“Mixing genres is fun.” This must have been the thought that went through the mind of whoever put together the pitch for Granbelm, a Magical Girl Mecha Hidden World Urban Fantasy Battle Royale… and that all comes out in the first episode.
Like the show, I’m going to try to push a lot of exposition out in the start: Granbelm takes place in a universe where magic is, or at least was, real. A thousand years ago or so, though, a group of sages got together and decided that since magic being used for bad things was bad, they’d seal it all away. They did this, but control over the seal is periodically decided via a series of competitive combats, where individuals strive against each other on the night of the full moon, in a separated illusion world, until only one combatant remains with her hat in the ring, becoming the new “Princeps”, the true mage. These fights are conducted with magical mechas called Armanoxes. What is an Armanox? Looks like an SD Gundam, controlled through the power of heart because it’s also somehow the pilot’s soul, and also something where they do a puppet strings effect for the controls that are also purely mental.
Got that? I hope so, it will be on the test.
In any case, our lead here is Mangetsu. She knows nothing about any of this but somehow gets summoned to the middle of a battle while retrieving a lunch box she left at school. There, she’s set upon by a couple of mechas as two other mecha-driving magical-girls we don’t know fight. One of them wins, and comes back in a way that protects Mangetsu, so I guess she’s a hero character. This is Shingetsu, our contractually required in to all things magical where as Mangetsu is heir to all things mundane.
One of the girls attacks again, and Mangetsu tries to run, only to find herself before the great seal on all magic, which is a giant floating island with clockwork tech and its own technical name that I really don’t want to have to bother with in this review, but ultimately must – Magiaconatus. It awakens her to a magical girl transformation and a mech of her own. Though she can’t even move it at first, she of course learns over the course of a couple lines and a few seconds and busts out top-tier attacks and defenses to disintegrate the baddie who went after her.
Bad news, Mangetsu, you’re part of the fight now.
In the following movements we learn a few things. It seems that Granbelm (the name of the combat ritual) isn’t fights to the death, since the girl Mangetsu disintegrated is later locked out of her team’s lair, with her magic crystal too screwed up to let her fight any more. So that’s nice. Also, it might not be such bad news for Mangetsu – she’s given plenty of outs but refuses, and eventually decides that since she has no discernible talent or personality other than being an extreme doormat in the mortal world, she might as well try to become a powerful magician instead. This is something that Shingetsu, who has transferred into her school, finds quite vexing.
Especially, it seems, because Shingetsu hates magic for reasons that aren’t explained very well. It seems that magic, which she can do quite a lot of for not yet being the world’s one and only mage (apparently manipulation of “magnetic fields” like yin and yang isn’t covered), is something that to her means a violation of the world, like making a flower bloom is a transgression against the laws of fate. Honestly, it’s best to not try to get into her head especially with the weak examples she pulls up, just know that when Mangetsu conjures an entire field of flowers from nothing without even trying, it’s probably not supposed to be a happy moment with Shingetsu there. In fact, it seems that Shingetsu wants to obliterate magic itself just for the temerity of having a non-lethal battle royale now and again.
They have a big fight, introducing all the other combatants because why not throw them all in full force right out of the gate. Of most critical import is Anna, an angry redhead who has a history with Shingetsu, throwing arbitrary accusations her way despite the fact her mom and little sister seem to really like Shingetsu.
In the wake of the fight, which is largely dictated by an artillery-type fighter (controlled by Nene, a friend of Mangetsu’s little sister), one of the other combatants (a flat-affect girl with white hair and a sister complex, called Kuon) offers to team up in order to deal with that. Nene overhears this and later reveals herself to the -getsu pair as a challenge.
The next match turns into a trio of 1v1s: Anna versus Shingetsu (again), Kuon versus Anna’s sadist underling who either is or is related to the person who cursed Kuon’s sister, and Mangetsu versus Nene. Sadist gets the upper hand, Anna screams a lot, and Nene pretty much had a win on lock until Mangetsu pulls the plot armor super-mode and one-shots Nene right out of the fight in an instant while tanking her ultimate “needed a ten second countdown” doom laser.
In the wake of this Nene becomes a friend, Kuon becomes a rival, Anna’s sadist minion abandons her cause, and Anna goes… even more psycho than before, to the point of arriving on scene via axe to every door in her way when Shingetsu comes to visit like she’s in The Shining.
