Due to the nature of the series in question this review contains mention of extreme violence torture and sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised. This review contains embedded images that are NSFW I have seen a fair amount of anime in my 25 years of life. I say in all sincerity that Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asuka may be the worst Ive ever actually finished. Theres another universe out there where Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asuka is a more wellconsidered and consequently much better show. Asuka is ostensibly a magical girl series but it has much more in common with dark action seinen like Gleipnir or Murcielago than it does anything genuinely tied to the mahou shoujo genre. Ive seen it argued that Madoka Magica casts a shadow over the series but that is true to only a very limited extent. Instead like many other seinen Asuka tries to explore the depths of the human psyche while also being a gory action series. This is a very difficult tightrope walk to pull off at the absolute best of times. Most action seinen that succeed at this do so by being very mindful of what they show and how. Many simply dont even try. Murcielago for example throws any attempt at societal commentary to the wind. Simply allowing itself to be the splatterhouse fantasy that anyone reading it would be doing so to experience anyway. Asuka is not smart enough to do either of these things. Its not entirely fair to say that it fails as a magical girl story because it doesnt really try to be one. Nonetheless its worth picking apart why it doesnt try to. The shows core problems on this front can be distilled down to a single exchange in the 8th episode. One character is offered by an agent of the terroristic Babel Brigade to become one of their rogue mahou shoujo. She asks if he wants her to fight and kill people To which he instead of supplying a real answer replies Thats what magical girls do right?. Without the context of the series around it it would be easy to take this as an inuniverse question and response. One built on the discussed entities as they exist within the world of the show. However from the Doylist outofuniverse perspective with the show that contains it its really hard to not read this as the authors actual feelings on magical girl stories in general. There is only one obvious notevidentlyhostile nod to any other magical girl series in the show. That being a parody of the informative segments from Cardcaptor Sakura. Even this its possible to take as pugnacious if youre feeling uncharitable enough. And do trust me by the end of the series you will not be feeling charitable. The prevailing feeling is of a magical girl series by way of Mark Millar. Asuka wears the skin of the mahou shoujo genre but feels like it was written by someone who hates it. 660https://i.ur.com/temYomA.png 660https://i.ur.com/c65a5oK.png 660https://i.ur.com/tV0L55b.png Yet whats most frustrating about Asuka is that when it comes up with what seems on the surface like a good idea it completely squanders it. Lets take the alreadymentioned 8th episode as an example. The story of antagonist Whiplash Chisato is to be very charitable deeply problematic. But the core idea of a disabled magical girl who overcomes her physical disability to still fight could be a compelling one. Even if that character is as Chisato is a villain. Sadly youre not going to find it explored with any depth thought or nuance here. Chisato is ultimately just another curvy body stuck in a revealing outfit. Her disability the loss of a leg is just an excuse to give her a shiny robot limb. Which in of itself might still be excusable even interesting if given a more compelling and respectful framework. But the show has no interest in that so the characterlike so many othersis completely wasted. Her character arc such as it is instead goes as follows. She is nearly beat to death at the hands of an abusive father after he fails to secure her a job in a whorehouse. Her father is killed by a hulking robotman who like many characters in the show seems to be inspired in design by another here: Al from Fullmetal Alchemist. He offers to make her a magical girl. She accepts gaining the aforementioned shiny robot leg in the process. Some indeterminate amount of time later she is Good At Fighting now. They walk together on the beach its implied shes fallen for the robotman. We get both of their sad backstories. Hers is that she lost her leg and her mother after a car crash caused by a drunk driver. His is that hes a child soldier from Somalia who was forced to join up with a group of armed guerillas after they slaughtered most of his town and forced him to murder his parents and rape his sister. He reveals that hes kidnapped the people responsible for her mothers death. He makes her kill them. She does so and vomits as she does. Extra fun: several episodes later its revealed that all of this was orchestrated by the evil organization she joins. Then in the finale Kurumi tortures her again. 660https://i.ur.com/ZM6dLNJ.png Normally people who think this works call them enhanced interrogation techniques so I guess I appreciate her honesty if nothing else. She ends up getting a happy ending that consists of having a collar filled with chemicals shackled to her neck and is forcibly recruited into the protagonists magical girl organization. Shes also hired as a maid by the maid cafe that serves as a front for said organization. Does that seem right to you? This is emblematic of Asukas core issue. There is a whole lot of sadness death despair and downright bizarreness crammed into its characters backstories and the runtime of the show itself. However and this is crucial absolutely none of it is ever leveraged to any productive end from a storytelling or thematic perspective. This issue repeats itself in ways big and small over the course of the series run. For instance this character second from the left introduced briefly in a flashback? 