While better than the other magical girl premiere this season, I'm not too sure about this one either.
In a world where the Holy Grail war doesn't exist, Illyasviel von Einzbern is a normal grade school student until a magical wand named Ruby flies into her bathroom one night and tricks her into becoming a magical girl. The majority of the episode revolves around establishing the cast, some sight gags, and a little bit about how the magical girl system works. However, while I enjoyed seeing Fate universe characters in a far happier world, if that aspect wasn't present, this would be a bland magical girl series with more fanservice than the norm.
This is honestly a bit of a shame, since I came into this show really wanting to like it. The parody element is definitely in full force here, with homages to Card Captor Sakura sticking out the most, from the design of the outfits to using cards for magic (admittedly a interesting way to make sure the Servants get their screentime). I thought that Ruby was an interesting character, since I wasn't expecting a personified magical girl rod. He (She?) seems to be what you get when you put Sakura's Clow Staff and Nanoha's Raising Heart AI in a blender and add in a dash of Kyuubey's manipulation for good measure.
However, Prisma Illya's doujinshi roots are very obvious, and it brings the rest of the premise down. When she walked into the bath with the "unoccupied" sign still on the door, anyone who knows anything about anime cliches knew exactly what would happen next, and it played out exactly in that way. The transformation sequence also felt like it was aiming towards a, ahem, specific audience. The introductions of the characters are pretty minimal as well, since the show seems to be assuming that Fate franchise fans are the main audience and already have an idea of how they act and the basic idea of their relationships. And why shouldn't it? Most of my enjoyment of this episode came from that fact, yet I can't deny that if they were swapped out with original characters, I would be far more critical of it.
At the moment, it looks like how much you'll like Prisma Illya will depend on how much you like Fate and magical girl conventions. I'm giving this series the three-episode test to see if if it shakes off the doujinshi feel and manages to stand on its own a bit better. If not, I'm likely to drop it, since this show has already hit my red flag ("You're in love with your brother!"). The novelty of a happy Illya is not enough to keep me around, so we'll see how it goes.
Images from Crunchyroll.com.
It'd take a whole season for the show to shake off the Doujinshin feel unfortunately. The source material only moved away out of those Doujin routes with later arcs. It's not going to turn Madoka Magica suddenly in the third episode.
ReplyDeleteThat's too bad. I wasn't expecting another Madoka, but I was hoping that this would be able to be a good magical girl series in its own right, more like Nanoha. I'll give it a shot anyway.
ReplyDelete...to think that both of the lead characters in Daybreak illusion and Prisma Illya are voiced by Mai Kadowaki, therefore I shall declare the opening of the Mai Kadowaki Magical Girl Loli Festa.
ReplyDeleteWow, I didn't even notice that! Thanks for pointing it out.
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