thor123

Wild Cardz / JaJa Uma! Quartet is a fantasy action anime about 4 magical girls who have to fight a randomly appearing gigantic chess piece. I say randomly here, and I really mean randomly, as in the way every character or story element is introduced randomly. 

Of course, a 50-minute movie doesn't have the luxury to expand too much on every little thing, but there should at least be some basics: the start of the show made me think it was a sci fi show, so the sudden magic was a bit odd. And speaking of the magic, the way it works isn't explained either. Most fantasy series at least have some semblance of a "magic system" to explain how things work (so you at least have an idea of what scale the magic powers can reach), but Wild Cardz just glosses over that part of the plot, the way it glosses over the backstories of characters: it seems like the girls of the Quartet know some of the newly introduced characters from before, but we have no idea how they know them or why it would matter.

And then these characters - who are as generic as you could possibly imagine - have to fight some big chess-piece, because the creators couldn't think of a more interesting enemy. As for the origin of this chess-piece: we get some half-assed explanation, but by that point it was too late, and too little.

Animation

The animation was fine, I guess, but not enough to save this OVA from scoring very poorly. Not to mention the character designs, which I really didn't like.

Sound

The music is generic action music, which is quite fitting for the generic magic battles.

For the voice acting, there are 2 versions: the English dub is what I tried at first. I turned it off after 1 minute, because that was atrocious.

The Japanese version is passable, I guess, but I felt like some of the VAs were miscast, and would have been a lot better for different characters. Some of the voices are also downright annoying.

Overall

If you enjoy generic magic battles without any explanation, you might have a small chance of liking this. I'd still sooner recommend searching for some AMVs or "best fight scenes" compilations than watching this, though. For the runtime it has, this story is horribly undeveloped, making it one huge waste of time.

Review written for the Daily Anime Marathon Club