Kabushikigaisha Magi-Lumière
Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.

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This looks really promising. It's a new twist on the magical girls genre, being adapted for our modern world by mixing the story with the cruel side of corporatism and how that affects the magical girls industry. The art looks amazing, the characters and side characters look fun and engaging and the story isn't anything to write home about, but it's in its early stage, so only time will tell. In the 2 chapters that are officially translated in english at the moment, the magical girl transformations are stunning and easy to follow with the flow of the panels. For the moment, it's a solid ... magical girls series that new and old fans of the genre will enjoy.

I need animations of these transformations I beg of you.

The story of Magilumiere is honestly really great!
The premise is unique in how it treats the function of magical girls, adding technology for harnessing magic is something I haven't seen in any magical girl show or manga so far, often the genre relying heavily on the idea of Gods. I don't want to get too heavily into spoilers because it's never fun to have your review repressed - but overall it's a very good story, diving into the corruption of big business and money hungry politics and wrapping it all neat and tidy with a ... magical girl sparkle. I don't think I've grown bored once during any arc, which is quite hard for manga these days atleast, so it's a nice change of pace. The story is also a shounen I believe, though it breaks away from the emphasis on the stakes of the fight and put more emphasis on the stakes of the outcome. We know they're going to make it out, but we fear the consequences of the characters choices with and outwith their control.

'The art is fantastic, almost a My Hero Academia but with less lewding of their girls and way more charm. The transformation scenes definetly are some of the most interesting ones, especially when paired with the designs of the uniforms - which, to go off in a tangent, the concept of the magical girls all having unique themes based off of their ideals but only Magilumiere, the company to promote team work constantly, has an actual set uniform adds to much world building and nuance that I adore.

The characters are amazing, genuinely really thought out and even though you could see them as generic, they do actually have a nice amount of dimension to them. I can't wait to see how they've matured in recent chapters and future chapters to come!

A fascinating take on the magical girl genre. It not only reimagines the concept of feminine heroines using magic to defeat monsters into a modern setting with corporations and politics, but also transforms the privatised and personalised aspect of the genre - where the characters keep their heroic identities a secret - into corporate, public life. The art here is dynamic, and the character designs are eye-catching. And though the protagonist is not a big step away from the modern Shonen protagonist, who obsesses over justice and morality, her interactions with the strange and quirky main characters along with her experiences of working in a ... corporate job shine through. You can clearly tell that the mangaka has gone through some corporate jobs before.

Yet one issue narratively here is that despite being a Shonen manga that depends on incorporating dynamic fight scenes into the story, there is very little sense of conflict and threat each time the characters embark on a fight. There seem to be too few stakes in the action scenes with characters consistently and constantly making out of conflicts. Though they learn new things about themselves that nicely advances character development, they never seem to experience the agony of having their life threatened. This can really diminish the urgency of action scenes, making them feel more like showcases of characters and their personalities than tense and exciting situations. However, though in this aspect, the manga may struggle, what makes up much of the manga's interesting aspects is its setting and the societal issues that it attempts to shine a light on.

I want to touch on the setting as this is a really interesting spin. It adds original and interesting world-building that keeps readers intrigued. But this take very boldly has a social and political dimension as well. By having a corporate world as the backdrop, and setting the main characters up in a start-up company while having an antagonistic figure in a huge corporation CEO and discussing issues pertaining to deregulation, the manga touches on real-world issues like the social effects of capitalism, corporation dominance, and the treatment of workers and their work. Yet, despite this bold step, the story here seems to be adopting a rather simplistic perspective of this whole system. It depicts start-ups that shake up the status quo as a moral good and a good for workers, and big corporations with their desire for capital as bad and tone deaf to the sufferings of the common people. This is quite a simplistic and exaggerated rendering of things, for instance, it does not fully take into account the wide effects of this economic and political system, not fully rendering the effect of treating people as expendable, depicting them more as one-offs and focusing on the main characters and their desirable working conditions under a fictional start-up. In the face of this simplistic ideology, the story can seem extremely naive which makes it hard to take the very real issues that the story is trying to grapple with seriously.

Overall, Kabushikigashia Magi-Lumiere is a fascinating manga with a great setting that touches on very pertinent topics. In terms of craft, the manga is nicely illustrated, has great flow and was a pleasure to read. Yet, its rather simplistic take on its setting and story, as well as its rather flat action arcs can make the read a little hard to be fully invested in.