Magical Girl Raising Project

Episode 12

With just three magical girls left, it's finally time to close the curtain on this game of survival. As Snow White despairs over her inability to protect people, Fav appears to explain the purpose of the game and asks her to take over as the new Master for the next round of the selection process. Meanwhile, Ripple and Swim Swim engage in a duel to the death. Ripple is badly wounded, but she manages to kill Swim Swim after finding a way to exploit her weakness. Snow White arrives too late to stop the battle and turns her anger on the seemingly indestructible device that allows Fav to stay in the human world. She can't break it on her own, but her lucky charm allows Ripple to get back up and destroy the device using Swim Swim's magic weapon.

The duel between Ripple and Swim Swim is interesting to watch on a couple of levels. We finally get an idea of what Swim Swim sees when she uses her power to pass through solid objects, and it makes for some neat visuals as we look up at the ground as if it's the surface of a pool of water. Ripple also finds a surprisingly pragmatic way to win the fight: if your opponent is vulnerable to light and sound, just skip the fancy swordplay and toss a flashbang grenade at her face. Once all the stabbing and slashing is over though, Ripple's victory feels rather hollow on an emotional level. With Fav still around, Ripple's feeling of “mission accomplished” can't really carry over to the audience. It's also difficult to be happy for a character who's just stabbed an unconscious girl to death with a sword. There's a feeling of numbness to the whole thing, possibly due to the amount of death we've already seen over the past dozen episodes.

While the outcome of the duel is a little underwhelming, the end of Snow White's character arc is actively frustrating. There was room in this episode for her to finally take matters into her own hands and rebel against the game in a tangible way. Instead, she just denounces Fav verbally and hits his magical gadget with a big rock. Snow White's victory depends on the lucky rabbit's foot (courtesy of Hardgore Alice) bringing Ripple back to finish the job for her. Her own magical power is only useful in allowing her to tell Ripple to ignore Fav's words and stab the device, which she was clearly about to do anyway. There's an argument to be made that Snow White's commitment to her ideals inspires others to do the right thing, but it's still disappointing that she doesn't do anything consequential on her own.

It's not until the epilogue that Snow White finally translates her desire to change the world into concrete actions, and even then it happens off-screen. We flash forward from Fav's demise to a time after Snow White has presumably rebelled against the magical authorities and started using her powers to fight evil directly. She and Ripple both seem to be doing fine on their own, and we don't see either of them paying much of a price for the choices they've made. It's the kind of happy ending that the audience might want, but it's presented in a way that makes it feel unearned.

Some of the underlying themes in Magical Girl Raising Project are touched on in this final episode, if only briefly. The most relevant bit of dialogue might be Fav's agreement with Cranberry's claim that the older, less homicidal selection process had gotten boring. This is as close as the series has come to directly addressing dark magical girl stories as a genre, and it has some potentially interesting implications if you're looking for them. Are we as the audience partially responsible for the violent deaths of these fictional characters because we're viewing it as entertainment? Has the perpetual desire for something new and exciting corrupted our idea of what a magical girl is supposed to be? We don't get any answers here, but the questions are intriguing enough on their own.

This final episode is solid from a technical standpoint, and it does a decent job of bringing the main story to a concrete ending. It's occasionally interesting on an intellectual level, but it rings surprisingly hollow when it comes to raw human emotion, and the presumptive heroine remains frustratingly incapable of achieving much on her own. In short, it's all over the place, which is perhaps fitting when you look at Magical Girl Raising Project as a whole. This series has been clever and compelling at times, but it's also suffered from stretches of shaky storytelling and uninspired plot twists. It's neither risen above its dark tone nor wallowed in it, instead ending up somewhere in between. I can't help but wish it had done more with its themes and characters, but it's still been an interesting series to watch. I've enjoyed wrestling with its good and bad points from week to week, and not many shows can provide so much to talk about on such a consistent basis.

Rating: B-

Magical Girl Raising Project is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Paul Jensen is a freelance writer and editor. You can follow more of his anime-related ramblings on Twitter.