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Ever since I finished Soul Eater I've been conflicted on how I feel about the show in its totality. This was a show that I really enjoyed watching; the art work was unique, the musical openings were great, the characters were dynamic, and the story always made me hunger for more.

After taking some time to ponder on the entirety of the anime and really reflect upon the various elements of the show, I discovered that it was missing some instrumental components that can make a show transcend to greatness.

I normally don't analyze the art and music in a show but I think those were ... both key features in Soul Eater. My typical belief is that a show can be great with bad art and music or vice versa so they aren't components that require in depth analysis on a regular basis. Obviously these elements can enhance a show to such an extent that it becomes more memorable or remarkable upon viewing in some circumstances.

The art style in this show is unique. At first I was a bit fazed by the strange art style with the mix of typical animation and CGI but as I continued to watch I found myself enthralled by the styling. The combat scenes were crisp and the characters were designed in such a way as to not just make them unforgettable but to visually highlight their individual personalities and quirks.

Now, while I didn't overly enjoy the first OST Resonance, I would be remiss in not saying that I was well aware of the song Papermoon before I ever watched Soul Eater. Despite its grammatically awkward mix of English with the Japanese lyrics, this opening song is one of my favorites. While I'm prone to skip the OP for most shows, there was never a chance that I would miss Papermoon which remains one of my favorite anime OPs.

My reflections upon the show led me to the conclusion that what prevented Soul Eater from retaining the initial captivation that I had for it was the story. Upon watching Soul Eater, you should be immediately reminded of another eerily similar and popular Shounen, Bleach. The show's premise is presented in a very analogous manner where the heroes fight against those with corrupted souls using specialized weapons, who also happen to be humans, under the guidance of Lord Death, aka the Grim Reaper. Unlike Bleach, the production team decided not to insert several seasons of filler material interspersed throughout the main story in a nonsensical way.

The story starts out in a fascinating way in that meisters with their human partners that have the ability to transform into weapons must collect 99 corrupted souls and afterwards a witch's soul to transform the weapon into a Death Scythe capable of being used by Lord Death. This concept could have made for a really intriguing story but it never leads anywhere and is quickly forgotten when more serious issues crop up.

There are also numerous questions that arise throughout the anime that are never really resolved during the story. The main question that I had, which I feared I had missed the answer to at some point, was what are meisters and weapons? Apparently this question is never answered during the show (there is more expository in Soul Eater Not but I don't recommend watching that).

In the end the story suffers from several major flaws. The show doesn't cover the entire Manga which means that unresolved issues might be answered at a later time but not within the period covered in the anime. Second, as a Shounen, it's going to focus on particular generic elements geared towards its demographic audience meaning that if you expected Full Metal Alchemist, you might want to look elsewhere. The story is going to cover the typical trials and tribulations of young heroes fighting enemies and overcoming obstacles despite the odds.

There are certainly some strengths to the story as it reminds us that everyone is vulnerable to evil, darkness, and madness. That good people can commit crimes but still redeem themselves. But the greatest strength of the story is in fact providing a path for the growth of the characters.

At the end of the day, the strongest aspect of Soul Eater is in fact the characters. The main characters of Maka and her weapon Soul, Black☆Star and his weapon Tsubaki, and Death the Kid and his dual weapons Liz and Patty are all uniquely amazing. It's rare to find shows in which the characters clearly progress throughout the story but this show provided us that rare glimpse in which we saw all the main characters progress from beginning to end. I found that my favorite character by far was Maka (no, I did not find her voice annoying. Apparently, I didn't watch the version that turned her into Asta). While I didn't necessarily appreciate some of her violent tsundere habits, her growth from a perfectionist and model student trying to live up to her mother's reputation to becoming a team player willing to sacrifice herself for her partner was beautiful. The relationship between her and Soul was exceptionally dynamic. Introduced to us as the model student and the cool punk who constantly argued and fought, we saw them grow into a formidable force as they came to truly trust and care for one another where the meaning of soul resonance became clear. I admittedly didn't like Black☆Star for a lot of the anime as he was basically another cocky Naruto, the interactions with his polar opposite in Tsubaki is what made him so unique. While he was loud, determined, and arrogant, Tsubaki was anything but. To see them truly bond and blend was great. I also didn't like Kid at the beginning as his OCD with symmetry drove me crazy but as we saw him change from the dutiful son who had abilities beyond all others to the suspicious detective who thought that his father may have been corrupted to discovering that despite his own suspicions, his father had no evil designs and deeply loved him was remarkable.

