Anime Review: Magi

Magi

Airing Season: Fall 2012
Length: 25 Episodes
Genre, as perceived by Dogy: Adventure, Action, Comedy (slight)
Dogy Overall Score: 80/100 *I biasedly want to give it slightly slower*
Would I recommend It?: Yes
Who would I recommend it to? Somebody who wants to see a few unique ideas, or somebody who wants to see what could possibly be a "mainstream American anime."

Magi is an amazing show out the box. It has a pretty good mesh of a lot of concepts. Action and adventure, comedy and drama, and even slight hints of romance. Magi has it all. With it, the show has some visuals that I'd rank above par and an interestingly wide variety of music genres for the OST ( #randomrapbeats?? ). When you start watching it, you truly believe there's nothing the show can do wrong.

And surprisingly to my usual, ominous blog formatting, nothing actually went wrong.

"So why such an average score?" I have two reasons for that; one is a fair, valid argument, while the other one is biased and a completely self-centered opinion.

The valid argument I have is pointed at the action. For everything that happens out of the ordinary in the beginning, presentation wise, Magi eventually slips into the "general action formula." Yeah buddy, we got the good ol' "I'm gettin' scraped, so lemme take a second, say some stuff, and mysteriously power-up and/or get a new ability." It's not like they even try to hide it. You're kinda lulled into a routine of watching the series by that point, so you easily let it slide through your subconscious without noting it. But if you catch it, you start questioning if the show will continue to lose it's flair it sparked in the opening. It sadly takes away from all the good that occurs around it.

*thinks for 3 minutes*

Heh, it's actually hard to put my personal gripe with the show into a short entry without doing an analysis of the series. It's all about the characters and their importance to the series, but it basically goes like this.

If you like Aladdin and Alibaba, you'll thoroughly enjoy the show. They don't even have to be your favorites, but they have to be likable enough for you to genuinely be interested in their parts. If any other character is your favorite above them, you'll lose interest here and there because the other characters have enough interesting traits and points that you want to see more of them. (Mine is Morgiana, by a landslide). If you like any other character as a favorite, but don't like either Aladdin or Alibaba, then there's going to be a point and time when you straight don't care for the series. It almost can't be helped. I hate to make it sound that simple and formulated, but that's the best way to sum it up in my mind. I could pick any other noteworthy character in the series and I reach the same conclusion.

The reason I call this biased is because I really don't think the show depends on the characters THAT much. There is a standalone plot that works well enough that you could get by without likable characters. It'd be hard as hell, but doable. That's not the same as other recent series where a cast of uninteresting characters means there's absolutely no reason to watch (see: Little Busters). So I can't wholeheartedly fault Magi for this and I will not. But I can't just undermine my belief that this problem exists.

Regardless of that, the series is still solid. It was worth the watch, I'd totally watch it again (just for Morgiana), and I'm already looking forward to the (I think confirmed?) second season. If this winds up being a future mainstream American anime, I'd be down with that. It's one of those series that people should check out regardless of their tastes of anime.