Eventually we find out that her self-worth is based on a lie and that Shingetsu helped her with the spell she thought she cast herself as a kid. Shingetsu begs for her adoptive sister to protect her family as anything other than a mage, and Anna seems to calm down… until the stinger of the episode where she’s seen stealing the family magic stone that should give her some kind of vast power. It’s at least a lot bigger than the earring she was using. Because magic stones are important and we need to get a full tutorial on those.
Also in the matter of tutorials is that Nene is technically the oldest of her sisters and is stuck in a middle school body for reasons of magic. He mother couldn’t remember her in a flashback so probably something happened? And there’s the cursed sister Kuon has who I glossed over earlier and who acts as her main motivation.
Some shows keep a lot of balls in the air with expert juggling. Granbelm tries to toss so many you won’t notice when the antigravity fails to kick in.
Given that, it’s time for a showdown with Anna, before which she has a conversation with her little sister that confirms no, she does not in fact have any personality or character outside hating Shingetsu. Shingetsu, meanwhile, plays the “I’m sad because I’m gifted and feel like my awesomeness is a curse” card which… okay, to be fair, that is something talented people can legitimately feel, like they’re doing wrong by getting for free what others get by working hard or can’t even get by working hard. But in fiction it’s a very risky card to play to make the character look legitimately tortured rather than like an unlikable whiner. And Granbelm has so many lines to divide its effort on that I’m sure you can guess which camp Shingetsu falls into.
They have their catchphrase interaction (You know, Shingetsu, Anna might not have gone so psycho if you said anything to her other than a smug sounding “you cannot defeat me”) and the battle begins. After a couple rounds that Shingetsu wins with embarrassing ease, Anna actually manages to put on a couple shows and even deal quite a bit of real damage to Shingetsu’s mech before taking a critical hit to the back since she decided to take her time choking rather than finishing the fight quick.
Meanwhile, Mangetsu and Kuon fight who I guess is our next villain since she’s the only thing close to an antagonist left, curse-wielding sadist Suishou.
Also, it’s revealed that instead of losing the qualification to fight, Anna just outright died when she was killed. Not only that, but the very memory of her is wiped from reality, leaving only those still active in Granbelm to remember her. Even former participant Nene has no knowledge of her.
So, yeah, new rules! It looks like the Magiaconatus is also a crimson denizen pretty much and can just eat somebody if it doesn’t like their face when they lose. Makes about as much sense as anything else in this show.
So, we’re on Suishou now. She continues to act the creeper, and at least they up her villain cred by establishing that she’s literally eating away at Kuon’s sister’s soul, stealing magic and mannerisms and messing with Kuon’s head a lot, complete with some legitimately creepy scenes mixing predatory interest and hints of yuri.
Meanwhile Nene does computer work to find out something bizarre she can’t say about Mangetsu’s incredible magical power and the magic in the area in general and Shingetsu lectures us some more on another magical technique that of course has to be spelled out in detail.
We cut very abruptly to the next battle, in which Kuon is very nearly driven to let Suishou om nom nom her up before rallying and delivering quite the rear-kicking. Of course, this only unlocks Suishou’s second health bar, but rather than continuing their fight, Mangetsu buts in and takes damage that reveals the big secret about her. It seems that Mangetsu is a puppet created by the Magiaconatus because it likes Shingetsu and she was sad and lonely not having a friend in the world.
Now, the idea that the Magiaconatus was a conscious entity capable of choosing things, and even that it seemed to really like Shingetsu for reason not announced, had come up before. Mangetsu being a fake, I suppose was meant to be presaged by Anna being deleted, establishing that the Magiaconatus had the ability to rewrite the history of the outside world as all living things perceived it.
This does bring up a lot of other questions. Like if the Magiaconatus can do all this, even going so far as to put its own Mary Sue Self Insert Fanfic Human into the Granbelm fight partway through, why couldn’t it just waste everybody who dared oppose Shingetsu from the start? Or, for that matter, since the whole tournament only happens because “That’s how the Magiaconatus wants it”, couldn’t it have just skipped the survival game if it had its weird floaty castle heart set on Shingetsu?
Whatever. This gives Suishou more ammo to be a jerk with. She goes ahead and teases Mangetsu about her hangups and doll status until Kuon continues the grudge match. She beats the snot out of Suishou, but unfortunately we can’t lose our only antagonist so easily, so when she goes for a finish of “Stab in the chest”, this somehow doesn’t hurt Suishou and lets Suishou grab the knife and stab Kuon in the chest instead before finishing her off with a laser blast. This kills Kuon – for real, erasing her from reality just like Anna.
