The Fall 2016 Anime Preview Guide

Magical Girl Raising Project

Koyuki Himekawa has always dreamed of becoming a magical girl, but in the real world, all she can do is play out her fantasy through the free game Magical Girl Raising Project. But after an unexpected in-game message offers to make her fantasy real, Koyuki discovers that dreams really do come true! Tasked with helping people in order to collect “Magical Candy,” Koyuki is now enjoying nights as a real-life magical girl and even making friends with other heroes like herself. Unfortunately, the life of a magical girl is far from all fun and games... Magical Girl Raising Project is based on a series of light novels and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll, Saturdays at 12:15 PM EST.

Paul Jensen

Rating:

Good grief, this feels like a slow introduction. I have a sneaking suspicion that Magical Girl Raising Project is dragging its feet here in order to end on Fav's big announcement that half of the girls in town are about to get the axe. Even so, I'll admit that this show has caught my interest. Maybe it's just a result of the current state of the genre, but even the most harmless bits of dialogue come across as foreshadowing for dark and heartbreaking things to come. All aboard the tragedy train!

If Koyuki is meant to be the one truly “good” magical girl in a world full of bad ones, then this first episode sets her up fairly well. We see enough of her family and friends to figure out that she's got her life more or less in order before her big transformation. That's a good thing, because it gives her something to lose if this all goes downhill in a hurry. As a stable heroine with a clear vision of what the ideal magical girl should be, she's well positioned to have ideological clashes with her more pragmatic rivals. Setting her childhood friend up as her mentor and partner is also an intriguing decision, even if the poor guy does appear to be wearing a bright red shirt with “kill me off early” written on the back.

There's plenty of potential here for Magical Girl Raising Project to say something interesting about the genre. The mobile game setup, the score-based rankings, and the imminent eliminations could all easily be used to critique the way so many other titles are going with the dark and bloody approach just because it's in fashion. On the other hand, this show could just as easily fall into that same trap and end up as a needlessly grim trainwreck.

Episodes like this are tough to pin down, as all the potential in the world doesn't mean much if it's not put to good use. The best thing I can say for the time being is that Magical Girl Raising Project has given itself ample opportunity to be a good series. Only time will tell if it lives up to that promise, but that's a journey I'm willing to take. I like the look of this show, and it's made some good narrative decisions in the early going. Don't go in expecting it to one-up Madoka Magica, but it should at least be a tragically good time.

Jacob Chapman

Rating:

Happy Hunger Games, everyone! It's time to beat this dead horse into a pulp! Even five years later (which is like a decade in anime years), imitating Madoka Magica just never seems to go out of style, and Magical Girl Raising Project is the newest entry in a long line of dark mahou shojo adventures out to wring that sweet Dokes udder out just one more time. The twist this time? Just make the slaughter of magical girls the premise right from the start, by setting up a battle royale where only half of them (at most) are allowed to survive. And by "right from the start," I apparently mean episode two, because the entire first episode of MGRP (save its grim n' bloody flash-forward cold open) is spent pretending that things are all hunky-dory in the world of magical girldom. Our heroine is teased by her friends for her magical girl fantasies, wins her own set of powers via magical lottery, tests them out to overwhelmingly positive results, and even gets to reunite with her first crush as a fellow magical girl. (No, it's not what you're thinking. He's a boy when he's not on the clock, which means it's gotta be pretty strange to swear fealty to your lady love while peering over the giant rack you decided to give your avatar.) It's all rainbows and sunshine right out of the gate, which leaves most of us glancing at the clock, waiting for them to drop that other shoe. I get the feeling Boyfriend-chan is not long for this survival game, but just introducing Boyfriend-chan as a magical girl at all did hold my interest in this episode more than I was expecting.

