Mashle: Magic and Muscles

orpheusx9 May 27, 2023

6

TL;DR - Entertaining at first, but predictable and repetitive. To be fair, it's a really good adaptation of the manga and is faithful to the original material. The voice acting for each of the characters is exactly what I'd imagined. So this is really a review of the story and characters overall rather than just of the anime itself. Ultimately the problem with this series is that it never goes deep enough. Every conflict feels contrived, every character feels flat and 1-dimensional, and there's never really any true tension because you know how things are going to end. I get that it's supposed to be a parody, but humor and irony can only carry a shallow plot and characters so far before you start getting bored. Every fight is the same - the enemy has no clue how powerful Mash is, Mash is super polite but also super dumb so they have a dumb conversation, at some point they fight, then the enemy is taken by surprise at how powerful Mash is, and then Mash wins, only to spare the enemy. Characters are so exaggerated as to basically be walking tropes, and at no point does the story ever make you feel like something is at stake. Nobody dies, bad guys suddenly become good guys because they're always "touched" by Mash's kindness (more like pity or indifference), and fights last basically 5-10 mins. Mash is supposed to be this pariah to the world because he has no magic, but nothing happens even when everyone finds out. Nobody gets punished for anything, literally one of your antagonists has been turning other students into dolls and... nobody's asking why 2 dozen students have just vanished? Oh, and Mash of course has a cast of sidekicks with their own personality quirks. And occasionally they fight. That's it. Rinse and repeat. You'll get through the first arc or maybe even first couple of arcs and find it's funny and entertaining, then you start getting bored really fast because it just doesn't go anywhere else. There are so many other shounen shows out there that are much better at character development and world-building, while still being comedies. Gintama is a shounen comedy. Assassination Classroom is a shounen comedy. Food Wars is a shounen comedy. It's 100% possible to write funny stories aimed at teenage boys without it devolving into a predictable slog (well, ok Food Wars got predictable too, but it stayed entertaining for way longer).

Johnleo Jun 27, 2023

5.2

Yeah this anime is pretty much just harry potter and opm fusion its not bad it got some decent animation and overall its not too hard to watch i actually enjoy it quite a bit but the characters just feel so fucking dead they are all very bland with almost no real emotion the creator of this anime was just throwing random shit at the show hoping it would be good its not bad but its not good either bland show overall

kyozaii Jul 4, 2023

5

OPM + Mob + Black Clover + Harry Potter = This series To be honest, of all the anime we got for this season, this show was one I enjoyed purely because of how unserious it is. It has all the anime troupes you can possibly think of and the plot armor goes crazy each episode, plus we have an OP Mc (which personally doesn't bother me, I love OP characters). The story doesn't really offer much because we just skip from one thing to another, until the last episode where there seems to be a new villain in the play, Abel was just a warm-up 'bad guy'. No, the characters aren't complex nor do they have enough personalities to keep them interesting. They get some sob backstory and you're supposed to feel sorry for them, but they're still very much 2 dimensional. And plot armor saves the day because Dot is suddenly kinda badass, Abel was just being a silly goose turning people into puppets with no consequences whatsoever, Finn the useless guy has an OP brother that popped out randomly, and the teachers are nowhere in sight, and then there's Lemon.  Did I enjoy this? yes... sometimes it's nice to just watch a show with no heavy plot and complexity. No thoughts head empty. Mash was enough to make me want to keep watching <3 Also, this anime is so unserious, it took them 12 episodes to realize Mash got no magic. No thoughts were ever thunk in this show.