Volumes: 16/16 (Complete), In Print
Shounen
Genre: Post Apocalyptic, Time Travel, Scifi, Fighting, Conspiracy
Please note: This review will have more light spoilers than most other reviews, because I honestly can’t imagine most people reading all the way to the end without some idea of where the story goes. Seriously, most of the reviews I have read about this manga didn’t make it past the first arc, which was the weakest part of the story.
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a witch, who had a powerful bloodline, her descendants were called magical girls. Legend has it if you gather all of her descendants together you can sacrifice them in a powerful ritual that may change the world, or even the universe.
But Kii Kogami doesn’t know any of that. He’s just an ordinary high schooler about to be shocked out of his boring, dreary life into a huge conspiracy that will change everything he thought he knew.
Review: This is really difficult to review, so I’m going to break it down into parts. The story has 4 main story arcs:
First Arc: v1-5: The Magical Girl Apocalypse arc.
Second Arc: v6-8: Intermission arc, where it appears they stopped the Apocalypse from happening, but it is actually still going to happen.
Third Arc: v9-11: The original unchanged future that brought about the Apocalypse 20 years into the future.
Fourth Arc: v12-16: The good guys from the future go back in time to the Apocalypse to change the past.
The First Arc was terrible, most readers don’t get past it. It’s a series of deliberately shocking, pointless deaths with extreme gore; with a helping of a shocking, unnecessary to the plot rape scene as well. It’s pseudo Survival Horror, since most real Survival Horror is about who to trust and the crucial decisions characters make that impacts their survival. The (Artificial) Magical Girls are so overpowered, immortal, plus there’s a totally unnecessary zombie element, that makes any survival just impossible. But then the whole scenario is revealed to be a sham.
The Second Arc: In this arc they appear to have stopped the apocalypse from happening, so everything resets. The goal of this arc is for them to find out who is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
The Third Arc: This is the original future that led to the Apocalypse. Honestly while parts of it were fine, it’s somewhat ruined for me because a huge key plot point comes about because one of the new main characters does something incredibly stupid.
The Fourth Arc: This is the new changed timeline starting from when the good guys go back in time to the present and bring about a new future. Of course includes the final confrontation between the good guys and the bad guys.
All in all, I did feel like slogging it out all the way to the end had a decent payoff, and a good ending but only just barely. I nearly dropped this series five times, and sometimes I got so disgusted or grossed out, I just stopped reading it for a while.
One big issue is the cast members. In particular there are two antagonists who are introduced as evil, who join the main cast. One of them in particular is a super rape-y pervert cop which is..... At first I thought he was going to be killed horribly as some sort of justice, and then after he joined the main characters I had him pegged as the villain in disguise. And later he seems like he is about to betray our heroes. After all this setup, in the end he’s actually ends up being one of the central heroes, but he never quite gives up his rape-y desires, which is.... seriously off putting.
The other evil antagonist who switches sides is the Parasite Magical Girl. Somehow even the heroes don’t care that she stole some poor random person’s body, and literally no one ever mentions it.
Another big problem with this series is the main characters. The main male protagonist is about as interesting as white bread and the main female protagonist that you are supposed to be cheering for has too much damage done to her character at the very beginning of the story to be sympathetic. Even when it’s revealed later that she is being mind controlled, it’s just too little, too late.
In the end I really found myself most attached to some of the other supporting cast members. I didn’t really care about the main characters at all.
The main thing that did keep me reading was the constant reveals about the truth behind everything. The plot twists and turns, and new information would often put old information into a new light. It did keep me wondering what would happen next, and it was interesting how many layers the conspiracy had. (So many layers!)
The central genre of this story, BTW, is actually much more heavily Scifi than fantasy or magic. What happens is that some researchers unlock the secret of the magical girls, which is in their blood, and use it to create artificial magical girls who can be mind controlled.
The overall ending- I would say it’s much better than I had hoped it would turn out- but at the same time, if I thought about it too much I started to think about the things that didn’t quite add up and are never explained. It’s hard to say more without massive spoilers. But overall it’s a decent ending if you don’t mind some Shounen tropes.
Recommended: If somehow you are able to get past the extreme gore, many violent deaths and decapitations, and then all the rape scenes and attempted rape scenes, totally unnecessary fan service that is often in poor taste- then underneath it all is a decent time travel story about preventing the Apocalypse, and the conspiracy behind it all.
Not Recommended: If you don’t want to stomach many deliberately shocking deaths and rape, then don’t read this.
Age Rating: R: a lot of extremely graphic gore, a lot of nudity, some graphic rape, and some consensual sex
Other thoughts on the art: The crude color artwork on the covers is much worse than the actual regular artwork inside, which looks more like regular Shounen art. But at the same time a lot of the fight scenes tended to over use massive motion blurs that were really annoying. Ends up having everything look out of focus. But thankfully it's not that bad.
Other Works by this Mangaka: Magical Girl SITE
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