Due to the nature of the series in question this review contains mention of extreme violence, torture, and sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.

This review contains embedded images that are NSFW

I have seen a fair amount of anime in my 25 years of life. I say in all sincerity, that Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asuka may be the worst I've ever actually finished.

There’s another universe out there where Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asuka is a more well-considered, and consequently much better, show. Asuka is ostensibly a magical girl series, but it has much more in common with dark action seinen like Gleipnir or Murcielago than it does anything genuinely tied to the mahou shoujo genre. I’ve seen it argued that Madoka Magica casts a shadow over the series, but that is true to only a very limited extent. Instead, like many other seinen, Asuka tries to explore the depths of the human psyche while also being a gory action series. This is a very difficult tightrope walk to pull off at the absolute best of times. Most action seinen that succeed at this do so by being very mindful of what they show and how. Many simply don’t even try. Murcielago for example throws any attempt at societal commentary to the wind. Simply allowing itself to be the splatterhouse fantasy that anyone reading it would be doing so to experience anyway.

Asuka is not smart enough to do either of these things. It’s not entirely fair to say that it fails as a magical girl story because it doesn’t really try to be one. Nonetheless, it’s worth picking apart why it doesn’t try to.

The show’s core problems on this front can be distilled down to a single exchange in the 8th episode. One character is offered by an agent of the terroristic Babel Brigade to become one of their rogue mahou shoujo. She asks if he wants her “to fight, and kill people” To which he, instead of supplying a real answer, replies “That’s what magical girls do, right?”. Without the context of the series around it, it would be easy to take this as an in-universe question and response. One built on the discussed entities as they exist within the world of the show. However, from the Doylist (out-of-universe) perspective, with the show that contains it, it’s really hard to not read this as the author’s actual feelings on magical girl stories in general.

There is only one obvious, not-evidently-hostile nod to any other magical girl series in the show. That being a parody of the informative segments from Cardcaptor Sakura. Even this it’s possible to take as pugnacious if you’re feeling uncharitable enough. And do trust me, by the end of the series, you will not be feeling charitable. The prevailing feeling is of a magical girl series by way of Mark Millar. Asuka wears the skin of the mahou shoujo genre, but feels like it was written by someone who hates it.

Yet, what’s most frustrating about Asuka is that when it comes up with what seems on the surface like a good idea, it completely squanders it. Let’s take the already-mentioned 8th episode as an example. The story of antagonist Whiplash Chisato is to be very charitable, deeply problematic. But the core idea of a disabled magical girl who overcomes her physical disability to still fight could be a compelling one. Even if that character is (as Chisato is) a villain. Sadly, you’re not going to find it explored with any depth, thought, or nuance here. Chisato is ultimately just another curvy body stuck in a revealing outfit. Her disability (the loss of a leg) is just an excuse to give her a shiny robot limb. Which in of itself, might still be excusable, even interesting, if given a more compelling and respectful framework. But the show has no interest in that, so the character--like so many others--is completely wasted.

Her character arc (such as it is), instead goes as follows. She is nearly beat to death at the hands of an abusive father after he fails to secure her a job in a whorehouse. Her father is killed by a hulking robot-man who, like many characters in the show, seems to be “inspired” in design by another (here: Al from Fullmetal Alchemist). He offers to make her a magical girl. She accepts, gaining the aforementioned shiny robot leg in the process. Some indeterminate amount of time later, she is Good At Fighting now. They walk together on the beach, it’s implied she’s fallen for the robot-man. We get both of their sad backstories. Hers is that she lost her leg and her mother after a car crash caused by a drunk driver. His is that he’s a child soldier from Somalia who was forced to join up with a group of armed guerillas after they slaughtered most of his town and forced him to murder his parents and rape his sister. He reveals that he’s kidnapped the people responsible for her mother’s death. He makes her kill them. She does so, and vomits as she does. Extra fun: several episodes later it’s revealed that all of this was orchestrated by the evil organization she joins. Then, in the finale, Kurumi tortures her again.

She ends up getting a “happy ending” that consists of having a collar filled with chemicals shackled to her neck, and is forcibly recruited into the protagonists’ magical girl organization. She’s also hired as a maid by the maid cafe` that serves as a front for said organization.

Does that seem right to you? This is emblematic of Asuka’s core issue. There is a whole lot of sadness, death, despair, and downright bizarreness crammed into its characters’ backstories and the runtime of the show itself. However, and this is crucial, absolutely none of it is ever leveraged to any productive end from a storytelling or thematic perspective. This issue repeats itself in ways big and small over the course of the series’ run. For instance, this character second from the left, introduced briefly in a flashback?

