Wistoria: Wand and Sword

Episode 4

It feels sad to say that an anime eventually having to drastically scale back its scope and ambition when it comes to the quality of its animation is “inevitable” but that is simply the reality that a lot of anime studios live in, these days. I'm not going to pretend that the fourth episode of Wistoria looks awful, or anything—the show remains perfectly watchable since a serious downgrade from the first episodes' absolutely stellar production values remains “pretty good” when you compare them to what a lot of shows put out every week. Still, Studio Actas was reaching for the stars with Wistoria and it's a real shame to see that the show is already being forced to cut corners with all of these slow pans across static images and the “walk and talk” scenes that consist of the upper halves of characters' bodies hopping up and down like little paper dolls.

I am a firm believer that a good story can survive flimsy production values, though, so how goes the tale of Will Serfort and his quest to brute-force his way into becoming a Magia Vander? It's…also perfectly fine, right now, though far from stellar. “The Eve of the Grand Festival” is another episode that continues to build up the cast of (mostly) snobs and bullies that seem to fill the halls of Regarden Academy—including the new King Shit of Asshole Mountain: Julius Reinberg. If Sion was previously filling in the role of Regarden's resident “We Have Draco Malfoy at Home”, then Julius is the “Seriously, We Have So Many Dracos at Home” character. On top of being haughty, dismissive, and entitled, his hair is blue, which makes him easy to tell apart from Sion the Ginger.

In all seriousness, it seems like Wistoria plans on using Sion as more of the “tsundere rival” type that doesn't have a clear 1-1 analog to That Other Wizard School Franchise that I can be bothered to remember, while Julius is more like the outright sociopathic bully tyrants that you'd find in the pages of a Stephen King novel. I mean, just look at the face that homeboy is making in the screencap up there! That is technically a functional point of differentiation between the antagonists we've met so far but it is still funny that the consequence of Wistoria's desperate need to prove Will's underdog status is that the story has made basically every student at Regarden that isn't a cute girl for Will to befriend into unreasonably enthusiastic douchebags. At least Will can continue to make friends with the rowdy drunken dwarves that frequent the tavern he works part-time for.

Unfortunately, though, since “The Eve of the Grand Festival” is mostly about setting the table for said festival, there's not a whole lot for us to talk about beyond the exposition that we get. Will continues to be made fun of for his reliance on strength over magic. Colette continues to be one of the, like, three or four people on the planet who is interested in treating Will as a human being. Sion is still being a jerk and Julius is an even bigger jerk (would you be surprised if I told you that Julius is also a dwarf-racist? Of course not). This is not a bad episode of Wistoria but it is the kind of “in one ear and out the other” time-killer that a show can only get away with so many times before its audience has to start questioning whether they'd be better off seeking other sources of entertainment.

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Wistoria: Wand and Sword is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.