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Note: There are some minor spoilers in here
This anime fails in a kind of peculiar way. It’s less that it does things badly, and more like it doesn’t do what it sets itself up to do. In a way, it’s like K-on! promising to be about music, yet playing out like a cute girls doing cute things show where they mostly just casually have fun and eat cookies and drink tea. This series starts with the premise of a young witch trying to prevent her incoming death in a year, yet most of the show is not about that.
On an emotional and thematic level, this premise is used for the protagonist to go out and help people so she can gather those tears of joy she seeks to create that seed of life she needs to prevent her death. So she does good deeds for those around her and seemingly takes a proactive role in both not giving up and fighting for prolonging her life with a positive attitude, and learning the importance of emotions and value them for that they mean for the people that feels them, and not see them as a commodity and just a mean to live longer. This way she comes to realize how important every person is and how much she loves her town and its inhabitants. So if you just stick to those messages and feelings and the wholesome episodic stories, you might be pleased, have a good time, and consider this a good show.
However, if you look at it from a critical standpoint, the series is really messy, starting off with the premise being mostly abandoned throughout the show. There are several things happening in the setting, most of which with the protagonist taking some part in them, that go beyond what she needs to do. That makes the world feel expanded and not just centered around her on one hand, but also diminishes her goal, makes it seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and since both the anime and main character focus more on those other plot points, the supposed main one gets completely sidelined. The main girl collects two to four tears in the early episodes, gets around forty somewhere in the middle, and by the end of the season she has collected a lot of them off screen.
It’s not that it’s not understandable that some content would be skipped, there was no way that we would see the one thousand tears being collected, in the same way that not every fragment of the Shikon no Tama was collected on screen in InuYasha, that would probably require a huge amount of episodes that’s no longer the norm in the medium, and would likely get repetitive and boring fast. But over there that was still the main plot, while here it gets almost completely abandoned.
We see the protagonist stuck in the same city with the same people, and promising things to them for the future, thus adding an extra motivation to keep on living, yet mostly not collecting the tears, then when she occasionally goes to other places in the setting, she takes part of events that are completely unrelated to her goal. The finale sets her up for a mission around the world, thus promising to expand the setting even more in a possible sequel, yet that also means more stuff for her to do other than collecting those tears.
This is as easily fixable as simply not setting up a premise that you will otherwise not focus on, why not just simply have the protagonist help people and go on missions as part of her training as a witch? Ok that way there wouldn’t be a sense of urgency, but it’s not like there’s any real sense of urgency to begin with. The main character doesn’t take her goal very seriously, doesn’t seem that preoccupied for most of the episodes, and the tone in general is initially very light, with the characters joking a lot, and the protagonist quickly responding the most absurd and often perverted things, hitting on about a third of the female roster of the show. To make a comparison, Mahoutsukai no Yome also focus a lot on the stories of the side characters, thus exploring the setting and its magical creatures more, but that always is tied with the training of its main character, which is supposed to be the plot, while over here that’s not the case.
Ok so we established that the main plot is not the focus of the show, does the series make it up with quality side stories then? Well, if you just accept what happens and get emotional with them, then you’d be pleased. If on the other hand you think about how quickly the episodic stories and characters come on go and how sometimes we know nothing about them besides their specific drama for that one episode, and thus we end up not caring about them much, then it’s hard to call them quality material.
The writing and characterization in general is very questionable. For example, there’s this kuudere witch with a tragic past that hates magic, yet dominates spectacle magic that makes people happy, and goes from a complete stranger to one of the best friends of the protagonist and feeling sad for her incoming death, while also coming to appreciate magic for her newfound bound, in a single episode. Then the next episode the two girls encourage an interspecies relationship, something that I will always be against.
Then we get another one where the protagonist has collected a lot more tears out of screen after apparently finding out which targets and situations are more likely to produce more tears, and she is forbidden to use magic to learn the importance of each of them and basically not use people for her benefit I guess. I get the message and the supposed growth of the protagonist but she always seemed to care about each person she helps, so this change seems weird, and also understandable. She has to collect a thousand of those in a year or she will die, she’s gonna do whatever she can, and it’s not like she’s scamming people, she’s still helping them and doing good things, so I don’t really get the issue here.
