Witch Craft Works 1
Yeah okay I don't think this one is for me. The story so far just feels like the most generic kind of generic LN tripe - there are witches at the school, one of them is all about protecting the MC, the rest seem to be out to kill him. We haven't had any real explanation about why the MC is important to these witches yet, but really, what reason is necessary beyond "because plot"?
I might have been willing to go along with a super-generic story like this if there was at least a good cast of characters to hold my interest, but the first thing that struck me about this show just from looking at its key visual is that the character design in general looks awful.
I will give it some credit: the most awful character design of all, the main girl Kagari, actually wound up being the one I appreciated the most. She's intimidatingly tall, with stupidly large boobs and the most mannish face you ever saw on a female character - basically, the opposite of cute. But the show actually seems quite aware of all this, and just uses her looks to fuel the deadpan humour. It's vaguely amusing how everyone in the school seems to be obsessed with this girl and treats her like a super-charismatic goddess and idol, even though she's decidedly not attractive and has an "I give zero fucks" look permanently plastered to her face. It also makes it seem oddly appropriate when she starts calling the MC her "princess" (note: the MC is most definitely not female, and is if anything even more generic than the MC of ImoCho).
Her deadpan, unflappable nature also plays well off the first antagonist we see in this episode, a rival witch who attacks using an entire army of evil robot bunny soldiers. Because why the hell not, I guess. It is fairly amusing to see plainface witch standing there in the midst of all this madness just continuing not to give anything even resembling a fuck. Oh, and when plainface witch does attack, she apparently does so by summoning and/or turning herself into fire. Which, as wonzo so helpfully demonstrated earlier in the thread, looks like SHIT compared to the manga. After seeing those comparison images, I couldn't help wincing when she supposedly "turned herself into fire" in the anime, because it doesn't look like that at all, it just looks like she has unimpressive CG flames vaguely floating around her.
Butyeah, aside from this main girl whose design seems to look bad on purpose, the other character designs in the show just look like a big pile of bleh. Even nekomimi cannot save them from being bland and forgettable. Just like even a fhana OP cannot save this show from being dropped by me right now.
Dropped.