Back in the real world, Mangetsu seems fine at first, but her (surrogate) family has forgotten her entirely. Oops. Her body starts to stain, her hair to bleach, normals can’t see her, she has no reflection, all that good stuff. Nene and her sisters help her not burn out like the Torch she evidently is, while Suishou moves on to trying to psychologically torment Shingetsu, suggesting that she may also be artificial and just generally being a jerk to her while revealing that her motive is to prove that worthy wielder for magic doesn’t exist by beating Shingetsu.
Again, Magiaconatus is given a huge amount of agency in this arc and though we’re told everything we might have believed about the setup for the battle could be wrong due to it misleading the world, we aren’t ever given an answer that feels sufficient as to why it goes through such a convoluted process. Suishou thinks it’s all part of the test for the one true candidate, Shingetsu, but she speaks with no authority – she’s trying to break Shingetsu’s will and heart and as such is the very picture of an unreliable source at this stage.
After a downtime episode where Mangetsu comes to terms with dying rather easily (easier than Shingetsu comes to terms with her dying) we engage the final battle and do get a reveal for this, that Suishou is a thousand year old witch tasked with proving that no human is worthy of becoming Princeps, which she says will (ironically) make her Princeps if she pulls it off by defeating Shingetsu, having won every single previous battle royale without being awarded her prize. For this, she pulls out all the stops and fights with much higher spec that previously seen as well as the same annoying trump cards. She even busts out Fin Funnels so you know she means business.
Shingetsu manages to annoy Suishou for once by pointing out that she’s clearly the final boss meant to lose in the end, and we have ourselves the kind of showdown this show promised with its action and animation. Round 1 ends up being mostly versus Mangetsu, with Shingetsu using stealth to play dead (per Mangetsu’s plan) until Mangetsu is obliterated.
Round 2, after quite the slugfest, Mangetsu’s ghost appears for Shingetsu, giving her a fresh powered-up mech and something approaching an actual magical girl transformation (with a shoulder-cloak thing that looks great when she’s facing the camera directly and hilariously stupid from every other angle), taking out Suishou.
Magiaconatus tries a last wave of screwing with Shingetsu’s head, but Shingetsu holds firm, getting the crown, angel wings, and a staff before declaring all of that… none of that.
Magic is erased, and we leave an epilogue in a world where it doesn’t exist and in fact never did. In this new world Shingetsu is a ghost that nobody can see or hear, Nene is an adult like her chronological age says she should be, Anna and Kuon are still deleted, and it’s strongly hinted that suspiciously similar substitutes to Mangetsu and Shingetsu now exist as ordinary humans. You work that one out, show’s over.
I think most emblematic of this show’s problems is one moment near the start of the final episode. Shingetsu asks why Magiaconatus went through this whole convoluted plan even though it seems pretty clear that its mind (as much as it has a mind) is rather made up about a lot of things. Of course, she receives no answer, and neither do we. With a repeated theme in the finale that the seal a thousand years earlier was trying to do what Shingetsu is doing, removing magical power from the world, the entire show comes off as a twelve episode death game battle royale capping off a thousand year effort to do the equivalent of hitting “Empty Recycle Bin” after deleting something so that it’s really gone for real this time.
On another note of weakness, here’s a tip for budding Scifi-fantasy writers: typically you get a finite number of made-up or pointlessly exotic words before those who read or watch your work get bored and start to glaze over them. The number varies depending on the length of your work and its format (a 12 episode anime is particularly unfriendly compared to, say, a scifi novel for adults) This is why a lot of intelligently put-together speculative fiction will either use fairly common words for a lot of its concepts (even if it has to redefine them in context), or else familiar-sounding compounds, saving the invented mouthfuls for the most necessary cases. Or, at least, if you’re going to have the mouthful names, provide a common slang term that’s easier to remember.
For Granbelm, I kind of spot it “Armanox”. It’s important that these mecha-like things are not technological entities, so you can’t use most of the words that describe their form. “Princeps” is on the edge. It’s a real word (if a bizarre one) and it’s describing a critical concept. Most of the other lingo that gets thrown around in this show isn’t needed. It’s distracting and annoying. Let’s compare…
“In Granbelm, seven mages participate in a ritual combat scenario known as Granbelm, in which they fight for control of the Macguffin called the Magiaconatus. In order to conduct their battles, the mages each have an Armanox to fight with. The last one standing will receive the prize and become Princeps.”
“In Fate/Stay Night, seven mages participate in a ritual combat scenario known as The Holy Grail War, in which they fight for control of the Macguffin called the Holy Grail. In order to conduct their battles, the mages each have a Servant to fight with. The last one standing will receive the prize and have their wish granted.”
