(12 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Adaptation of a series of fantasy light novels in my kryptonite subgenre : the wish-fulfilment fantasy where super-powered teens are enrolled into a vaguely military magic high-school, and somehow the male lead gets a harem of girls around him. At least we’ve only got one of those this season.
Characters
Kanata is our protagonist. The opening action sequence sees him holding off hundreds of insect-like enemies to allow his teammates to escape, so it’s very confusing that for the rest of the episode nearly everyone in his floating city labels him a traitor. This is probably supposed to be an intriguing mystery, but it just comes off as annoying. Anyway, he’s an overachiever nice guy.
The student council appoints him as the new teacher for the Loser Class, because of course it would be silly to involve actual faculty in this decision. And of course he’s just run into all three members of this class before, and they all believe he’s a pervert because of these terrible first impressions.
They are :
– Misora, the very angry girl who will make it your fault if she bumps into you. Doesn’t seem to work well for her, as she’s lost every single training fight so far. And dear gods, she arrives late to school with a piece of bread in her mouth ? Seriously ?
– Lecty, the wallflower who can barely get a word out.
– Rico, the egomaniac who’s in love with herself and spends most of her time admiring her reflection. She’s the only one whose gimmick is actually mildly funny, as her self-absorbed rants are at least awful by design, instead of accident like the rest of the show.
Production Values
Ouch. The CG insect enemies looks awful, mostly due to bad compositing and effects. This also affects the flying combat scenes, although there’s not much of them beyond the prologue.
Overall Impression
Cards on the table : I don’t like this genre of shows, and they face an uphill struggle with me at the best of times. It’s often an excuse for the writers to be lazy, avoiding having to write an actual plot when they can instead fall back on cliché highschool and harem hijinks to fill up pages and screentime. The rushed and truncated anime adaptations don’t do what little depth the novels may have had any favours.
This one still manages to be way worse than average, somehow. All the characters are annoying and one-dimensional. It looks awful. The plotting is a mess. The world-building makes no sense. And there’s an hilariously nonsensical bit where Kanata broods and monologues about his fallen comrades in arms being forgotten by the Normals, as only Wizards don’t suddenly get there memories erased or something (for whatever reason)… only for a further scene to reveal that there’s like 10% Normals and 90% Wizards in the flying city, so why the heck was he getting all worked up for ?
Even if this show didn’t take itself so seriously at times, it still wouldn’t be funny. It’s a trainwreck in motion, and I have no wish to stick around.
