Alzrius
The EN World kitten
The Irregular at Magic High School ("Mahoka Koko no Rettosei") was a twenty-six episode series that I wanted to like, but I had the distinct impression that it honestly didn't care whether I liked it or not.
The basic setup is that, a century from now, magic is a well-established phenomenon, and is utilized in a manner akin to being another form of technology. The story is based around Tatsuya Shiba and his little sister Miyuki enrolling in a state-run school for those who are able to use magic.
The Irregular takes itself very seriously, being an action-drama. I use that term somewhat guardedly, because it's more drama than it is action. While it doesn't lack for scenes of things being blown up or people being injured, the majority of the show is the characters talking about various incidents that are going to happen or have already happened.
That alone isn't necessarily a deal-breaker - many detective stories and thrillers are written around that particular style of exposition, after all. What broke The Irregular for me was that it tossed around quite a bit of technical jargon regarding the specifics of how magic worked, without ever giving the viewers a basic overview of the show's magic system.
The overall effect of this is that, whenever the characters talk about some particular point of magic - and make no mistake, they do that a lot - it's a lot like overhearing people talking about a board game that you've never played. There's clearly a sense of overall structure there, but you're left trying to juggle various terms and conditions without any hope of assembling the moving parts.
Even that wouldn't be too bad if the characters themselves were entertaining. Sadly, they never quite live up to their potential. The cast is fairly large, and because of that most of them are fairly shallow in their presentation. Nowhere is this more true than with the main characters, Miyuki and Tatsuya.
Miyuki herself is nothing more than a walking brother-complex. She's one of the most one-dimensional characters I've seen in recent memory, being defined totally by her worshipful (and somewhat incestuous) feelings towards Tatsuya.
Tatsuya himself is little better. Emotionless and eminently talented at virtually everything, Tatsuya is a fairly gratuitous Mary Sue. While he's initially presented as an underachiever when it comes to magic, this is quickly explained as being largely due to the fact that the standardized tests for magic simply don't measure his strong suits very well. Likewise, the show desperately wants us to believe that he's not very talented as practical spellcasting.
The problem with all of this is that the show then immediately turns around and tells us that he's such a genius at "magical engineering" - as well as tactics and strategy - that this handicap is purely theoretical; when it comes time to actually use magic, he's running rings around everyone else due to having such incredible situational awareness. Not surprisingly, virtually all of the female cast members are interested in him, while the male cast members universally admire him.
And he's also an expert at hand-to-hand combat. And he's a member of the school's disciplinary committee. And he's secretly a genius inventor with an entire lab dedicated to producing and marketing his inventions. And he's a scion of one of the most powerful magic-using families in Japan. And he's a member of the military's special forces. And he's a war hero. And he has a secret power (of course).
Like I said, Mary-freaking-Sue.
Overall, the way I'd characterize The Irregular at Magic High School is that it's an anime that's highly narcissistic. It clearly had a well-defined internal mythos regarding how magic worked, but at no point did it seem willing to let me in on the its methodology. Likewise, the main character is so perfect that he's boring, and all of the other cast members are defined solely as satellites to his perfection.
This is an anime that I wanted to like, but it quite clearly was too focused on itself to care how I felt about it.
The basic setup is that, a century from now, magic is a well-established phenomenon, and is utilized in a manner akin to being another form of technology. The story is based around Tatsuya Shiba and his little sister Miyuki enrolling in a state-run school for those who are able to use magic.
The Irregular takes itself very seriously, being an action-drama. I use that term somewhat guardedly, because it's more drama than it is action. While it doesn't lack for scenes of things being blown up or people being injured, the majority of the show is the characters talking about various incidents that are going to happen or have already happened.
That alone isn't necessarily a deal-breaker - many detective stories and thrillers are written around that particular style of exposition, after all. What broke The Irregular for me was that it tossed around quite a bit of technical jargon regarding the specifics of how magic worked, without ever giving the viewers a basic overview of the show's magic system.
The overall effect of this is that, whenever the characters talk about some particular point of magic - and make no mistake, they do that a lot - it's a lot like overhearing people talking about a board game that you've never played. There's clearly a sense of overall structure there, but you're left trying to juggle various terms and conditions without any hope of assembling the moving parts.
Even that wouldn't be too bad if the characters themselves were entertaining. Sadly, they never quite live up to their potential. The cast is fairly large, and because of that most of them are fairly shallow in their presentation. Nowhere is this more true than with the main characters, Miyuki and Tatsuya.
Miyuki herself is nothing more than a walking brother-complex. She's one of the most one-dimensional characters I've seen in recent memory, being defined totally by her worshipful (and somewhat incestuous) feelings towards Tatsuya.
Tatsuya himself is little better. Emotionless and eminently talented at virtually everything, Tatsuya is a fairly gratuitous Mary Sue. While he's initially presented as an underachiever when it comes to magic, this is quickly explained as being largely due to the fact that the standardized tests for magic simply don't measure his strong suits very well. Likewise, the show desperately wants us to believe that he's not very talented as practical spellcasting.
The problem with all of this is that the show then immediately turns around and tells us that he's such a genius at "magical engineering" - as well as tactics and strategy - that this handicap is purely theoretical; when it comes time to actually use magic, he's running rings around everyone else due to having such incredible situational awareness. Not surprisingly, virtually all of the female cast members are interested in him, while the male cast members universally admire him.
And he's also an expert at hand-to-hand combat. And he's a member of the school's disciplinary committee. And he's secretly a genius inventor with an entire lab dedicated to producing and marketing his inventions. And he's a scion of one of the most powerful magic-using families in Japan. And he's a member of the military's special forces. And he's a war hero. And he has a secret power (of course).
Like I said, Mary-freaking-Sue.
Overall, the way I'd characterize The Irregular at Magic High School is that it's an anime that's highly narcissistic. It clearly had a well-defined internal mythos regarding how magic worked, but at no point did it seem willing to let me in on the its methodology. Likewise, the main character is so perfect that he's boring, and all of the other cast members are defined solely as satellites to his perfection.
This is an anime that I wanted to like, but it quite clearly was too focused on itself to care how I felt about it.
