Modern Magic Made Simple
よくわかる現代魔法Life hasn't been fair to Koyomi Morishita. Even though she's in high school, she's so short that everyone assumes she's still in grade school. The boys and girls in her school tease her mercilessly, and she's not exactly graceful either. On the other hand, she's still better off than Yumiko, who has a magician trying to kill her. Or at least Koyomi was until their paths crossed! Fortunately, salvation arrives in the form of master mage and graduate student Misa Anehara, who agrees to take Koyomi under her wing in learning the new style of magic, which breaks enchantment down into sequences of code. That'll be quite a task, given that so far Koyomi's talent seems to consist of making washbasins randomly fall out of the sky. But if it was easy, it wouldn't be magic, would it? (Source: Sentai Filmworks)
Reviews
stamm.gust - 2014-03-12 18:16:48
Story: A young girl named Koyomi Morishita is an incredibly clumsy high schooler who feels useless and seems to not do anything right without causing any trouble. One day she discovers a flyer that mentions 'if anyone wants to be special, come join in for training' [or something like that it wasn't explained very well]. Koyomi happily accepts and goes over to a magic school in order to change herself and become a better person.
Along the way she meets her teacher, a powerful magic user named Misa Anehara, her serious no-nonsensed brother Sōshirō who doesn't believe in magic, a normie named Kaho Sakazaki, and another magic user who is a natural born one named Yumiko Cristina Ichinose. The story should begin with her learning about magic and overcoming obstacles but the creators/writers seem to have other ideas.
Pros: The premise is pretty good, even though it has been done to death before, and it could lead to some creative possibilities.
The animation is also pretty fluid, the magic looks impressive to look at and it's interesting to see them in action [art is pretty standard though with works]. Music is pretty average but its still nice to listen to.
Cons: Biggest problem is the episode counts are out of order, if you watch the first few episodes you will be more confused and agitated than invested... and the people behind this even know about this but didn't even bother to fix it! There are these weird puppets of the characters that talk about the magic and recap and all that stuff and even apologize about the out of order and say that they'll continue where they left off but it doesn't really. I guess they wanted to be cute there but they had no purpose and it just isn't that funny, I had to waste more minutes of an episode thanks to those bozos.
Also, speaking of which, for a parody on magic the show is not funny. Every joke here falls flat and it uses lame running gags like having Koyomi hit someone with a water basin or falling onto Yumiko's breasts (yea it that kind of show). It gets tiring very quickly. The characters are not that great either, you got the stock clumsy girl, the tsundere, the smart girl, the emotionless girl, the guy who doesn't believe in magic, we've seen it all before and they don't add in anything new to the roles either.
Overall: It could have worked, but the makers just didn't care and did not put much effort into this; I only saw 8 out of 12 episodes and it did not seem like it would get better at all.
Go see Little Witch Academia instead if you want a good magic anime parody thing. It's a lot shorter but is way more satifying to watch.
Thank you for checking out and reading my second review~