One of these is way easier to parse than the other. And I know this probably seems like an odd topic to pick on, but it’s one that bears mentioning in general and caused some real hiccups for Granbelm right out of the gate so it’s best to talk about it here.
To knock out another topic, the fighting in this show is good. If there’s anything that got both effort from the writers and budget for the animators, it’s the battles. They’re decently paced and reasonably dynamic. They even sell the wide and chibi-esque mech designs, which are something of an ask.
But, unfortunately, a fight is only as interesting as its fighters allow it to be, and Granbelm is not great at compelling characters. Mangetsu and Shingetsu are actually kind of alright, but the problem is that we’re supposed to come away from the show thinking of how this was this huge trial for Shingetsu, how she had to learn and grow to be able to do what she did at the end. But she didn’t. She had the resolve already in episode 1, and it seldom wavered. She wasn’t a bad character, and Mangetsu was actually a pretty neat one once her twist was deployed (before that, her level of chipperness and squeaking “What?” in rapid sequence when something happened could be grating), but they needed one or more really good antagonists to actually do what they were meant to do, and those aren’t up to snuff.
On the antagonist side you’ve got Anna, who spends well over half the show just being a hot-headed ball of rage who screams a lot. This is the closest thing to a villain that the first half of Granbelm has, and it’s not a good look. Maybe if we actually understood earlier why she wanted vengeance or what was going through that warped head of hers we could connect, or if she had a more watchable persona. There aren’t a lot of characters who can really own their entire performance being all down to screaming in over-the-top fury, and that’s most of what Anna does.
Once she’s out of the picture, Suishou steps up. I will give her that she at least has a few moments where she’s legitimately creepy, particularly when she’s trying to break down Kuon’s will, but in the end… she’s just a jerk. Sure at the climax we pull out that she’s this mystical being, but that doesn’t erase the fact that she spends most of her villainy on just trolling people. She’s nasty, and she can hold her own in a fight, but she’s not quite as grandiose as she needs to be. A story like Granbelm needed a villain who could be more operatic, or who had a stronger rivalry with the hero, Shingetsu. Anna wanted to have that rivalry but she has the subtlety and charm of a gorilla on steroids, and her rivalry with Shingetsu was painfully one-sided. Suishou did have a deep rivalry, the kind that could have carried the emotional arc of the back half of the show, but she had it with Kuon. She had surprisingly little on Mangetsu and even less on Shingetsu.
Speaking of Kuon, we’ve got the assist characters. Nene was pretty good, being fun to watch and passably useful. Kuon was too good for her role. She had the compelling motivation, the real rivalry with the final boss, the connectable backstory, the epic and swelling emotional fight… but she’s not the protagonist, so she has to get erased from reality to let us keep puttering around with a conflict that isn’t half as good as the one being spent on a “gotcha” moment.
I have to ask myself, how much cooler would it be if Kuon didn’t die there – if instead of Suishou being a jerk for the final arc, we had a hero versus hero finale where Kuon still needed the Princeps power to save her sister, and couldn’t believe that Shingetsu’s “delete all magic” play would actually restore her half-eaten (albeit as a ploy against Suishou) soul. Where we tease a happy ending like with the curse-caster down everyone can have what they want only to reveal that no, there’s still a reason to fight. Shingetsu, in that case, would have to face up to her desire, for the sake of the world, clashing with the desperate wish of someone she actually knows and who she knows isn’t malicious in opposing her. That’s a tough moral hurdle that they almost tried with Mangetsu, but they had Mangetsu support her own demise and sacrifice herself for final boss phase 1, so they never really made Shingetsu own up to it, that she was destroying the potential for some forms of salvation as well as great destruction.
In a sense, the fact that I’m nitpicking this is good: it means that Granbelm connected with me enough that I cared about its scenario, despite all the moments where I felt like I was in school and all the faults I’m currently bringing up.
And also on the plus side the art is beautiful and I must reiterate that the combat, literally-magic Super Robot that it is, is really top notch. The fights in this feel like what the fights in Star Driver wish they were: Conflicts between mechs in spaces outside of space, with mystical powers and mechanical muscle alike.
On the whole, there’s a sense in which Granbelm is deeply frustrating. It has high peaks, but deep valleys. I think we spend more time in the valleys, but the peaks can’t be ignored either. For that, I will give Granbelm a C+. It’s worth watching for the visuals alone, and while the story and characters have their faults, they don’t drag it down enough to actually kill it. They do make it forgettable, but at least it’s enjoyable enough while it’s here, provided you don’t try to think too much about why.