, it turns out that the magic side of things is even more interested in her. The possessing monsters, called Nights, seem to be just one form of “higher dimensional” beings, and a slightly different one known as the Creed Killer shows up. Creed Killer is intelligent and capable of conversation, and seems to be after Matoi for some reason. Clarus, meanwhile, is after Creed Killer, as there’s a history between them. In brief, Clarus had a partner who was a sweet girl (a lot like Matoi) and who tried to talk things out with Creed Killer, only to get owned (not technically dead but close enough), leaving Clarus bitter and angry.
They have a very long battle against Creed Killer, running through many battlefields both in the city and in the twisted and colorful higher dimensions, at the end of which Matoi finds her resolve to fight and ends up calling on the omnipresent Shinto gods to aid her, pooling enough power to destroy the otherwise overwhelming Creed Killer.
We back off this for a moment to both get Clarus situated as the transfer student and part of Matoi’s circle of friends despite her standoffish nature, and to explore more of Yuma. You see, it turns out that Yuma was not, in fact, depressingly normal. No, she evidently had great spiritual power, so that she was causing incidents as a little kid. Her grandfather put a seal on her to stop that out of control nonsense (despite clearly being proud that his granddaughter had the ability)… and a test from Clarus to determine if Yuma is a candidate for becoming one of this setting’s magical girls breaks it and releases Yuma’s contracted gods, a Tanuki and a Kitsune.
From here, the Nights continue to badger our heroes as we get something of a more full story. It seems that Matoi’s mother was a “Shrine Maiden of Divine Union” (Magical Girl) as well, and that ten years ago when she disappeared promising to return, it was for some great and terrible Magical Girl mission.
Sure enough, the details on that come out: there is evidently some sort of space rift that will consume and unify all dimensions, turning the world into a playground for the currently higher-dimensional beings, most of which are freeking jerks. Matoi’s mother went to the highest of the higher dimensions to seal it, but now the rift is back, and only Matoi has the power to reach the top in what most people seem to believe from the prior experience is a one-way trip.
In this we get some rather needless turns for the Nights – Creed Killer returns from the space between dimensions he was evidently thrown into rather than being killed off for real and reveals that their leader has been killed and replaced by an impostor. The impostor also appears to be possessing the quirky comic relief cop sidekick of Matoi’s father in order to have the in to develop her power and… mostly just to see what happens.
Though emotions are tense getting there, Matoi does indeed find the wish she has in her heart to set off, goal in mind to meet her mom in the highest dimension and bring her back. Yuma and Clarus, for their friend’s sake, go with as far as they can, which includes Clarus getting a grudge match with Creed Killer and finally destroying him after uniting with her higher-dimensional being honestly rather than by technological BS. On the threshold of the end, the two of them peel off, leaving Matoi to enter the final stage alone. In the meantime, the Nights are making an epic-level mess of Earth and it’s up to all the regular priests and shrine maidens to defend against the siege while she’s doing the thing
Matoi goes through some “we saw the ending of 2001” business that seems to exist outside time, and is finally able to perceive the gate that possessed comic relief, perching on a rooftop for some reason, tells us is her mother in a merged state with her god, that’s keeping all reality from going kaput. So she can save her mom and reality can burn, or she can join her mom in being a weird gate thing and save the world.
Matoi, who can’t hear this exposition, instead wishes for her family to be normal hard enough that… reality just gives up and lets her have it. We don’t know exactly what changed or how it was accomplished other than wishing real hard, but evidently the base rules of the setting were changed so that the space hole and dimension merger is no longer a threat.
Thus, Matoi and her Mom are able to return to Earth (picking up Clarus and Yuma on the way), all the Nights stop being able to do their large scale attack and are presumably defeated, and Matoi’s overworked dad gets to wake up to his daugher who he figured out enough to think he was going to lose and ten-years-missing-hasn’t-aged-a-day wife making curry.
Matoi says goodbye to her god, Clarus goes home and finds her first friend may actually awaken from her coma, and all seems to be well that ends well until a comedic final scene reveals that Matoi’s mom and dad may be a little too lovey-dovey for her comfort, there are still some Nights for Yuma to battle, and at Yuma’s invitation Matoi’s god returns to reinforce the fact that she’s a magical girl and not normal at all. Laugh.
