(12ish episodes)
What’s it about ?
Wow, that’s probably the most generic title you could give to a light novel series, and I’m surprised nobody used it before 2011. But hey, it’s quite accurate to both the premise and the genericness of its execution.
Characters
Takeshi, our generic high school male protagonist, was leading a perfectly ordinary (and generic) life. The one wrinkle on his genericness was that he already had an actual girlfriend, which is quite rare for this type of thing. (Actually, there seems to be something quite unsettling going on at his house. Were the writers seriously implying his mother was having sex with that boy who could be his brother, or am I just completely misinterpreting it ? It’s hard to tell when none of them are talking to each other and the whole scene lasts for less than a minute.) Anyway, his life is completely wrecked when he meets…
Mui, a teenage magician on the run. Of course mere minutes later she faints in a way that leads to an accidental kiss, and of course she starts getting violent when she notices. The big idea here, though, is that he gets magic powers because he’s been splashed by her magical gun’s discharge. Curiously, his new powers are completely unrelated by what he’s been hit with ; he now has “evasion” powers, which are actually the best kind right now (for reasons I’m about to explain).
Tsuganashi is her brother (or so she claims), who has apparently been brainwashed by whoever the bad guys are. She was looking for him, but she’s now hunted by him and his posse, and Takeshi gets caught in the crossfire. Let me point out that this posse are very, very stupid : two out of three of them lose their magic powers due to their sheer incompetence, as that’s what happens when you use magic to directly attack a magician in the mundane world. The third one happens to also have evasion powers, which are kosher to use (and work great in combination with conventional weapons).
Isoshima, Takeshi’s girlfriend, also accidentally gets splashed into becoming a magician. She gets shapeshifting powers, the immediate effect of which is for her breasts to grow to an uncomfortable size. /facepalm. Takeshi’s best friend Ida also got splashed, so Mui decides the best way to “protect” them is to bring them to the magic school in the magic world. (Hopefully Ida will be able to learn how not be on fire all the time.)
Production Values
Decent enough. Sometimes it manages to build some atmosphere, but then we’re back to utter blandness. Great credits sequence at the end, though.
Overall Impression
Urgh. There are glimmers of vaguely interesting ideas here, but they swim in such a sea of stupidity that it’s hard to get invested in this. The plotting verges on the nonsensical, with “shocking” twists that make everyone involved look terminally dumb. Not that the characters are particularly compelling, anyway. And frankly, it’s not like the promise of shifting the setting to a magic school inspires me much confidence.
No way I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to this.