Even outside the main characters, there were several very well developed side characters. Frankenstein whose grip on sanity was a constant throughout the show as his thoughts constantly weighed on his consciousness as he attempted to balance his inner desires with what was right; Medusa who in one instance could go from the kind and caring mother-like figure to contorting her face as she blithely reveled in her wickedness; and Chrona who never could find out who he was or where he fit in. Even Excalibur whose scenes were likely filler provided significant entertainment and laughter as he regaled our heroes in nonsense. Fool!

I will say one more thing about Soul Eater...the ending was one of the worst I have ever seen and I think that's what caused my initial confliction. I won't spoil it but the ending breaks all the themes pushed throughout the show to prove that any story or plot can be overcome with a studio's direction.

Nonetheless, Soul Eater is a good show with great art, music, and awesome characters but would have been even better with an improved story.

I'll attempt to do my best to not reveal any spoilers but that may be difficult in a review where it's really critical to analyze a confusing story that contained an inordinate number of characters.

I'll preface this by saying that I still consider myself a relative novice in the anime community as I've really only been watching anime outside of the mainstream for the past year or so. That being said, I think I probably have seen enough to accurately judge basic elements of a show at this point. Anyway, like most shows I see these days, I didn't know much about this show ... beyond the generic description provided by Netflix that this was a show about a magical high school. While this topic isn't necessarily unique at this point, it stilled piqued my interest and I don't mind school drama or magic shows.

As depicted in the prologue of this show, the premise was that in the 21st century, the population of Earth was ravaged by war due to an inadequate and depleting supply of natural resources. This Third World War was ended and the planet saved by magicians but the population dropped to 3 billion and the world was left to recover from the remnants.

Problems have already crept up as early as this simple expository setting. During this story, we are told that nuclear weapons are never used. While I know that's not a serious issue and I can suspend my belief for something like this but this show constantly fails to provide basic background information. In fact Mahouka did a very poor job at world building and even after seeing the entire anime, I really don't understand this futuristic Earth. Some necessary elements that are critical for the viewer at this point might be the basic structure of the world order, where did the magicians even come from, and how does this system of magic even work? For a show whose foundation is built on a society of magic, I never fully grasped the magical system or the role of magicians within society. Now there are many shows that will present a simplistic view of magic that don't quite require any complex explanation of how things exactly work like Fairy Tail or such. We're presented with the fact that magic exists throughout the world and individuals can learn to master and specialize in it. Mahouka does go into detail when describing how spells work but since as a viewer I never was given a rudimentary and understandable explanation of how the magic system works, there is no way I can comprehend a discussion over the course of a few minutes on the intricacies of the theories behind a particular spell. For instance, in one scene, a spell is described as the user generating three magical areas in the shape of three dimensional squares with each square being within each other and each vertex containing another magical circle with a six meter diameter or radius) which can be detonated by the user pulling the trigger on a CAD. It's pointless to have so many technical discussions like so filled with obscure jargon that is nonsensical to the viewer. I typically don't watch shows expecting to be bombarded with incomprehensible scientific facts that might be seen in high level physics courses.

Enough of that, so after the prologue I assumed that this show was likely going to be about newly developed high school academies devoted to magic preparing their students for a world that was basically in a magical arms race. Apparently I was wrong. I can't really tell you what this show was about. Mahouka seemed to want to have every possible element in it to the point where the story was largely incoherent. The story was broken into three arcs that were fairly distinct from each other but seemed to bounce from themes of discrimination, manipulation, terrorism, athletic competition, theoretical magic, love, etc. etc. This was a mix of James Bond goes to Hogwarts where he reveals himself to be Superman who has discovered all the Dragon Balls to start a harem where he competes in the Tri-Wizard Competition and wins the Nobel prize for science and then wins the heart of his imouto...wait...he probably won the heart of his sister before the show started. ONII-SAMA!

The first arc focused on the fact that the high school had a discriminatory practice in place in which students who scored highly on their exams were put on the Course 1 track and called Blooms and those who didn't score as high were put on the Course 2 track and called Weeds. This system of discrimination made absolutely no sense because this high school was apparently the most prestigious high school in all of Japan and only seemed to accept the best students. Also the discrimination seemed to be something that was largely instituted by the students themselves so I'm not sure how this system became institutionalized if it wasn't done by the administration. Also, the majority of characters we are introduced to are either very sympathetic to Course 2 students (like everyone on the Student Council, what a coincidence) or Course 2 students themselves. Even though you think the first arc is going to focus and resolve this issue, it doesn't really. Instead they have a polite discussion about how discrimination is bad but Course 2 students are in fact just lazy moochers who don't really deserve better treatment anyway...also they should give up magic if they can't cut it. There are other issues that do get resolved that are a bit bizarre in and of themselves but I've rambled for long enough.

