The Irregular at Magic High School Anime Review

I've really got to get out of the habit of checking out anime that are adaptations of light novels only to find out that the show only covers a portion of said books. It always leaves me wanting more, and since I don't live in Japan, and am not fluent enough in the language to read said novels, I'm inevitably left hanging in the end. That is something that I'm left worrying about having recently completed the anime run of The Irregular at Magic High School, as I really enjoyed the show, but it's based on a light novel series and covers only about the first half of it. Granted, it does sound like the anime did quite well for itself sales-wise, so I'm a lot more hopeful that we'll see more of it in the future, unlike Rokka, which I lamented about recently, but still part of me will live in fear that the anime will remain half finished. In the meantime, though, let's chat about the show so far.

In a nutshell, the show focuses on the Shiba siblings, Tatsuya and Miyuki, as they go to the top mage high school in Japan. Sorcery is something that has only recently awakened in humans, and has lead to several wars, so now each country does its best to educate magic-proficient individuals so to include them in their military. The school discriminates between two tiers of students which are kind of like honour students (called Blooms) versus regular ones (called Weeds) where the former exhibit exceptional skills in magic while the latter only average. Miyuki gets accepted as a Bloom, while Tatsuya enters as a weed. As the show progresses, though, we start to see that Tatsuya is hiding his true power and is on a level well beyond anyone in the school, and possibly one of the most powerful magicians in the world. So, the series largely acts as a slow reveal of who Tatsuya is and just what he is capable of with his magic.

This results in Tatsuya gradually earning the respect of his peers through his exceptional engineering skills, and we see the show be a bit of a story of acceptance. While wearing the mantle of a Weed, he has to prove himself on merits and show that these differentiations between magicians isn't necessarily as cut and dry as the establishment would have one believe. Thankfully there are a number of level-headed students who don't share these discriminatory Bloom vs Weed sentiments and are more inclined to judge one on the content of their character. Tatsuya quickly befriends these people, but there are still the stubborn ones that won't accept him simply because he's a Weed, so he has to prove himself to these folks, resulting them very much getting their comeuppance, which is oh so satisfying.

As all of this is going on, we start to see that there's a lot more to our protagonist here than he's letting on, and with that the show feels like a very gradual reveal of just how powerful Tatsuya is. Slowly we see that he is a brilliant engineer with amazing magical powers as we follow him through his day-to-day life in high school. The series ends on a crescendo with Tatsuya using some of his most devastating abilities, and left me hungry for more. This is where it becomes apparent that we're only halfway through the light novel in terms of content covered, but I'm cautiously optimistic that the series will continue at some point.

While Tatsuya is doing all of this, he's meeting plenty of folks at school, of course. It's a bit touch and go in terms of how well developed the rest of the cast is. His sister, Miyuki, is interesting. On the surface she seems like she's just a very powerful magician with a big brother complex but it's through her that we start to understand just how different Tatsuya is as well as the siblings connection to the Yotsuba, one of the most powerful magician families in Japan.

Their friends and classmates are where we see things bounce between reasonably well developed and cardboard. Erika Chiba is probably the most interesting of the bunch, and it could very easily work if someone wanted to make a spin off series based on the Chiba family seeing as they're all very good sword fighters with several of them involved with law enforcement or the military. Meanwhile Mikihiko's whole thing with summoning spirits and the accident that the series hints at suggests there's quite a bit to explore with this character. Leo and Mizuki seem nice enough, and help keep things feeling light from time to time, but they aren't really all that well developed in comparison to Tatsuya and Miyuki's other friends, and, if anything, I get the sense that Mizuki is mostly around for the purpose of fan service.

The student council has its fair share of members that are introduced to us, but only a handful of them get fleshed out in any way. Mari has her moments during action scenes, but it's more Saegusa and Jumonji that are of particular interest since both of their families are two of the other top magician families in Japan, so they get involved in the political side of mage life outside of school.

One person I'd like to learn more about, though, is Masaki Ichijo, as he's the closest thing to a rival that Tatsuya has in The Irregular at Magic High School. While there are a few other people that are straight up evil bad guys that Tatsuya fights from time to time, they were all just cannon fodder. Ichijo is seen as a prodigy at his own high school and the two cross paths at an inter school, magic-oriented sporting event. It was one of the few times where Tatsuya had to work hard to win, and made for some exciting action. There's obviously a lot more backstory to Ichijo, and I'd like to see it.

If anything, it made me more annoyed when the show tried to present Lu Gonghu as some sort of badass, but he wound up getting thumped again and against. For someone with a reputation for being a beast of a fighter, he got soundly whupped on multiple occasions, and not even by seasoned soldiers, but green, inexperienced high school students. The guy quickly devolved from potentially interesting villain to anti-climatic bore.

What with all of the magic getting flung around there are some pretty good action scenes. The showdown between Tatsuya and Ichijo is by far the best, but there are a few other scenes in particular that stood out. Erika gets in a few scraps that are reasonably entertaining, and there's a big multi episode battle towards the end of the series where everyone is fighting pretty much non-stop. They're fun scenes, but the big thing is waiting to see if Tatsuya will pull any particularly big rabbits out of his hat, which happens with increasing frequency toward the end of the series.

The quality of the animation itself helps quite a bit in enhancing the fight scenes (and everything else for that matter), as the show is quite pretty to look at. There's a nice use of color, glowing computer terminals, and, of course, all that magic. So, the series is very easy on the eyes, if a tad heavy on the blue and teal tones.

In the end, though, we're only about halfway through the light novel with a whole lot more that we need to learn about. We've been introduced to a lot of people, and we know that Tatsuya is secretly a freakishly powerful magician and brilliant engineer. There's also still a lot of mystery surrounding his and Miyuki's aunt. So, there's still quite a bit that we need to know. What will Tatsuya do with all that power? How will the world respond to the events of the last few episodes? When will Mr. Zhou be back? Just what is the Yotsuba family scheming behind the scenes? We'll need to see the anime cover the last half of the light novel to get answers to those questions. I'm remaining cautiously optimistic that we'll see more episodes at some point in the future. The anime proved reasonably popular, so there's a monetary incentive for the show to continue. It's just a question of how long it'll be before it returns.