Pop Quiz: What happens when you take a giant sturdy, steel block and throw rocks at it to try and move it?

It won't move right? The rocks will all crumble, right? And doing it repeatedly will get frustratingly boring, right? Well that experience would still be more thrilling than watching 26 episodes of The Irregular at Magic High School.

Based on the light novel series of the same name, and animated by Studio Madhouse, Irregular at Magic High School, also known as Mahouka is what happens when a writer completely gives up making an interesting story or cast and instead tries to make their main character, Tatsuya Shiba in the case, be on top of things in every situation imaginable. Since so many of Mahouka's problems exist because of this character, and his existence massively drags down any interesting elements the show might have going for it, let's talk about Tatsuya first.

Tatsuya AKA Onii Sama AKA Jesus kun mk 3 times infinity, is completely overpowered in every way possible. The show literally says that: "there's nobody can surpass you in either studies or martial arts" in the very first episode. But it gets worse.

He never loses any fight, never shows any signs of emotional weakness, can weaponize magic to be able to fly before anyone else, has a countermeasure for his opponents moves before they even attack, can take a sniper wound head on and heal instantly, can destroy a magic raven just by looking at it, invade people's psyche, can catch and dissolve multiple bullets shot directly at him, develop new technology for their society in secret/make flawless weapons for everyone at his school, has a radar to see where any person comes from, never misses with his weapon, takes down a terrorist organization from the inside singlehandedly, BRINGS PEOPLE BACK FROM THE DEAD, and most painfully, gets nearly every single one of the many girls in the series, including his sister, to never stop talking about him or even falling for him because of how "cool" he is.
The worst part, aside from a horrible plot point that comes in the last three episodes, is that the show's way of justifying all of this overpoweredness is by saying he does SLIGHTLY worse at moving a heavy block across the floor with his mind than anyone else. This "weakness" is only brought up in a vain attempt to convince the audience that God Almighty is not overpowered, and it's never mentioned past this or used as an obstacle in any fight he enters, including in the next season.

What Mahouka doesn't get is that intelligent audiences won't think a character who always wins is "cool". A character is admired for trying, and then eventually succeeding with more effort. Pixar's first rule of storytelling is "You admire a character for trying more than their successes", so in turn, a character who always succeeds gives you no reason to admire them or be invested in their growth. Some of anime's most beloved protagonists like Guts from Berserk, Simon from Gurren Lagann, Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist or Lelouch from Code Geass are ones who don't always succeed, and have to learn to overcome their physical and emotional flaws to grow as people. Nothing of the sort happens with Tatsuya, he starts at Square Infinity and his feats keep growing from there.

Now, having an overpowered protagonist doesn't immediately make a show terrible. A writer could use their overpowered character as a joke and build the show around their strength (One Punch Man), you could make your character fun to watch personality wise (Sora from No Game No Life or Alucard from Hellsing) or have an interesting side cast to make up for the overpowered protagonist. But they don't take advantage. Mahouka is solemnly serious the whole show, Tatsuya has a dull expression on his face at all times and never truly emotes, and as I'll get into later, other characters have less character than the rocks thrown at the steel block and are made obsolete in the story.

When it comes to the story itself, it's surprisingly pretty shallow. In 2095, a sizable portion of the human population has died off, but those remaining learned how to use magic as technology and made schools that have competitions with it. Trite. Enter Tatsuya and his sister Miyuki. Because Tatsuya failed that square inch block test I mentioned earlier, he's put in the lower of the school's two classes, and the early parts of the series are all about Tatsuya being seen as the underdog just for being in the lower class because of that BS test method. There's only one other major character in the lower class, and she's taken out of the plot far too quickly. Tatsuya is far stronger than anyone in their world, let alone the upper class, so it gets really annoying.

Other elements of the story include various terrorist attacks, and a high school competition, and while some ideas for the competitions are creative like Magic Bat and the Surf Races, they aren't fun story wise because Tatsuya's overpoweredness transfers to everyone on his team at "First High School". Wow. What creativity there in the naming. One of the dumbest scenes in the show (and that says a lot) involves one girl in First High School crying her eyes out for losing in the finals of an event, which might've worked if it was against another school, but it's against the girl's own teammate! She has no reason to cry because their school wins anyway!

One interesting thing the show does attempt to do is create its very own magic system with lots of types and intricacies, but they also fail because their system of blending magic with technology is incredibly confusing or it's only used to justify Tatsuya winning a fight through technobabble and info dumping. It's unimportant and important in the same story which never works. Something like RWBY, where the characters have two magic powers a piece and their own technology makes it much more clear and practical. Aura for defense, Semblance for a unique power. And this is even with all of the retcons from later seasons! Mahouka doesn't need such a complex and confusing magic system to make the fights interesting, and no matter how easy the system might've been, it doesn't matter because how strong Tatsuya and his team are compared to everyone else.

Nothing is interesting in the story beyond that. Even the various side character subplots brought to fill up the runtime mean nothing in terms of relevance or even development for most of them. How could you make a cool idea about military grade magic weapons into a cliche high school not-harem Jesus fantasy?! It's lazy, cheap, incredibly full of itself, frustrating and boring, and no amount of polished looking techno animation can save it.