Matoi the Sacred Slayer is actually a tough one for me to rate. On one hand, I appreciate that it’s a more classical fun action sort of show, rather than going dark like Madoka or Yuki Yuna or even Day Break Illusion. It’s got a lot of the look, but it never really feels the same kind of oppressive or miserable, and that’s something we need to see as much as we need to see the pits of despair.
On the other hand… there are a lot of things that Matoi doesn’t quite land, ideas it either doesn’t totally follow through with or that it starts to go on with and then decides, “eeh, don’t need to mess with that.” This is not a good thing for a show to do, especially not with significant constructive elements.
For instance, having a villain. It is possible to have a story, even a good one, where you just deal with an unintelligent monster of the week, stories that can be perfectly dramatic but where you don’t really have a “villain” in the terms of something you can interact with that can carry scenes or do heavy lifting for the plot. But, if you don’t have a real villain, some other element needs to pick up the slack to maintain the drama.
Matoi the Sacred Slayer is not a status-quo-heavy show where we just fight the monster of the week and everything goes back to normal. It is a twelve-episode show with a well-defined beginning and end that’s trying to tell a complete and cogent story. And in that context, something has to drive the plot forward. Is it the Nights? Not really. Most of them don’t have anything to them, they’re just blobs of bad that have to be put down. The few talking Nights there are – Creed Killer and two doofuses from the later episodes – make an attempt to look like the villains, but they don’t actually do a whole lot more than the ones that just squawk “mikyuu”. They don’t have any coherent goals or motivations of their own, they just follow orders from the big boss who is ultimately revealed to be this weird observer entity… who just wants to see what happens, and doesn’t have any stake in what the outcome of the events set in motion actually is.
But a lot of weight is allowed to rest on the Nights and their antics. The boss of the Nights is built up somewhat before the letdown, all the way to the first appearance in flashback of Creed Killer dealing with Clarus’s former friend, and the show seems to want you to believe that the Nights are it.
You could have the story be one about dealing with the rules of their reality itself, where (as Mr. Observer says) the real enemy is the dimension itself and just getting to mom. But you would need to set up those ideas and that struggle in more than just the last couple of episodes, with a lot of focus on how traveling up the dimensional chain is both hard to do and a big deal. The way everybody jumps around in the first fight with Creed Killer, I just assumed for most of the show that they could warp around the “higher dimensions” and that we didn’t need to go into more detail.
Instead, the show seems to think that the talking Nights are enough when they aren’t, and thus spends not enough effort on the conflicts that actually matter.
So, okay, in downsides we have the fact that the villians suck and that the disrobing de-transformation element is a little uncomfortable even if it has the energy of someone sitting down in early workshopping and asking “You know, why do the clothes come back in most Magical Girl shows?” more than the prurient interest of Trinity Seven (Recall, though, that I quite liked Trinity Seven. It was pervy, of course, but not awkward the same way).
On from there, the world is very thinly constructed for how many details it’s got. There are a finite number of “Higher Dimensions.” Get that. Beings from them can be either helpful gods, or the ruinous Nights, and either way seem to use human hosts to manifest and do things. Okay. Basic Shakugan no Shana setup with poorly understood but very hard lines between good and bad supernaturals.
But then we get into all the orders and terms the show throws at us. One group that fights the Nights is Anti-creed. Which belongs to an organization called Fatima. Which seems to be related to the catholic church somehow, which is presumably why they use their higher dimensional beings (that they don’t call gods despite still calling transforming divine union) rather than making nice with them. Then there’s the blonde lady who works for a different group that seems to be some sort of international police group called IATO. Who are IATO? What’s their agenda? How and why are they keeping the masquerade up? I hope you don’t want to know the answers because I don’t have them. And then there are the various Shinto shrines that have their interrelated families and also know the phenomenon and talk about Shrine Maidens of Divine Union. And evidently the Shinto priests that don’t have merged-up unified gods can still do magic, like grandpa sealing Yuma’s gods away or all of them kicking ass in the ending? And then you have Yuma running around insisting on her “exorcist girl” terminology just to throw another way to refer to things in there.
I followed all of that, as much as there’s text for it, but it’s really convoluted for twelve episodes. It feels like there are half a dozen aliases for every concept, and close to as many explanations and views on the phenomena. At the very least we have Shinto, Christian, and IATO Secular versions of the entire story, and half a point for Yuma’s chuuni. I will say at this juncture I at least appreciate the attempt to ground the Magical Girl fantasy in Shinto lore among others, but it would have shone a little brighter if it were a little clear that that and not “eeh, whatever” was the structure the universe worked on.