The sad truth that everyone in the audience knows where this show is going works against it pretty hard, but once you get past the laughable tone obfuscation and pregnant pacing of the whole thing, this isn't too shabby for a Madoka ripoff. For one thing, it's kind of refreshing to see a series like this not speckle its entire runtime with dark foreboding, making all its attempts at sincere emotion feel like wasted time. Sure, we know all these gals are gonna start killing each other soon, but since we're already prepared for it, why not spend the lead-up "fluff time" trying to sincerely connect with the cast? Our heroine is generic as can be, but genuinely likable as the episode gives all her little quirks and mannerisms room to breathe while she discovers her powers. Her comrades are refreshingly diverse for a magical girl roster, which is the greatest thing this show brings to the table. Since everyone's costume and name are based on their own tastes applied to a smartphone game's character creator, you have completely incongruent aesthetics between girls like Calamity Mary, Nemurin, Weiss Winterprison, and "Cranberry, Musician of the Forest" (my personal favorite, pictured above).

Long story short, this show isn't exactly good, but it's way better than I thought it was going to be, and it still has a great amount of potential to entertain though not necessarily impress. The devil's in the details on this one, and even if it is a big obvious rip-off, I'm willing to give this Madoka-esque Money Raising Project a few more episodes.

Theron Martin

Rating:

Skip the first 48 seconds of this one and you have a fairly standard-looking series about a girl learning the ropes of becoming a magical girl. Even connecting it to a phone app game isn't really that novel anymore. Taken on that basis, this is a mildly entertaining, mostly innocuous little show whose main twist is that one of the magical girls is actually a boy (who loves magical girls) before he transforms. The name of the series even suggests of this merely being a fully-animated version of a game where you play a magical girl character.

But we can't just ignore those first 48 seconds, can we? The very first shot of the series is shock imagery which harkens back to the likes of Elfen Lied or When They Cry, and quickly realizing that these are bloodied, broken, and quite probably dead magical girls scattered across the floor around one survivor is a pretty potent bit of foreshadowing. Sure, series as recently as Re: Zero have pulled stunts like this, but this is a magical girl series, which is normally the antithesis of that kind of thing. Unlike Re: Zero, though, the story doesn't come back to that grimness before the end of the episode. In fact, there's nothing else in the episode which even suggests that such a level of darkness might be behind the whole magical girl thing. Even the interesting comment that the episode ends on – that the city is overpopulated by magical girls, so their number will have to be reduced by half – doesn't automatically lead in this direction, as the “collecting magical candy” element built in provides an easy way to peaceably rank the magical girls against each other in a contest.

Stringing the audience along like that is, I think, a mistake; even Madoka Magica had Kyubey getting shot up during the first episode as an additional hint beyond the opening scene that not everything was so copacetic. (And I feel pretty confident that the producers at least partly had that series in mind while making this one.) In fact, it's the main reason that I am not rating this first episode higher, as I actually find the perversity of a magical girl competition turning deadly in a bloody way to be quite intriguing. The aesthetics of the series are also pretty good so far, even if Snow White's magical girl outfit is well less than dazzling and the eyes of the girls shown so far are weirdly oversized even for anime. There are a couple of mild touches of fan service that don't need to be there, but the animation is decent and overall the series is easy on the eyes.

Because of what direction this series is apparently supposed to go, I'll reserve judgment on it until the violent side shows up again. For now, though, it at least has my attention.

Nick Creamer

Rating: 3.5

You'd be forgiven for approaching Magical Girl Raising Project with a heavy dollop of skepticism. In the wake of Madoka Magica's mega-success, there've been a handful of “magical girls, but dark” productions seemingly aimed at somewhat replicating that show's fortunes. Magical girls have always possessed Madoka's moral and tonal complexity, of course, but it's easy to see a show aiming at that one's precise tonal space - and the sharp contrast of frilly outfits and blood splatters that opens Magical Girl Raising Project feels more tacky than anything. “A classic genre, but dark” doesn't make a show interesting - Madoka Magica succeeded because it was an excellent show, and anything attempting to mirror that has to succeed on its own merits as well.

