Oh boy, I expected a trip when I signed up to cover this. This was honestly one of the shows I was most excited for in the Spring season that wasn’t a continuing series like Steins;Gate or My Hero Academia.How did it stack up to my expectations? Well, if you’ve been reading my reviews you already know. Still, let’s go over the last episode and talk a little more in depth about what did and didn’t work in Mahou Shoujo Ore.
The episode picks up where the last episode left off, with their manager telling Saki to defeat him. With one last grand battle between them, the magical girl idols will of cemented their place in the public’s mind and in history. To try to push Saki even further, he electrocutes Mohiro in an attempt to anger her and push her to begin the final showdown. [Though he admits, it won’t be much of a fight. He’s pretty weak, he doesn’t have any second or third forms to transform or anything.]
Saki, in, what I feel was the most predictable move ever goes and smashes up all the cameras. Why the manager didn’t count on this or keep a few demon minions around to protect all the equipment is beyond me. I mean, could he really think that she would really just want to fight him? The much easier answer is to cut the camera feeds, slap him across the face and tell him “No, that’s not how any of this works. Heroes don’t hurt their friends!”
In a flare for the dramatic, saying that there is no going back and by doing what he’d done he’s given up his place in both the human and demon worlds. The manager pulls a bold move and uses the lightning powers to attempt to drop a giant stalactite on top of himself. Though, as we learned with Saki’s mother. Character death is a little to heavy for this series and he is pulled out of the way via the rope that is connecting him and Mohiro.
There is a moment of sweetness between Saki and Mohiro that almost ends in a kiss before Hyoue comes in and ruins the moment.
The faeries come in and capture the manager and the day is saved. Er, it would be if the lesser demons didn’t start thinking for themselves outside their leaders orders and beat down Sakuyo and then set on their way to kill Saki.
So the faeries, Saki and the manager [who refused to see a magical girl taken down by minor demons] join the fight and begin taking down the demons. However, they are reproducing too fast. Things are looking hopeless and lost when the girls from PRISMA arrive on the scene. They’ve saved Sakuyo and Saki and Sakuyo join together for one last dramatical final episode attack full of love power! The demons are vanquished. The animation budget is saved.
Their manager is carted off to faerie world prison and the girls return to the human world and retire the magical girl idols. Attempting to become idols on their own merits once again, singing and dancing on street corners trying to get noticed and get big. This time with Kokoro-chan acting as their manager.
Still, a magical girls work is never done as Mohiro is now being beaten up by human thugs and the girls need to step in. That’s the end, that’s Magical Girl Ore.
Okay, so let’s check out what worked in this episode? Having the manager join the final fight against the demons because he couldn’t bare for magical girls to be taken out by mini-boss type demons. That’s funny. Hyoue stepping in and totally ruining the romantic moment between Mohiro and Saki was really funny.
Though I was hoping to see some kind of romantic conclusion, either be it between the female Saki and Mohiro or between Ore and Mohiro.
What didn’t work for me was having the Prisma Girls step in for the final fight. I feel like there was another way they could of gotten Sakuyo to the fight. They could of utilized Fujimoto and his siblings. There is no resolution in their plotline. There was a pretty epic opening that the series made for a Fujimoto ‘Saki, I am your father.’ Star wars parody thing going on or something.
-Final Thoughts
My overall feeling with Mahou Shoujo Ore is disappointment. It was a plot that had a lot of potential and honestly, given some better execution? Probably could of been one of the best comedies of our time. It had a lot of elements of some of the classics, there are many moments in the series that remind me fondly of Excel Saga.
The issue seemed to be that the series was either entirely unwilling to commit completely to it’s gag or it would drag out a gag for far too long and beat it like a dead horse. In particular, two moments come to mind.
First, episode 5. Which honestly, i struggle to understand why I didn’t drop this show like a hot potato after this debacle of an episode. It sat and beat a dead horse for 30 minutes with the same, unfunny joke and made jokes that were distinctly uncomfortable. I’ve since been made aware that the predatory behavior and ‘rape like’ natures of the jokes is something more distinctly Japanese in humor than someone from the west can really understand.
Second, episode 8. There were a lot of great things going on in this episode. Saki’s mother and her time as a magical girl were funny. The comedy in the meet and greet episode was mostly on point. The issue comes with the fact that it ruined it’s own gag almost immediately. When Saki’s mother ‘dies’ and is carried on by an angelic looking Kokoro-chan. They had a lot of places they could of gone with this, they could of committed completely and killed her straight out.
They could of waited an episode and brought her back to life without explanation and had Saki comment on it offly like “Didn’t you die?” and have her mother laugh it off like “Oh that was last episode.” or, they could do what they did and only carry it through the credits and deflate the comedy of it by reducing it to a joke that he was merely taking her to the pharmacy to get medicine for her back.
The source manga for Mahou Shoujo Ore is only two volumes long. They were trying to cram too little, into too much, rather then the other way around and the result was a sloppy mess of filler. This would of done better as either a short, or perhaps a smaller run of six episodes like the original FLCL. Where the action could of been tighter, the comedy could of been faster and the overall result wouldn’t end up being as sadly painful and forgettable.
The anime studio did it’s best in trying to pad the run time with industry inside jokes and subtle jabs at themselves and they way they run things. It’s unfortunately, not very accessible humor to a western audience and i’m not even entirely sure how well it translates to a general Asian audience who doesn’t understand the finer points of the animation industry.
The one thing that did work, and probably the best thing about the series is the way it misdirects you from the beginning. The reveal of the fact that their manager is the demon boss and that Hyoue, who the show has slowly convinced you is evil the entire show is actually the prince of the faeries was masterfully done.
I would give Mahou Shoujo Ore a 6/10. It has it’s moments for sure, but it’s marred by a ton of problems that make it almost insufferable to watch at times. If I ever did recommend it to someone, I would give them an episode guide so they could only gather the important information and some of the funnier episodes, but I would never make anyone sit through this entire train wreck of a show.