And maybe that’s honest; if something weird and mystical was happening, people wouldn’t agree on a single codified explanation. But this is fiction. The Academy City stories can get pretty darn convoluted, but you know what? First of all, they have a lot more time. Second, they always make sure to explain and contextualize what’s going on. Esper powers are one thing, Magic is another, and each manifestation of either gets a story out of how it works. This isn’t always good (the British arc of Index 3 really loses itself in that) but it is at least a deliberate and sensible choice that helps the world feel real even if, ironically, it’s not the realistic level of understanding.
Matoi doesn’t do that. What are the rules? What cosmology are we really grounded in? Is it “Clap your hands if you believe” material? Figure that out for yourself.
Speaking of this element, I wanted to address one particular character: Matoi’s god. So, the Higher Dimensional beings in this show are explicitly a kind of mixed bag: You’ve got the gribbly stupid Nights, and the hammy villain Nights, and this captive entity that Clarus uses through technology, Yuma’s gods that take the form of classical Japanese spirits… and then you have Matoi’s god.
Matoi’s god is very conceptually important to the show. First of all, this god is the partner of our main character, her link to the other world and the source of her cool powers (whether she wants them or not). It’s also a heavy hitter; the one god that can enable its contractor to reach the Highest Dimension and solve the plot in the end.
It just sort of… hovers there.
The entire show, Matoi’s god basically does nothing but loom when it’s jut busy being her magical girl powers. Out of all the otherworldly entities in this show, some of which do have clear personalities, this is the one that most needed to have a persona, because it’s the most central to the story. A main villain would be a close second, but I already established we don’t have one of those.
Instead, Matoi’s god is wholly inscrutable. That’s it’s thing, obscure hovering. Matoi questions it, tries to talk with it. It just floats there. In the episode where Clarus confronts Matoi and drags out a glimpse of it, why doesn’t it reassemble itself into the top half of her outfit? She clearly wants to be covered, but instead it just doesn’t. Could it not? Is it a troll? It doesn’t seem like a troll but that also seems like a fairly trivial task.
It’s a total gutterball. Compare this to Alastor, from Shakugan no Shana. Alastor is the source of Shana’s cool powers (mostly), her contracted divine-like otherworldly entity of good, and most of the time doesn’t have any sort of physical existence with separate agency. In those respects, Alastor and Matoi’s god are fairly similar. The big difference, though, is that Alastor is a character. Alastor gets lines, has wishes and motivations, and can be understood on at least some level so that we have some concept about what the bond between Shana and Alastor means.
This is because Shakugan no Shana is a good show and knows that because that bond is important, we should be able to understand it. When Shana triggers her ultimate move at the end of the first story, that lands. We know what Shana feels, what Alastor feels, and what the significance of that moment is. When Matoi is begging her god to hold on just a little longer as her regalia begins to crumble in the penultimate dimension, it doesn’t land. We don’t understand if her god is trying, or in pain, or if she’s just talking to herself like it’s her own motivation and belief in her wish that needs to be bolstered.
I suppose what they were going for is the idea that a god is supposed to be occulted and doesn’t talk back (though Yuuma’s gods have plenty of personality despite being nonverbal, unlike Matoi’s) but in service to that thematic desire, something important to storytelling has been sacrificed, and it’s not a good deal. We didn’t need it to communicate as much or as clearly as Alastor, but we did need at least, say, the ability to know whether or not the thing even understands Matoi when she’s trying to express herself to it.
Now, I’ve gone into detail here, but I will say that no one of these problems is critically offensive. The show can still do action and individual Nights are still threatening in the immediate even if it’s all sort of scattered on what the overarching bad is supposed to be. Like I said, I still followed what was going on despite the clear as mud picture of the world, and while I wanted more out of Matoi’s god there was at least a clear direction they were going with gods.
But what is there to redeem Matoi, or push it forward towards being a good show?
