(12 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Adaptation of a light novel series where teenagers attend a school to improve their magical battle proficiency. Like every other light novel that gets adapted into anime, then.
Characters
Thor (*snigger*), our generic male protagonist who doesn’t even get to feature on the series’ main poster artwork. Unlike most everyone else here, his “soul weapon” is a shield, not a blade. Also, he’s very, very bland.
Imari, a girl he meets just before the entrance ceremony and with whom he’s got some actual chemistry. (Which might be partly due to reconstituting the main couple of VAs from SAO. Or maybe it’s just that Haruka Tomatsu can improve anything by her presence.) So of course the sadistic and impossibly young school headmistress announce that all the applicants must duel in pair, with only the winner getting to enter ; and Thor is thus forced to beat her and make her drop out. (Maybe she’s not entirely written out, but I’m not holding my breath.)
Julie, the nearly-mute moeblob he’s then paired with and has to room with. No real personality on display yet.
Some more supporting cast get a bit of screentime, but none of them are striking enough to deserve mentioning.
Production Values
Those are some very uninspired character designs, with the girls often wearing some fetishized clothing that doesn’t look like fabric, and high heels that seem wholly unsuited to the somersaulting around they do in the OP sequence. But at least there’s not too much fanservice.
Points off for the impenetrable pre-credits sequence, which seems to think that drowning the screen in bloody darkness looks good and dramatic.
Overall Impression
Is this a prank ? An attempt to ram every single light novel cliché into the one show ? And it takes itself dreadfully seriously, of course. This goes beyond mediocre and into laughably bad… Except I’m falling asleep instead of laughing. It’s just that boring.
Don’t bother with this one.