Exists solely to be killed a few realtime minutes later, in another flashback. She is dissolved into a skeleton by some kind of goop monster.

The show is, for a solid 80% of its runtime, sheer misery porn, and not much else.

What’s more troubling is the thematic underpinning this all makes apparent. The gist of Asuka’s politics--when it can be coherent enough to have them--seems to be that the only kind of justice is a swift death to the “evil” people of the world. And Asuka really seems to have a funny idea of “evil”.

The series tries to frame Asuka’s core struggle--the world needs her to defend it, but she doesn’t want to do that, being sick of fighting--as a classic heroic narrative, but there’s a key failure of understanding here. When at one point grilled by a villain about why she’s doing this, Asuka responds, as the camera flashes to mental images of two of her friends, that even if magical girls aren’t miraculous heroes who can save everyone, that there are still some things that are worth fighting for. That’s not a bad moral on its own, fighting for those close to you is a classic shonen trope.

The issue is that the world that the series presents is so unrelentingly bleak that it doesn’t make that desire actually feel particularly heroic. Even after the show tries to sell us on the idea of Asuka having embraced becoming a magical girl again, it still feels like she’s being forced to do something that she really doesn’t want to. Which is itself not even a problem, inherently, but the show’s repeated failure to sell any of this just makes the whole thing feel miserable and pointless. The show’s attempt at a happy ending is roughly this:

There are a plethora of other writing problems, but many of these almost seem slight by comparison. It’s not a great sign when the fact that the main antagonists disappear for the show’s entire middle third, and only reappear in the finale to screw onscreen for about 15 seconds, seems like a minor gripe.

You might argue--not without reason--that Asuka isn’t a magical girl show and shouldn’t be judged by the moral standards of one. That’s true! Asuka is an action series and a war drama. Yet, it doesn’t really succeed at being either of these things either.

As an action show Asuka’s failings are readily apparent on the production side. Whether LIDEN FILMS simply could not devote the staff to the project or there was some other factor, the animation is often dumpy at best. Even when characters are simply standing around doing nothing, there’s a kind of slapdash-ness to the shots. When they are doing something, Asuka often chooses to not actually animate what would be its most action-packed moments. So while you do get the occasional nice cut of Asuka say, jumping onto a car, or something like that, the animation is on the whole incredibly lacking. Being mostly reduced to a series of slideshows by honestly sort of pathetic attempts to draw “dramatic” splash screens.

This finally begins to rectify itself as the show nears its conclusion (chiefly in the second to last episode, as the third-to-last and before are often downright ugly). Here, the newly revitalized choreography and the occasional cool shot provide some reprieve from the show’s mountain of writing problems.

Suffice it to say though that by this point it’s kind of too little, too late.

As a war drama, well, we’ve already gone over the show’s complete failure to build a compelling narrative arc. Large chunks of the series are intercut with incredibly dull scenes of military officials strategizing or bargaining with other governmental types. None of this adds anything to the series, and were it cut, Asuka would be marginally more tolerable. Though it says a lot that this isn’t actually one of the major problems the show has.

At the end of the day. It is difficult to imagine much of anyone getting anything out of Asuka. If you want a dark action series you have dozens of better options. Including its contemporary Dororo. If it needs to be seinen specifically, both Goblin Slayer and Magical Girl Site last year, and No Guns Life and Gleipnir getting adaptations later this year, point to a burgeoning trend of seinen manga getting anime. It’s not like there’s a dearth of options.

If you really insist on a dark action series that has magical girls, I find it difficult to believe that you could conceivably pick something worse from the crop that exists. Even long-forgotten early aughts webnovel curio Sailor Nothing would be a better choice, simply for weirdness’ sake.

The sad part is, as someone who’s reasonably familiar with the seinen action genre, none of these problems are actually unique to Asuka, though it is certainly clumsier about them than most. With adaptations of No Guns Life and the particularly noxious Gleipnir on the horizon, I do wonder just how many shows like this we’re in for. My hope is that Asuka is the low point of the trend. In this genre, the line that separates fun shlock (Murcielago, The Violence Action) from the tediously, genuinely awful (Gleipnir, and of course, this) is a thin one. Asuka isn’t completely devoid of merit of course--the soundtrack is great, even if completely out of place, and it’s reasonably fun to riff on the more tolerable parts with friends, but you could almost certainly do better, whatever you’re looking for.