Synopsis

Kusanagi Takeru is the captain of the 35th test platoon of the Antimagic Academy, also known as the small-fry platoon. Why? They’re a rag-tag bunch of horrible trainees.

The team is made up of a sniper with stage freight who shoots at wrong buildings…

… a mad technician support who couldn’t care less…

… and a captain who is only good with swords.

Now to be fair, they’re technically individually skilled at their own specific expertise. It’s just that they’re pretty horrible at missions. So they’ve amassed a total of zero points as far as actual missions are concerned.

Enter Ouka. She’s a former professional witch hunter who got demoted because she killed a witch when she shouldn’t have. Her demotion is basically to become a student again, and participate as a member of the 35th test platoon.

So we’ve got 3 inept trainees and a prodigy who looks down on them in the same team. Such is the dynamics of the platoon.

On one particular mission, Ouka and Takeru assaults an enemy hideout and finds tons of human corpses. Ouka goes emotional, and then goes on a rampage. Takeru somehow calms her down with a speech about being comrades.

Were you confused? That’s understandable.

Review

Pacing issues. That’s the biggest problem I felt the show has. The episode tried to cram so much that it didn’t really bother establishing most elements of the premise of the show. While I appreciate the fact that the show didn’t just dump the information to us via some long-ass narration, it somehow took for granted the tons of information we need to know about the world.

Take the enemies for example. Who exactly are the enemies? They’ve mentioned witches, and we’ve seen one enemy use some magic that summons a mech. But other than that, we’re coming up with blanks. The goons we’ve seen use guns for crying out loud, and this distracts from the actual premise of the show. Only the mech part is relevant, but the relevance comes way later into the series.

Another example is Ouka’s emotional outburst. Why was she emotional? Sure, she mentioned that her family was killed by witches, but that statement alone carry no emotional weight. Watching someone get emotional over something I can’t empathize with due to a lack of understanding about the complex underlying background is generally an awkward thing. And that’s how the scene made me feel.

I would prefer it much more if the show paced itself better, showing the atrocious things witches do in order to illustrate the stakes of what the test platoons are doing. This would have been a better use of parts of the first episode than jumping quickly to Ouka’s emotional outburst. This makes me feel like the producers of this show had a very specific plot milestone to achieve per episode, which means they’ll either jam or stretch events just to achieve those milestones.

And this makes me really sad. I’ve read about 7 volumes of the light novel this was based on, and I really really liked it. The novel begins with a campy feel with bits and pieces of grim dark elements. Then as the story progressed, the grim dark elements gradually eat up the campy elements, both in feel and in the actual things the characters go through. When the story reached the arc about Takeru’s little sister, the series went full despair mode, one that I think Gen Urobuchi would be proud of.

Will succeeding episodes improve to actually give justice to how good the novels are? I sure hope so. But the trajectory of the pacing suggests that we really shouldn’t expect it.

Waifu Index

Ouka‘s an okay waifu. Usagi is a fun, cute waifu. Several future characters are good waifu materials as well. But Ikaruga is best waifu.