So far, Magical Girl Raising Project is actually doing a perfectly fine job of that. The show's greatest strength is likely its thoughtful approach to characters; protagonist Koyuki's relationship with her two friends already feels fairly grounded, and the show takes care to give some actual context to her personal feelings on magical girls. There's an endearing little scene between her and an elementary school friend that actually touches on the difficulty of liking “girly stuff” as a young boy, and the premiere's final scene calls back to that in the best way possible, by allowing the boy who liked magical girls to become one without a hint of judgment or mockery. “Dark for the sake of dark” shows often fail because they don't care about their characters enough to make the audience care, but Magical Girl Raising Project doesn't have that problem at all. Its cast is already likable, and though there are clear hints of darkness to come, those are far from the only reason to watch it.

The episode moves quickly through the magical girl setup, allowing the obvious genre props to speak for themselves (mascots, costume styles) and instead focusing on neat little quirks of how magical girls function in this world. I appreciated the show's grounded but funny approach to its subject matter; details like Koyuki slamming into her ceiling upon first receiving her powers, or the light discussion of each new magical girls’ theming, gave a sense of solidity to the storytelling. And the production is solid all around - I'm not a fan of the show's hyper-deformed character designs, but the animation is consistent and color work fairly striking. Magical Girl Raising Project is a polished package.

Ultimately, it will be up to the next couple episodes to tell whether this one's a show worth following. The show is clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I'm sure magical girls will soon be pitted against each other, so how the show handles that transition will likely determine Raising Project's fortunes. But the fact that the material before the shoe-drop is engaging is an extremely positive sign. I'll be keeping an eye on this one.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 2.5

In a post-Madoka anime world, we should all know better than to trust this episode's sugary presentation of its characters. Of course the scene of magical girl carnage before we ever get the actual plot of the episode is a pretty big giveaway, but even if you manage to forget about it, there are plenty of other warning signs over the course of Magical Girl Raising Project. First of all, it's got a mascot who is half-black and half-white, like a less edible half-moon cookie with a feathered tail. Right there the symbolism is that he's neither all good nor all bad, so there's no way he's letting kids who play his cellphone game become magical girls out of the goodness of his heart. Then there's the fact that our heroine, Koyuki, turns into the only magical girl who looks like a magical girl, at least in the traditional sense. She's the most covered of the ones introduced thus far, and she alone has the flowers, ruffles, and pale shades of innocent girlish pink and white; the rest wear boob-baring garments or look like scantily clad witches, ninjas, or other character types. The implication is that Koyuki is the only magical girl with a pure idea of what one is, so she's either going to survive to the end of what I assume is going to be a magical girl battle royal or die to save everyone else.

There are a couple of possibilities that I can come up with for this show. The first is that it's a plain old Madoka knock-off, which frankly feels very likely at this point. From the cute yet clearly evil mascot to the variety of magical girls who all gained their powers for different reasons or from different visions of what magical girls are, to Fav's announcement at the end that he wants to halve the number of magical girls operating in the city (which just screams that he's been waiting for this moment all along), and especially taking into account the “magical candies” that each girl is supposed to collect, this has all the hallmarks of the new standard of a Dark Magical Girl story. On the other hand, the series could be about how magical girl shows have lost their way, straying from the darkness as part of the plot (Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne)to stories designed around the idea of darkness, like the aforementioned Madoka or Daybreak Illusion. If we factor in the mention that the other magical girls have been keeping score – tracking and competing to see who gets the most candies – it seems like this series might want to point out that magical girls are supposed to be about saving people in trouble and self-sacrifice rather than winning the game. If it takes this direction, it could be much more interesting than this first episode suggests. But if it descends into dark-for-dark's-sake, relying on the presumed subversion of making magical girls into a violent murderfest, then never mind. I'll just go rewatch Madoka instead.