Honestly, not much. The Higher Dimension battlefields are colorful blob lands that are probably easy to animate and that look somewhat visually impressive, but they’re desolate and themeless. We go to the next dimension up, several steps from there, the Twelfth that’s apparently as high as Clarus can usually go… they all look the same, and the look doesn’t have anything to it other than “alien”. I guess the Highest dimension has more of a different look and feel, but we see it for literally just the climax of the final episode. How cool would it have been if, when the characters jump to a higher dimension, you could tell which dimension it was (assuming it was one we’d seen before) right away just by looking at it? Like each dimension was its own world with its own rules and theme that could influence fights there, rather than being nothing but freebie battlegrounds? Or, failing that, could the higher dimensions at least have something to them that’s conceptually engaging? In Yuki Yuna, the Jukai has a lot of the same color work that’s done in the Higher Dimensions here, but the Jukai has a clear theme: a foresty world of roots spreading out from the Shinju-sama. Here? Those colors aren’t natural, and that means this is special just like every other “higher dimension”.
The magic and outfits look good in abstract, but they’re not particularly special or engaging; they’re just magical girl outfits and that’s that. To compare again with Yuki Yuna, that show had both individual themes and this willingness to incorporate technical or futuristic elements. Matoi… I will give it that each girl kind of has a theme, with Clarus being the black knight and Yuma having her Tanuki and Kitsune motifs going hard, but Matoi is really standard even if it’s a well-designed frilly pink dress. The action is… alright. The first battle with Creed Killer in particular is kind of engaging, but a lot of it is only so-so. I can’t really fault the animation, but the choreography is doing the minimum it needs to do to not get called out for extreme lameness; it isn’t winning any accolades.
What about the emotional impact? When I reviewed Day Break Illusion, it was how it handled its emotions, the growth of its characters and their struggle against the darkness, that really propelled the show forward. Matoi the Sacred Slayer is clearly trying to deal somewhat in that space. Matoi’s biggest wants are to have a good relationship with her dad, to get her mom back, and to live a normal life. That’s a fine motivation, but until the final arc, it’s something she whines about while being dragged into magical girl duties, largely on account of having a conscience. Towards the end we get a few good scenes between her and her father that develop their bond, but it needed to be in there earlier
(Aside: there’s a moment in a late episode where Matoi is buying cheap clothes at a flea market because, you know, transforming eats through her wardrobe. She finds a really pretty dress and is offered a good deal on it, but is sad to not accept as she needs more bargain one-use pieces. Her dad comes around and buys it for her and she clearly likes it and says she’ll treasure it… and then she wears it when she’s headed off to the Highest Dimension and I know that’s probably meant to be symbolic of taking her dad’s love for her with her but it made me unreasonably angry, like WTF if you’re not going to strip before transforming then wear your shrine maiden outfit, it’s thematic and replaceable on the dime of the people pushing you to do this. I guess half a point for the show that I cared.)
On the whole, this is a show that doesn’t try enough in areas that matter or that didn’t understand where it had to focus in order to go the distance. I feel like it had a clear concept, that somebody put a good deal of thought and effort into it at some point along the line, but that effort doesn’t translate to an on-screen product that’s better than mediocre.
I thought long and hard about what final letter grade to give this thing. On the one hand, it’s not offensive, and every once in a while there will be an effective scene or cool moment. The music is pretty good and the visuals, while they have their issues, are very much trying. Similarly, the human elements are making some serious good faith attempts to be compelling and connectable, attempts I wish a lot of other shows would make.
On the other hand, as a finished product, I can’t really say it accomplished its aims. There’s too much mess and not enough focus; too much awkward and not enough point. But… is it worse than the other shows I’ve reviewed this month?
I think, compared to its close competitors, the worst I can give Matoi the Sacred Slayer is a C. It’s got more going on and is at least more fun to watch than Nanatsuiro Drops, it’s only a fraction as awkward and painful as Modern Magic Made Simple with a story that’s a hair weaker and characters that are stronger, and next to Tokyo Mew Mew New… well, it’s going to be a matter of if you fall for the Moe or not, which I think Mew Mew overkilled. Out of all the shows from this Magical Girl May I think it’s one of the ones I’d be more open to re-watching, because while Day Break Illusion was better it was also a dark show that liked to hurt. So, in a weird way, I actually do have to recommend Matoi the Sacred Slayer. If you’re just looking for a Magical Girl show that… mostly works and won’t largely make you regret watching it, Matoi will do that for you.
I guess I can rest knowing the character would probably be pleased: her grade, like her show, is entirely normal and largely unremarkable.