Name: Boiler-plate, mediocre production with a painfully unfunny script
Item: Magical Destroyers
Rating: 29
Author: pink9320

Waifra

Boiler-plate, mediocre production with a painfully unfunny script · Waifora

Most of us came here because of the OP off of YouTube, I believe - tons of symbolism and imagery, some really nice colour aesthetics and a great song and vocal performance by Aimi behind it. Directed by Kenichi Kutsuna, key animator of Madoka Magica’s own OP and the influence of that series shows here. The second half of the opening’s very mixed types of art and photography layered on top of each other in chaotic and discordant fashion, combined with the noisecore-ish music promise for the anime to be a very forward-thinking and mind-opening experience. So does it live up to the excitement of this OP?

In my opinion, not in the slightest.

The real director of Magical Destroyers has had a number of minor directing roles, but notably directed episode 6 of FLCL Progressive and storyboarded episode 9 of Kill La Kill. These experiences and GAINAX/TRIGGER as a whole must’ve had a great impact on his ambition as a director, as the influence of both shows is on full display in Magical Destroyers; FLCL references such as the home run attack magical girl Anarchy uses (even sampling the same sfx from FLCL), the frequent heavy Gundam references, etc.
Most importantly, the show borrows its core idea from Kill La Kill. It takes an absurd dystopian premise and tries to take a mix of bold socio-philosophical commentary and plenty of comic relief out of it. The otaku are to be laughed at here as much as they are to be rooted for.

On a positive note, I like the character designs, Taiki Konno’s ED for this series might be even better than the OP and the rock-oriented soundtracks are generally pretty nice. Slayer is a good secondary antagonist, and there’s sometimes an admirable amount of detail put into the depiction of the otaku archetype in Japan. The last thing I’d like to praise is that the more surrealism-influenced sections of the series are pretty fun to watch, although unfortunately they are extremely few and far between.

So what’s the issue? Well, for starters Magical Destroyers isn’t funny. The character jokes overstay their welcome immediately, like Blue’s constant masochism which the series feels the need to completely stop the flow of a fight scene and even the music just to hear her say “But I like the pain!” or whatever. The satire is also very confused on whether it wants to be taken seriously or not, especially with the very obvious parallels to real life politics and historical atrocities throughout. It feels like we should be laughing at the absurd oppression of the otaku, but it’s just.. I don’t know, it feels both in poor taste and too grounded in reality to find novel enough to laugh at. Sometimes a character will even yell out a random reference like “NO HIT NO LIFE!” which doesn’t even make any sense.

Another major issue with this anime is the visuals. The keyframes always look really boring and lack expressive composition or such, and the colouration of the series is just really bog-standard and flat. The lighting is completely flat in the vast majority of scenes, which doesn’t help. Plus, the animation can range from relatively standard to really clunky and awkward during the worst moments of the anime, and the fight choreography is borderline nonexistent.

The characters meanwhile, are pretty much just cardboard cutout stereotypes and tropes that are spammed the heck out of without much thought or reason. There’s really just not much to talk about here without spoiling the plot, so I’ll keep it brief here.

So, that means it’s time to talk about the plot. This is going to be the spoiler section of the review - if you’re a new viewer this is pretty much the end of my tour guide. This next section will contain spoilers for up to and including episode 9.

Spoiler, click to view

The pace of the series is REALLY bad. Three episodes of relevant plot, tons of filler after and pretty much nothing interesting happens until episode 8. The secondary antagonist Slayer, who in general is one of my favourite parts of the series, is jangled in front of the viewer like car keys to a toddler until the very end of the series, all the while mediocre and forgettable minor antagonists are thrown out like shit at a wall that doesn’t stick. The episodes have little tonal consistency and no real intrigue outside of minor gimmicks. Take for example a series like Cowboy Bebop - plenty of single episode arcs, but they all worked because they developed on the cast in some way while also constantly keeping things fresh with new and interesting ideas along the way, i.e. the fun pseudo-horror of the fridge monster or the genuinely unsettling cyber-cult episode. In this the gimmicks are… pool episode, video game episode (don’t even get me started on how bad that was by the way), mountain climbing for some reason etc. In Bebop it all works not just because of the generally better quality of the series, but because the brief gimmicks are very specific to the setting of Bebop rather than the cliches of shonen anime in general. The only time the circumstances of MSMD are really used to its advantage are in the dream battle of episode 2, which is cool but unfortunately extremely underutilised despite the surreal motifs in the opening movie.

Then there’s the characters. I like Slayer as I just said, partly for her character design and the fact that for some reason her actions are always much better animated than everyone else - the rest is spoilers I won’t go into for now. The other character I like is Pink, but to be honest it’s because of her design and voice acting more than anything.
Otaku is kind of just a two-dimensional good guy. His big glaring character flaw is a defeatist mentality and lack of confidence which can occasionally make for interesting character conflict, particularly in episode 8. Buuuut in general he’s pretty boring besides that episode. Anarchy is an attempt at satirising a stereotypical tsundere.. by literally just writing a stereotypical tsundere. And Blue is fucking ANNOYING. I mentioned the S&M jokes earlier, and to be honest I can’t really recall her personality much at all outside of those and the fact she likes New Order (good band btw).

