Well, once again my duties have brought me a show that’s old enough to vote and it seems like barely anybody cared about the first time around, but heck, what have we got here? Some cute witch girls on brooms, some dated moe, an even more dated poppy love song that could have gone with anything for the opening? You know, against all sane expectations, I’m going to choose to be hopeful. I don’t expect this show to be good, but I will entertain the premise that it could be, and that if it isn’t good per say it may at least decline to hurt me. I know that isn’t much, but it’s still optimism. Show me what you’ve got, Magikano!
So, with somewhere between no expectations and the lowest of expectations going in, it’s pleasantly surprising that when the generic everyboy meets a mysterious girl who of course becomes a mysterious transfer student shortly after, no early encounter involves the crash-and-boob-grab routine. I think that would have been in vogue by the time this came out, so at least this show has some restraint despite being a fanservice anime. And despite the fact that she disappears and appears with powerful gusts of wind, no skirts get flipped out of the gate. No, the show saves the panty shots for later.
Sometimes, you take the little wins.
I suppose I should do this in order. We start with said generic guy, Haruo Yoshikawa, having a strange encounter with a blonde girl who he notices and then sees vanish in a gust of wind. He relates that she vanished “like a ghost” which gets both his weird sisters going and his paranormal obsessed freaky classmates. Haruo… extols the virtues of being totally uninteresting, wanting none of any ghost nonsense.
And sure enough, the teacher comes in and introduces (entering with a blast of wind) a transfer student: the same super-pretty blonde girl, Ayumi Mamiya. She glares at him for half a day and then at lunch is spotted being harassed by high school punks. Haruo stands up and gets himself beat instead, only for Ayumi to decide that’s enough and blow them away with her magic, cackling like an evil overlord. Then Haruo wakes up to find the student body believes he beat the bullies to protect one of his own sisters. Because magic.
Then he goes home and finds he’s the only one there… except for Ayumi, who declares herself to be the new live-in maid who is going to make a man out of Haruo (starting with a kiss, apparently).
And this, halfway through the first episode, is where you probably stop to confirm that you do have the right anime, and a single anime at that. It’s not just a choppy recut of a bunch of different pitches like that one episode of Chronicles of the Going Home Club.
The second half of the first episode explains itself: Ayumi is under a curse that will drain her of her magic and/or kill her if it’s not broken, and because he was the random draw from the cursed magic mirror, only Haruo can do it. Apparently this requires him to be “a man”, and also presumably a magician like Ayumi – and his sisters, who have been keeping him in a normal life with memory-erasing magic bludgeon hammers.
And from here, it’s comic mayhem. The majority of the episodes are taken up bouncing between slapstick, fanservice, and loads and loads of super-deformed or over-the-top chibi reactions. It’s very silly and relies on trope after trope that was stale by 2006. Episode 2 the student council president, who is basically every tough mode student council president, is induced into being Ayumi’s rival in cuteness. She’s also a witch and clearly has a crush on Haruo. Almost every beat feels exactly like something you’ve seen before, even the ones that should be original. The excessive fan clubs? The loon and persona of miss class president? Her childhood friend background and angst at being cool instead of cute? All very familiar. Even the showdown where the girls use magic to quick change between fanservice outfits and inspire an all-school brawl somehow just feels done.
Maybe it’s because there’s a limited amount of energy and passion in the production. The animation goes big with unreal expressions, but it still never really sells them. It knows it’s telling jokes, not a story, so there’s an intentional artificiality to everything about it that makes it come off as “that one anime you thought you made up in a mid-2000’s fever dream”. The thing that couldn’t possibly be real because it was clearly just jamming in parts of everything else.
It’s actually kind of amazing. This isn’t a parody show, it’s played 100% straight, but that very earnest devotion to the bit of being the schlock goofball romcom could almost be read as parodical. It’s almost funny and charming for reasons entirely unrelated to why and how it wants to be funny and/or charming.
What follows is a series of vignettes with no rhyme nor reason that’s making the rules up as it goes along and restores status quo with magic memory-erasing hammer bonks. You know, Witch Craft Works was a show that embraced how absurd the idea of “magic” could be, unbinding itself from the idea of historical or mythical traditions to just let us have giant teddy bears, rabbit armies, crocodile butlers, and so on. But despite all the visual randomness and the extremely arbitrary nature of power in the setting, it didn’t feel like it was being done off the cuff. There was a consistent vision there. Here? No such thing. It’s whatever makes the plot of the day work. One scenario will have the girls time traveling, while in another they’re fairly powerless to deal with a mundane perverted prowler.
And through it all there’s no plot progression. It’s just jokes. I suppose there’s more motion here than in Chronicles of the Going Home Club in that we actually introduce new characters. The Student Council President was the first, but later on we get a clumsy “witch hunter” religious zealot girl who seems to share the same one brain cell as all the other characters in this show.
Smartly enough, the show does know that Haruo isn’t interesting on his own and to largely keep the camera off of him. He’s not quite as much of an absentee as the owner from Busou Shinki, but he’s usually an object for comedy rather than an actor in his own right. Unfortunately, this doesn’t let any of the other characters develop either. Clingy sister is always clingy, and apparently always was
Ayumi is exactly the same as she was in episode 2. Student Council President? Exactly the same. Nobody has an arc in this show, because that’s not what the show is actually about or concerned with.
Another witch maid is sent by Ayumi’s family to help out… so? Ayumi’s little sister (who looks and feels much older than Ayumi) starts messing with them to create the plots of the episodes… so? None of this really matters much for the dynamics.
We get through sports day, a school play, cursed panties, and Christmas. Along the way it appears that Haruo does have some vast and threatening hidden power, which Ayumi’s treacherous sister seems to be more conscious of than all the idiots who live with him, probably because it was used to thrash her in the school play episode. Not that he remembers anything.
This brings us to the final two episodes. In them, we reveal that Haruo is actually (somehow) “The Demon King”, and his sealed power is awakening. Ayumi’s sister goes ahead and steals him at the end of the first episode where they putter around with that.
The team gears up for a rescue operation, the sister plays with her food like a (barely) PG-13 Succubus…
She beats up all the rescuers, Haruo wakes up in psycho mode and beats her up, and the sketchy homeroom teacher who was clearly involved with magic but who never did anything comes in to give us our final exposition: That this has happened before and that every time, time gets rewound a year to try again. She fails utterly to do her job, meaning it’s up to Haruo’s sisters, Ayumi, her sister, the Student Council President, and the random witch hunter to all team up and seal the Demon King back to being Haruo before he up and destroys the world. Ayumi professes her love, breaking through the Demon King and this allows time to be rewound back to the start of the show.
And… that’s it. Full reset ending. Welcome to the time loop.
So… this show was worse than I anticipated.
There’s almost nothing the show gets right. It doesn’t have enough buildup for comedic payoffs, it doesn’t have the animation to do action or fanservice while attempting to be kind of heavy on both, it sure as heck can’t do drama, it has no plot, its characters are static cardboard cutouts… it’s peak fossilized bad anime. Nobody cared anywhere along the chain. The creators didn’t care, and because of that audiences don’t care.
I will give Magikano that it is mostly harmless. The chains of events have enough sense that your mind isn’t being abused. The animation is incredibly cheap, but it’s not going to make your eyes bleed or anything like that. It gets everything wrong, but in such a dull and slapdash way that it can’t even be impressive in how bad it is. It’s an easy Fail, but if you’re looking to build a playlist for Bad Anime Night, it’s an option that won’t make you regret being born to have that kind of idea, which is more than I can say for some of the shows I’ve reviewed.