Apr 7, 2019
Mahoutsukai no Yome has cool looking characters, interesting magical concepts, visually striking art and animation, good soundtracks. It's clear that this show has high quality production value, but that's about it. The main problems with this show are the story and the characters, which are really important as these are meat and bones of a show.
The story has huge potential being that the settings involved magical elements and how the MC starts off new and fresh from her old miserable past in a new place far from her old home accompanied by ancient creature who is a magus. On paper it sounds promising and definitely
...
opens up many possibilities. In execution though, it's kind of pale. Being slice of life, that justified for it not having "end goal", it's just that what they presented are not very engaging, entertaining, or even just funny. Majority of the time it's just trying to show serene moment, beautiful looking and "calming" scene with sprinkle of beautiful looking magic, which I don't mind if only they do it in moderation. The problem is that they do it almost all the time, which if your story is about slice of life in magical world, it's definitely a wasted potential. The magical aspect is just there to help the visual a lot of time instead of the story.
There are many times when they try to point out "this is funny scene" by making the characters looks cute and kinda derpy, but honestly I don't find that moment to be funny at all. Plus the fact that they are using technique that reminds me of laugh track in sitcom, kinda pissed me off.
The characters themselves are not helping either. The main characters are bland. The other supporting characters are not adding anything interesting either.
Chise and Elias(our mains), it's very clear that the show is trying to show us that their romantic feelings are developing slowly but surely, but honestly it feels forced. Sometimes there will be scene where at first you would think "Aw they're cute together", but honestly when you take a step back and remembered what happened before that, there's nothing that would suggest that is the natural progression from their experience being together. It's feels like they made to act like that so that it feels romantic. Plus thinking how Elias is supposed to be ignorant of human emotion, what he did most of the time definitely made you question that. There are moments of tension from Elias that looks really dramatic, but after not for long, he returned to normal like it never happened, which really took you out of the moment, especially when accompanied by nonchalant response from Chise after that.
Some of the supporting characters are definitely have more personality than those two, but most of them are just there. They exist to spoon fed the story to Chise a lot of time if not all the time, which means there's huge amount of exposition. The interaction between supporting characters and main characters most of the time are just limited to that, story exposition. Whenever something happened, they usually just running around or stand still doing nothing watching Chise doing something.
I really wanted to like this show, because it looks really promising. Too bad the story and the characters are not good. The only thing that this show has going for are the character design and high production value. If the production value is just average, I'll bet this show would receive less score than what it have right now.
I'll give it 5.2, wasted story potential and wasted high production value.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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