Around the middle of the show is when the premise is practically abandoned to explore more of the setting, so there are episodes where the protagonist goes to some other places to meet another one of the Seven Sages, basically the seven greatest witches or mages in this world, all of which the main character is either their student, future assistant, friend or whatever, very fighting shounen like in a way.
Then the show gets more serious near its end, but the writing is still questionable. There’s an episode about a family cursed by a demon, so the protagonist wants to help even when her mistress/mother figure said not to get involved with, which of course the main character disobeys and ends up being saved by the same teacher at the last moment, who gets hurt in the way, very fighting shounen like in a way.
Then in the next episode, the protagonist is conveniently accompanied by one of the Seven Sages as a tree goes wild due to accumulated magic. Somehow that spawns a spirit that only the main character sees, but it is hinted that is not a spirit, thus its identity is never resolved, and conveniently the main girl gets a huge sudden power up that elevates her power a lot from how little capable she was in the beginning, and resolves everything with an emotional spell that somehow never occurred to anyone before.
Then the next two episodes they explore that concept to help some girl, and I’ve gotta say that it’s quite corny and follows fighting shounen logic, on top of being unbelievable that no one ever tried what the protagonist does, that emotions empower spells. But oh well magic is no science and it’s not the first time it happened in magic centered settings and fiction. They combine formulas with sudden emotional magic outbursts and solve the problem.
Good thing that there are plenty of top mages around because then a huge wave comes threatening to wipe away the whole town, only thing they do nothing and it’s the protagonist with her emotion spell that saves the day.
And in the last episode the shows resolve the little mystery bait it builds around a gloomy looking witch and her connection with the protagonist, where they give them a Uchiha like backdrop and conflicted relationship in a hurry. Very interesting lore wise but the dynamic kind of makes no sense and the revelation is done in a hurry to move on to the finale of the season and the setup for what’s to come.
It’s not like everything in the writing is bad though. Despite seemingly being an episodic anime, many early presented plot points and stories are not forgotten. The emotion spell is based on something that happens in the first episode, the tree that goes crazy was already anticipated in the second, the final witch appears throughout the whole series, the climate problem from the third episode gets mentioned again in the middle of the series, and some more. And plenty of side characters reappear throughout the series as well, they don’t do anything but at least are not one off episodic people.
Also, to help the kid from the tenth episode, they use the emotions of the sage with the strongest connection to her, and not the ones from the protagonist, which wouldn’t make sense. Then the spell of the next episode only worked because of residual magic left in the town by a very powerful witch. The war lore from the final episode is very interesting in itself, expands the setting and adds a sort of sociopolitical aspect to the anime, too bad that it’s told in a hurry, like many things happen in the series.
The protagonist gets a backdrop, an excuse for her unique ability and design of those eyes of hers, and learns a few things along the way. I can’t really say she changes much though, and every other character progression besides hers feels rushed and unconvincing. Besides that, most characters remain one note, there’s not much to write about them.
The presentation is rather weak. There are instances of good artwork and pretty backgrounds, but most of the time the visuals are basic, simple, and sort of outdated. The few action scenes are short and not that well animated, the special effects look a decade old, no design besides the protagonist’s is very interesting, but at least there’s some variety here and there, the backgrounds are mostly plain looking. The voice acting and the sound effects are fine, the music is typical orchestral strings, not memorable but does its job. The opening is a cute upbeat jpop song sung by Maaya Sakamoto and the ending is a ballad so somber it makes me think it was done based on the premise alone and not the actual mood of the series, but it’s the best thing in the anime for me.
In conclusion, if you don’t mind series not using their premises and don’t care much about convenient writing, this is a rather passable episodic show with some pretended emotional moments and sweet messages, with some interesting expansions of the setting, lore and some character growth scattered here and there. Writing, plot progression, characterization and presentation are otherwise very weak, which combined with the rather short and not very interesting side stories, make me drop its potential passable score a little.
4/10
