Taking place in a world where, if space shots are to be believed, an eighth continent has risen from the Pacific Ocean, Ultramarine Magmell regards this new world of harsh and even supernatural survival, where explorers brave countless dangers both known and unknown in search of riches and hope.
We will be following search and rescue instead.
This isn’t necessarily a fool idea. Compared to say, Made in Abyss, Ultramarine Magmell sets itself up to be a bit less dire since the lead character is not who we expect to be in danger most of the time. In theory, this would let us really soak in the atmosphere and the detail of this new continent. It could still be dark or grisly, but we could also take our time to an extent.
At first, that’s exactly what it seems like the show is going to do, as the first episode has a terminally ill boy hire main character Inyo (who has secret matter-conjuring superpowers) and his assistant Zero (who remotes a robot, presumably also with super powers) in order to find his brother who went missing on Magmell in the search for a fruit that can bolster human bodies and might save the kid.
On the way, we see what seems like a consistently hostile environment, full of parasitic entities and those that seem to hunt humans or at least feed on human misery. The brother is located, but kills the kid in order to bloom the fruit, which he now only desires for himself (having already offered his parents and an unknown number of adventuring party allies for it).
Inyo claims that the true terror of Magmell is how it drives people mad with greed, and it seems to be supernaturally so.
Sadly, we don’t stay with that tone or that level of quality. As the show goes on, the animation seems cheaper, the designs lazier, and the expeditions more transparently arbitrary set pieces. The wonderful sense of a magical and terrifying ecology that exists in the likes of Made in Abyss and the works of E. Gary Gygax is absent. There’s no sense of logic or reality to Magmell’s creatures or environs. These aren’t things that have adapted to a particular niche, they’re blocks of statistics to manage the episode’s particular issue.
And, while I’m busy cutting short what I normally do at the end, there’s another issue: The first episode and the last three seem to be cut from an entirely different cloth than episodes 2-10. In Episode 1, there’s this sense of threat and tragedy where there really was no right answer and nobody comes out unscathed, whether physically or psychologically.
Episode 2 still feels a little legitimate, as the rescue order comes from a young woman looking to have her father be extracted from his research lab. Inyo goes with the corporate security forces and we get the heavy handed message of the episode when using bullets congealed from the blood of tortured baby bear monsters to kill the parents that want their young back causes a Kaiju to arrive and start trashing everything. Inyo only agrees to finish extracting people when they let the babies go. Father and daughter will become semi-recurring characters.
Episode 3 features an old man who lived as part of a settler group on Magmell as a kid. As a kid, he left two of his friends to die when playing with poisonous creatures went wrong. Turns out, the friends are still alive, but as giant poison monsters merged with their favorite poison-type creatures. The nerdy kid with glasses even has glasses still as a giant bat monster. You figure that out. Rich old guy gets emotional catharsis and will show up again now and then.
We then get a filler episode where Inyo refuses to rescue a “Saint” lady who is actually a poacher. When Zero insists on trying to follow the lead, they discover that even if she had been funneling money back to orphanages and stuff, she’s gone totally mad with that psychosis we saw in episode 1. This will be the last time we see that plot point.
Episode 5 is a total screwball comedy where Inyo and Zero torment a shopkeeper by scamming him every time they shop with either total bullshit or their powers. He decides to strike it rich in Magmell rather than putting up with their abuse any more, so Inyo sabotages him in destructive ways, like giving him a live grenade with the pin pulled or cutting the brakes on his motorbike. After enough attempted murders, he makes it to Magmell, immediately gets in lethal danger, and Inyo saves him. He will return throughout the show as the butt of jokes.
In my review of Tsugumomo, I mentioned that slapstick could often be taken as horrific if you assume its consequences are real. In that show, I thought the moments were usually well-sold and that it created sufficient distance with its absurdity – even as the show also did drama in other places. Here, the rest of the show tries to be down-to-earth about its premise and this episode is so jarringly out of place that… yeah, Inyo’s kind of a bad person?
We get a backstory episode for him and how he had to kill his pet monster back when he was living with his mentor, Shuin, due to said monster Pokemon-evolving from friendly intelligent cat-thing to giant bloodthirsty saber-toothed gorilla on tasting blood. Okay…?
After that, we get another episode with the father and daughter from Episode 2. This time it’s the daughter who’s downed, facing a humanoid creature with unknown intentions and high destructive ability
As creepy as it looks, this turns out to be one of the native inhabitants of Magmell, called the Erin, who are fully intellectual abhumans with freaky abilities. In this one’s case, it has mega-stretchy arms and hates all weapons. It’s solved peacefully, it evidently can speak human languages, and the Erin, who should be kind of a big deal despite being never mentioned until now are never mentioned again.
