Magical Girl Raising Project Episode 3 Review

Warning: Review contains spoilers!

This installment of Magical Girl Raising Project focuses much more on Ruler and her gang of five magical girls. She bosses people around but also might be the true tsundere of the bunch, not Ripple. Two of her underlings are particularly jealous of Snow White and how she’s so far ahead of everyone else.

Ruler and Swim Swim.

Fav, the evil mascot who just don’t care.

The girls also find out what happens one of them loses for that week, and the rules are changing: the girls can transfer Magical Candies amongst themselves, even when their devices are off.

So far, this anime has been quite passive. Much of the action happens off-screen, and we don’t really get to see much of anything except the girls’ conversations or reactions to things. We hear about Snow White’s record-breaking amounts of magical candies and how she’s helped so many people, but mostly see her sitting atop a building with La Pucelle. We hear about how all of the girls have these special powers, but they don’t usually live up to their promise: for instance, this episode featured flying around on brooms for a bit (as has been the case every episode), and hole digging. And we didn’t even really get to see them dig the hole!

Here they are again, sitting after a successful day.

Anything can be viral on social media nowadays.

I’m not sure if it’s because of budget constraints, but this lack of action in a magical girl series that’s supposed to be about magical girls duking it out and dying, in addition to the anime’s overemphasis on eye candy and cuteness, sorely depreciate the sense of urgency and dread that the anime is trying to build. An example that combines both is the big reveal from this episode, when Sister Nana and Winterprison disclose that magical girls die when they lose their powers. This scene 1) was completely in chibi—and not only that, but a chibi environment with bright, happy colors, and 2) they didn’t experience a shocking moment themselves, but rather were digging through backlogs and just happened upon a recording of one of the other girls chatting pretty casually with Fav. It was like watching another person relate a secondhand account of something they’d heard from someone else who’d heard it secondhand. The scene was jarring, to be sure, but not because the happy environment wonderfully juxtaposed the super dark facts they were unveiling, and not because this anime deviated from those stereotypical shows where everyone chances upon a body and gasps. I wasn’t quite sure how to feel, given that I knew that I was supposed to feel alarmed but wasn’t feeling alarmed at all.

Sweet and soothing. By the way, it’s totally not.

Be worried about the foul truth.

I’m just a little disappointed, since this anime seems to have a case of promising storyline, poor execution. Every episode, I am excited about the big reveal, but every time the reveal comes, I’ve just felt bored, or the anime just passes by it too slowly or too quickly. For instance, what was the point of revealing the consequences of losing the weekly magical girl competition to a few girls if a few minutes later everyone would find out anyway? Why did I get excited over a promotional video featuring the two angel magical girls when I just saw it for three seconds? (And how in the world was that even allowed?)  What’s the deal with the robo-magical girl?

Robo-magical Western? Sounds promising!

Some action with La Pucelle.

The upside is that because we don’t really watch the girls do much of anything most of the time, the anime does become much more interesting when something happens. The best parts of the anime happen when someone was much more actively doing something. I liked Nemurin because of her dream-dinosaur-busting powers. I liked the end of this episode because the girls looked like they were actually about to do something about numero uno Snow White, and not just complain about her.

Magical girls aren’t what they seemed.

I’m not sure if the gender bender has a point at this point in time.

Speaking of Snow White, she’s probably the best part of the anime. She acts the most human out of everyone—the object of many of the others’ jealousy, number one because she’s kind and absolutely adores her job. Instead of being defined by a few personality quirks like many of the others, she’s characterized by her dreams—notions of noble, pure magical girls and what they do for the world that are being crushed more and more as the anime progresses. It confers a more relatable and psychological element to the anime that nicely contrasts the lack of genuineness it has otherwise. I honestly believe she’s the main reason I’m continuing to watch, despite my misgivings about it as a whole.

It does look like things are getting exciting, though, and I hope they actually do next episode.