I guess I won't go any further with the story except to state one last point and that is that I never understood what the antagonists' motives were during this entire show. They were largely just there for plot purposes.

On to the characters and there were so many of them. At times I thought I was watching one of the later seasons of Durarara except this time not only could I not recall what everyone's name was, half the characters looked so similar I had an incredibly difficult time telling them apart. Besides so many characters looking similar (there were a number of males with short mouse brown hair and then a number of females with mouse brown hair who I could not differentiate between for large portions of the show), many characters had extremely similar names. Now as a native English speaker, I already have difficulties remembering Japanese names especially considering the Japanese cultural usage of primarily using one's surname instead of first name. Anyway, as for similar names, there was a Miyuki, a Mayumi, a Masaki, a Mizuki, a Mitsui, and a Mibu. At least they referred to one character as George, I could remember that one. Anyway, even after 26 episodes, Mahouka rarely spent any time actually developing the characters. I never learned much about the backgrounds of any of the characters nor do many of them have much of a personality beyond a stereotype or caricature meant for the plot. Characters are critical for any good story but the characters in Mahouka are just quantity with absolutely no quality. I don't know anyone's underlying motivations, some of the characters' actions make no sense at all, and because of this I can't emotionally connect with anyone on any level in this show.

I will go over the two main and most controversial characters in this show, the siblings Tatsuya and Miyuki Shiba. Now Tatsuya is a very typical overpowered character...maybe not typical in that he is perfect in everything and that's not true most of the time. Ironically, you usually only see one overpowered character but Miyuki is also overpowered. Tatsuya starts high school as a Course 2 student but we quickly learn that he is probably the most gifted magician in the entire world. The reason we're given for him being put in a lower tiered track in high school is that he apparently can't use "practical" magic at a great level which was part of the high school exam. Even though, he just happens to be a genius who not only can read spells as they are casted, he can invent new magical weaponry and devices, prove magical theories, disable spells, visualize through sensory magic his surroundings and individuals, make people combust, disable weapons, cast some of the highest level spells, not die, bring others back to life, program CADs, and have all the girls fall in love with him while being oblivious. He's also pretty emotionless throughout the show which is never really explained. Miyuki, on the other hand, has great capacity for normal magic and can cast some of the most devastating spells in the show but she doesn't quite have the sheer invincibility of her brother. She does have this strange, unexplained, romantic, and incestuous love for her brother which is also never explained. She even incapacitates Tatsuya at one point because he doesn't acknowledge her as a woman when she is half naked. Beyond that she often freezes the surrounding environment and loses control of her magic when she thinks Tatsuya is getting too close to other women, she nearly kisses him in one scene and then runs to her room and cries when she got caught, she rolls around half naked in her bed blushing after Tatsuya wipes her tears away, and she blushes every time Tatsuya says nice things to her. Just a normal brother and sister relationship. Miyuki went from being weird to annoying to creepy to being yandere for me. I did not like either of the main characters. If a character is going to be invincible then you need to play off that. You could go the One Punch Man route and make it a comedic parody or you could make the show about overcoming obstacles outside of sheer strength. These characters are just too perfect and while people want themselves to be perfect, watching perfection is boring.

Mahouka apparently did not fully cover the light novels and I'm not sure if there are any plans for further seasons, though I'm not sure if it would be worth it to watch Tatsuya walk through another 26 episodes unchallenged. It seems the light novels do provide some explanations past where the anime has ended but I still can't comprehend the light novels resolving all the various flaws in this story. Character development needs to come earlier and can't wait until volume 8 or so for critical background. Also no story can sustain this many characters with absolutely no development. But I can't imagine that the main characters could possibly be any better in the light novels. Tatsuya is presented as invincible. I doubt that was necessarily the animation studio's choice so I assume that comes from the light novels. Also the story is from the light novels so if the plot was nonsensical in the show, it's probably not any better there.

I won't judge anyone who enjoyed this show or disagrees with my opinion. The ability to enjoy anything is always an incredible thing and anyone who enjoys something (as long as it's not sick and twisted or hurtful to others) has the right to it. Everyone also has the right to their own opinions because we all have different tastes. I'm sure many people hate my favorite shows but that's life for ya.