We get a filler episode with an old man living at an abandoned cafe in Magmell who basically does the Captain Ahab thing to avenge his dead daughter, and Inyo mostly watches despite being shot at and told to leave.
This is followed by two more complete filler episodes – one where Zero wants to become an elegant lady (Because she thinks a more mature woman could show up and snatch Inyo away from her) and thus gathers the recurring side character gang to go to Magmell and try out fruits that, unlike the one in the first episode, are just growing places and have various Wonderland-style effects (Like growing giant, growing tall because only the legs grow, or becoming a conehead) that are tested on the abused shopkeeper and somehow go back to normal between cuts. The other involves meeting a naturalist tending to some orphaned baby birds, and then dealing with a duo who are torturing and killing the mostly harmless Magmell animals (including torching those birds to death) for internet views. That’s sick. They’re left to suffer some awful hallucinations and hopefully never return.
To wash the taste of that awfulness out of our mouths, we then get the end run, which is heavily focused on Zero and what turns out to be her extremely tortured lab rat past.
The guy who was previously using her as a guinea pig with a shock collar shows up on a day when Inyo is out by himself, and forces Zero to bend the knee by having mind-controlled suicide bombers blow up the shopkeeper and then threaten the rest of the recurring NPC squad. After she caves, Inyo of course comes home, so the guy uses a suicide bomber on him, after setting off the ones holding all the friends hostage for good measure. In the last episode it’s revealed that everyone is fine (except the shopkeep, who is comedy hospitalized) because this show spent all its teeth.
Anyway, our new antagonist torments Zero some more, goads Inyo into confronting him at the lab, and… we learn surprisingly little about the truth behind this. The story we know is that Shuin gave Inyo a mission to find Zero and protect her forever as his seemingly last wish before vanishing, and so Inyo went and rescued her and destroyed the whole evil operation in the process. The evil operation was apparently to awaken superpowers in Zero (and the other “units”) but… why? Never explained. Evidently in the intervening four years he recaptured all the other Units and more, awakened their superpowers, got a super with the power of power theft to give him the powers, killed that super, and came up with this whole living bomb scheme using the depowered tortured kids. All of whom ultimately do explode, even the ones Zero gets to talk to on her recapture.
And sure, he did all this to get revenge on Inyo, who ruined him in the past… but what was he trying to do in the first place? Was becoming a cruddy knockoff of Gensei Kihara always the plan? Where did he get all this offscreen villain dark matter?
Anyway, Inyo comes to the rescue, gets beaten up badly by suicide bombers and the final boss man, but then convinces Zero to believe in the two of them so she breaks her bonds, summons her little robot thing and turns the tables.
The villain can’t take a bloody hint and comes back for a couple more hints, munching every Magmell fruit seen in the show so far (including several copies the one from episode 1 that had been rare enough to spend years killing for it, and all the Wonderland ones from the filler episode).
He turns into a giant Chaos Spawn.
As blobby globby, he chases Inyo down, but Inyo gets the better of him and smashes him into the rubble of his base, presumably killing him for real this time. Inyo and Zero are going to be partners forever, Inyo has some important future task involving going deep into the dark heart of Magmell that he wants her to be with him for (they didn’t already go there?) and we reveal that the assist squad is alive and well so the only people the suicide bombers managed to kill at any point was themselves. Harsh.
Whew.
So, I already described how this show was broken, so let’s talk about how much. Ultramarine Magmell is, when all is said and done, a watchable show. But it’s not a good show. It wears its problems openly, and offers little of value. It has these random strokes of cruelty, like with the baby birds, but it can’t manage to sustain this sort of survival atmosphere. It has this theme of savage magical nature, but it doesn’t ever feel like it delivers on that. Inyo’s abilities offer incredibly creativity, where he can conjure anything he can understand, but this is poorly utilized as well. It’s a superpower brawler without much good fighting, a dark adventure with no teeth, and an exploration fantasy that can’t paint a clear picture of its wonder.
For all that, the grade I’ll offer is a C-. I think I’m being fairly generous here but it’s not so bad that I feel the need to recommend avoiding it. The characters were passably written most of the time and while the long three-part ending run breaks down on analysis it did hold my attention well enough. I think you can decide for yourself if you want to bother with Ultramarine Magmell or not, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.