Speaking of the animation, it's not bad, but really doesn't have much to work with. By Studio Madhouse, all of the character designs have a nice polish to them and unique faces with well inserted lips, and the character animation is fairly smooth and consistent. Even some of the technical explanations have very Tron-esque backgrounds that fit the style of the show well. But at the same time, it feels wasted on being given so little to work with. The backgrounds are, for the most part, very unoriginal and standard with little to distinguish them from other future city series, the choreography can occasionally be very flat (in one case literally being two characters walking at each other to shoot each other with guns really slowly), some character designs don't fit for their gender or feel unoriginal, and the flat directing leaves a lot of times where characters are positioned in rooms at very basic angles. Overall, the animation is good, but held back by the source material's lack of anything interesting to animate. Even Guilty Crown, bad as it was story wise, at least had some creative designs and ways to use their animation.

The sound is a similar story. Rising Hope is a solid OP, but it can't hold a candle to LiSA's other song Crossing Field. The first ED and second OP aren't very memorable, but the second ED is actually very nice. In the series, the OST mostly consists of techno and dubstep themes, which aren't really bad but very unmemorable. So overall an OK soundtrack, but what puts it at a 5 is the rather bland delivery from most of the voice actors, and Miyuki's constant need to say "Onii sama" over and over again in the dialogue. It gets rather annoying, even if that's more the fault of the script and her "character".

As as characters in Mahouka, everyone in this show is either bland, one note, or a missed opportunity. And there is 0.1% character development whatsoever in 26 episodes.

I've already talked enough about Tatsuya, but I'd like to add that making him emotionless only feels like a lazy decision to not have him react to anything and not to actually show subtle character change like Oreki Houtarou from Hyouka or Hachiman from Oregairu. Now to everyone else.

Miyuki Shiba- Tatsuya's sister. Not only the worst character in this anime, but one of the worst characters in any anime ever. And this is coming from someone who watched Mirai Nikki, Guilty Crown, Hand Shakers and Magical Girl Site. Her only character trait is incest. You heard that right, the ONLY character trait Miyuki has in 26 episodes is loving her brother, being clingy to him, and getting all rosy red cheeks every time he's nice to her. She even rolls around in her bed basically orgasming over him once. It's not even delved into. Even Sword Art Online did a better job handling an incest plot because we actually got to see Suguha's inner thoughts and how she learns to get over it. Here, it exists to be incest, and no other reason. She looks cute, loves her brother, and is the most pure, precious, literal special snowflake with her ice powers. Honestly she's a worse character than Tatsuya! Because at least with Tatsuya, we could understand why he acted the way he did, but with Miyuki we get nothing. The most memorable thing about her is her constantly saying "Onii-sama" over and over and over again nonstop. For being the second most important character in your show, this is absolutely pathetic.
Not-Suzaku- I'm serious, the show literally just stole his character design. Basically he's Tatsuya's rival as indicated by the OP. His first appearance had me curious about what type of character he would be as he stood in a room with blood all over the walls, and he had a weapon that kills people just like Kira in Jojo Part 4. I thought he would be some sort of Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon type character who'd encounter Tatsuya many times and be some sort of diabolical mastermind but NOPE! Mets Tatsuya a grand total of once, fails like a chump, and then he turns into the most generic Pokémon rival possible, with whom Tatsuya lets his sister dance with. You had an interesting idea and then you completely forgot about it. WHY?!!!! Erika Chiba- A tomboyish girl with a very teasing personality with a relationship to her brother and a mentor to another character. While by no means a good character, she's the ONLY character in Mahouka to have something resembling a personality and at points she was the most fun character to watch. That said, it's the difference between a two dimensional character with a cast of one dimensional characters, but an achievement for how little it may be.

Mibu Sayaka- I brought her up because she's the character who has that 0.1% of character development I mentioned earlier, by realizing that it wasn't right to turn against the High School for their class discrimination based on one test. She could've been a much better candidate for representing the underdog theme, but the show thought it was better to ignore her for the rest of the run save for one tiny moment later, and make Tatsuya the underdog in a laughably bad display. Just another missed opportunity by Mahouka...

No one else is even worth talking about. All of the other girls do is look cute, stick to an archetype and talk about how cool Tatsuya is. Heck, one girl terrorist literally tries to hack into the First High School system JUST to get Tatsuya to notice her. All the other guys do is make you wish any one of them was the protagonist instead of Tatsuya. The villains are absolutely pathetic, being nothing more than the most one dimensional terrorists and gang leaders and leaving NO impression.

In short, a horribly unmemorable and generic cast of characters, and those who are memorable aren't exactly well known for good reason.

After 26 episodes of watching Mahouka, the payoff was a sigh of relief that it was finally over, insight into how ignorant one anime could be and being able to add another series to my Completed list. So in conclusion,

+Overall smooth animation and polished character designs
+First OP and second ED (which aren't even because of the show itself)
+Cool Techno Sequences
+Some decent ideas for Magic Games
+Ends with a bang...courtesy of God Almighty
+Erika is passable but...

-Horrible main characters: Tatsuya is invulnerable emotionless god and Miyuki has less character than a rock
-Horribly generic and unmemorable side characters with absolutely no development
-Fails at the underdog theme so hard that it's laughable
-All important information is given through info dumps
-Villains are the most generic terrorists possible
-Fanservice so pointless you wonder why it exists
-Incest for no reason besides Incest.
-Animation has very little to work with
-Side character plots that literally exist just to fill time
-Manages to be boring and frustrating at the same time
-Stupidly overcomplicated Magic System
-Wastes every good idea it has
-Completely tensionless at every point

SCREW THIS SHOW.