Like, it tried to do the whole "ok, let's take the Sammy cast but have a bit of old-fashioned magic with our magical girl while making it all dramatic", and for a large part it did OK, but it really wasn't able to be particularly impressive at any point. Instead, it actually managed to be
bad for stretches of time. The stretch where it milked tension brought about by characters being dumb and refusing to mention the most basic things until absolutely forced to after everything went to shit was especially awful. That's when it stopped being a harmless waste of time for me. It also took a lot of shortcuts when it came to tying events together, so despite the show being slow and plodding overall the most important parts were rushed as hell.
Worst of all, we didn't see
this strut walk.