EDIT: This paragraph was written after the rest of the review, since I decided I needed to address this. Probably one of the most tedious things about the series is how it'll try to set the viewer up for a big emotional climax by using rapid-fire flashbacks and one-off arguments to create emotional conflict, rather than naturally developing tensions through smaller details like a better written series would. This is most apparent in episode 1, where Otaku rejoining the resistance (which already is an anti-climax considering we all knew there was no way he'd actually leave on episode 1) is played out like this huge emotional beat between him and Anarchy, when we've seen both characters for only a few minutes by this point in the series and all we really know about them is that Otaku is the protagonist and an otaku, and Anarchy is his tsundere magical girl sidekick. The flashbacks feel meaningless, this whole sequence of events feels like just a general waste of time and the series progresses as if this never happened anyway. None of the otakus acknowledge his abandonment of them, he doesn't face any consequences for his decision, there's really just no point to the events of this episode.

There was one major bright spot in the main portion of the series, and that is episode 8. This episode had by far the strongest mix of character drama, beautiful keyframes and colouration and unusually expressive shots for the series up to this point. It brought out new facets and conflict to the relationship between the girls and Otaku that had never been seen before (outside of a very weak attempt in episode 1) and unfortunately were not explored again later on, and all led into a really pretty acoustic musical number sung by Otaku. It’s a great moment in the series, and the episode in general is far more tastefully written and produced than anything else in Magical Destroyers.

This last section of the review will be about the final episodes and ending - if you don’t want to be spoiled on episodes 10 through 12, do NOT read this.

Spoiler, click to view

I liked episodes 10 and 11 a little more for a few reasons. The script idea is actually a really nice mindfuck by this point in the series even though they lean on it a little heavily - not to mention the rather hilarious parallel between the last few episodes and Mirai Nikki that this establishes and that only gets worse as the anime finishes. Slayer v Anarchy was admittedly a lot of fun, with the best animation and choreography of the series by far along with Slayer’s insane monologuing undertoning everything. Cheesy, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love this. The last thing I liked is that for once the war between the otaku and the military felt like it had real, genuine stakes and consequences. The series suffers from a constant tonal confusion about whether it wants to really be taken seriously or not, but in this case for a moment they finally tried and succeeded at making things exciting. That’s not to say I LOVE these episodes, they still look and feel dull visually and the jokes still don’t land (besides the idol and otaku dynamic).

About the ending, now. This is where the tonal inconsistency gets REALLY jarring; Shobon yelling out to the people that they’re NPCs as if that’s supposed to sound sinister or funny - failing at both - comparing to a very dark lighting and the very dramatic and intense musical passage accompanying the scene, it’s all just a mess. For some reason the flowing of the girls’ hair after transforming is done at a much higher framerate than is ever used in the anime, and it looks extremely stiff and uncomfortable like those awful AI-interpolated videos on TikTok and YouTube. The music also ends up contrasting the pop tune used when the people come together in support of the otaku, which just highlights the confused feeling of this episode so far.
The Kyotaro twist is fucking retarded. Nuff said.
Anyway, the sequence that follows of Otaku slowly getting the life beaten out of him is kind of a massive misfire. The music tries to capture this feeling of glory and excitement that really contrasts the hopelessness of his situation (imagine if they played that over the titan attack in AOT episode 5), although thankfully it cuts out as he gets blasted into the air for an admittedly pretty cool shot of him punching Shobon. The dialogue is REALLY bad here, hammering in the “let people enjoy things” theme while Otaku is literally being pierced apart in the most violent sequence in the whole anime really makes for a bizarre and dissatisfying viewing of this scene. His actual death has some very cringe-inducing Christ imagery that makes the previous dialogue look even worse, but besides that there’s a few decent ideas here - the brief scene where he says goodbye to the girls in his memory is surprisingly bittersweet, and the shot of blood dripping down Anarchy’s face in the place of a teardrop is pretty raw.
The second generation Otaku isn’t really a pleasant surprise - I get what they went for with passing down ideas across generations being a common political theme, but in this case it just feels kind of cheap to end on a cliffhanger for a 12 episode anime immediately after killing the protagonist off. Either we get a season 2 or this gets continued in the gacha, and I wouldn’t look forward to either if I’m honest.

Magical Destroyers is what happens when you try to cobble together a brilliant anime out of just a few cool ideas and extremely mundane production and writing in between. Most of the anime feels like it was made just for the sake of existing and as a vehicle for a few ideas the creators liked, and unfortunately that ends up conceiving a generally soulless and mundane experience for the viewer overall.