Happy New Year! Out with the old, in with the new! Which is why I did my best to finish watching The Irregular at Magic High School before the end of the year. Didn’t want to drag something like that along with me into the new year. Thanks to the regulars at Animesuki Forums, I’ve been given lots of suggestions for good, clean anime to watch this year, so there’s no need to hang on to stuff that’s not working.
So how was the final arc of Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei? Do I need to say it? It was bad. Really bad. The problem with this show, as with many light novel adaptations, is that the writers focused too much on adapting the light novel and not enough on actually creating a good anime. You know how whenever a book is turned into a movie the fans come out of the woodwork screaming about how X was left out and Y was changed, this director is the worst in the world, and so on and so forth? I’ve been guilty of it myself, but that doesn’t mean all changes are necessarily wrong. Sometimes there’s plenty of room for improvement in the original material.
The other problem with the arc was the same one all along: the enemies are really dumb and really weak. It seemed all along that the aim of the evil Great Asia Alliance was the Magic Thesis Competition, but then it turns out that they were actually after the Kanto Magic Headquarters all along.
If that’s the case, why pick a time of the year when security is relatively tight because of the competition? Why pick a date when the most powerful high school students in the country will be gathered a short distance away from your target? And why bother attacking the competition center and other parts of the city instead of throwing your full firepower at your target from the start?
Actually there are a ton of questions left over from that arc. I suspect they wasted far too much time animating unnecessary scenes from the LN (e.g. anything with Honoka, anything with Naotsugu/Shuu, anything with Iso-whatshisname and his girlfriend, the scene with Jiro Marshall, the stuff with the girl that wants revenge, anything with that Zhou-sensei guy since nothing came of it, a hundred other scenes) just to please the fans instead of focusing on telling a logical, coherent story. That’s why the last arc seems so rushed and nonsensical… is the most benign explanation I can come up with.
In the end the day is finally saved by (guess who?) Shiba Tatsuya, dressed to kill in a Venom suit that requires him to thump his crotch repeatedly to fly. Regular watchers of Japanese media might know this already, but the Japanese have funny ideas about what is ‘cool’ and what isn’t. Anyway, Tatsuya eventually blows up the port of Zhenhai and probably the whole city of Ningbo along with it and that’s the end of the evil Chinese invaders, any resemblance to living figures is completely coincidental heh heh heh.
Since Shiba was going to save the day all along and we knew it from the start, why did the writer bother building up the rest of the characters? The cast was entirely too large. If you needed a few students to defend the defenseless, you could have just stuck with Leo, Erika, Saegusa and Watanabe, making room for tighter storytelling and less time-wasting. After all they only really exist to make Tatsuya look good by taking lots of time and effort to do what he can do in a flash. Oh, and to get injured by being stupid just so Tatsuya can show off his l33t healing skills.
The whole thing is muddled even further by the characters lacking any clear, defining attacks. “Everyone can use magic” just makes everyone interchangeable. To the end I still had no clear idea what Saegusa’s magic really was (something about smells?) or what, if anything, glasses girl could do in battle, or what made Kirihara any different from Leo.
…Not that it matters since Tatsuya beats them all anyway, but this was one area where they could have taken a leaf from the better sort of shounen fighting manga. A smaller cast with more clearly-defined roles and abilities would have gone a long way towards making the show easier to enjoy.
Well, that was that. I was warned that The Irregular at Magic High School was rather bad. I refused to listen and I got what I deserved. I’ve seen worse, of course, but I tend to like high-school series and I tend to like fighting series and I tend to like magic series, but when you put them all together and get a complete mess like this? Sad. And this is one area where “the light novel is better!” excuse doesn’t cut it, because the anime did nothing to suggest that or generate any interest in the source material. It didn’t leave any mysteries about what would happen next either (Tatsuya will continue to dominate everyone forever) so I think I’m done here. On to better things!