660https://i.ur.com/wwJzANA.png Exists solely to be killed a few realtime minutes later in another flashback. She is dissolved into a skeleton by some kind of goop monster. 660https://i.ur.com/na5R2DN.png The show is for a solid 80 of its runtime sheer misery porn and not much else. Whats more troubling is the thematic underpinning this all makes apparent. The gist of Asukas politicswhen it can be coherent enough to have themseems to be that the only kind of justice is a swift death to the evil people of the world. And Asuka really seems to have a funny idea of evil. The series tries to frame Asukas core strugglethe world needs her to defend it but she doesnt want to do that being sick of fightingas a classic heroic narrative but theres a key failure of understanding here. When at one point grilled by a villain about why shes doing this Asuka responds as the camera flashes to mental images of two of her friends that even if magical girls arent miraculous heroes who can save everyone that there are still some things that are worth fighting for. Thats not a bad moral on its own fighting for those close to you is a classic shonen trope. The issue is that the world that the series presents is so unrelentingly bleak that it doesnt make that desire actually feel particularly heroic. Even after the show tries to sell us on the idea of Asuka having embraced becoming a magical girl again it still feels like shes being forced to do something that she really doesnt want to. Which is itself not even a problem inherently but the shows repeated failure to sell any of this just makes the whole thing feel miserable and pointless. The shows attempt at a happy ending is roughly this: 660https://i.ur.com/fsb3nxY.png There are a plethora of other writing problems but many of these almost seem slight by comparison. Its not a great sign when the fact that the main antagonists disappear for the shows entire middle third and only reappear in the finale to screw onscreen for about 15 seconds seems like a minor gripe. You might arguenot without reasonthat Asuka isnt a magical girl show and shouldnt be judged by the moral standards of one. Thats true Asuka is an action series and a war drama. Yet it doesnt really succeed at being either of these things either. As an action show Asukas failings are readily apparent on the production side. Whether LIDEN FILMS simply could not devote the staff to the project or there was some other factor the animation is often dumpy at best. Even when characters are simply standing around doing nothing theres a kind of slapdashness to the shots. When they are doing something Asuka often chooses to not actually animate what would be its most actionpacked moments. So while you do get the occasional nice cut of Asuka say jumping onto a car or something like that the animation is on the whole incredibly lacking. Being mostly reduced to a series of slideshows by honestly sort of pathetic attempts to draw dramatic splash screens. This finally begins to rectify itself as the show nears its conclusion chiefly in the second to last episode as the thirdtolast and before are often downright ugly. Here the newly revitalized choreography and the occasional cool shot provide some reprieve from the shows mountain of writing problems. 660https://i.ur.com/SklakNT.png Suffice it to say though that by this point its kind of too little too late. As a war drama well weve already gone over the shows complete failure to build a compelling narrative arc. Large chunks of the series are intercut with incredibly dull scenes of military officials strategizing or bargaining with other governmental types. None of this adds anything to the series and were it cut Asuka would be marginally more tolerable. Though it says a lot that this isnt actually one of the major problems the show has. At the end of the day. It is difficult to imagine much of anyone getting anything out of Asuka. If you want a dark action series you have dozens of better options. Including its contemporary Dororo. If it needs to be seinen specifically both Goblin Slayer and Magical Girl Site last year and No Guns Life and Gleipnir getting adaptations later this year point to a burgeoning trend of seinen manga getting anime. Its not like theres a dearth of options. If you really insist on a dark action series that has magical girls I find it difficult to believe that you could conceivably pick something worse from the crop that exists. Even longforgotten early aughts webnovel curio Sailor Nothing would be a better choice simply for weirdness sake. The sad part is as someone whos reasonably familiar with the seinen action genre none of these problems are actually unique to Asuka though it is certainly clumsier about them than most. With adaptations of No Guns Life and the particularly noxious Gleipnir on the horizon I do wonder just how many shows like this were in for. My hope is that Asuka is the low point of the trend. In this genre the line that separates fun shlock Murcielago The Violence Action from the tediously genuinely awful Gleipnir and of course this is a thin one. Asuka isnt completely devoid of merit of coursethe soundtrack is great even if completely out of place and its reasonably fun to riff on the more tolerable parts with friends but you could almost certainly do better whatever youre looking for. 660https://i.ur.com/PaLFggj.png Fuck off.