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Exposition On A Plane With Index And The Terrorist

Posted on December 9, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode Review Title Image

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 10 Review

There are fewer things sadder than falling out of love with a franchise but I just have to admit that is where I am with A Certain Magical Index. I’ve put the final decision off until episode 13, but I’m almost certain this one is a drop. What is making it worse though, is that this season is making me really question why I actually even liked this show in the first place.

To go through the issues of this episode would take too long, so let’s just look at the moments that really illustrate why A Certain Magical Index season 3 is failing to really engage.

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 10

Firstly, we have an encounter between Misaka and Touma at the oh-so-familiar vending machine. That seems great and all. Misaka’s a great character and the vending machine is a staple set piece in the anime at this point. However, what was this scene doing? Really? Other than hoping fans would squee with delight over seeing Misaka was there anything happening in that sequence? Touma asked Misaka not to tell anyone about his amnesia? There were quicker and more logical ways to get to that point. Was it the comedy that was supposed to land as Misaka blushes and actually feeds coins into the vending machine? Because that was most definitely a swing and a miss as the anime continues to undervalue its female characters.

Then we get the scene in Touma’s apartment where he gets the call telling him he needs to go to England. The joke where Touma asks Tsuchimikado to make it quick and so no further information was given before hanging up was actually pretty amusing, so even though from a plot point of view it is maddening because we’re having a scene change for no explained reason, it kind of worked. What doesn’t is that right after that the window is broken as a smoke grenade is lobbed in to the apartment and both Touma and Index are knocked unconscious.

That could work if they woke up all surprised by where they are, but instead, through flash backs, we find out they went to the airport, rejected the plane that was organised for them, and took a regular flight to England. So why even knock them out? Could the writer not figure out how to end the scene?

Then we are finally subjected to terrorists on a plane. Index, we’ve seen terrorists on planes before. So many times. You have to at least be vaguely competent in this one because what you’ve delivered this week is half-hearted at best and what should actually be an interesting transition sequence from one city to the next turns into yet another mangled mess. About the only positive is that Stiyl shows up, in another plane for some reason, and throws some magic around. And again, unless they are just hoping that the mere presence of a character cooler than Touma makes the audience jump in delight there really isn’t anything to this scene.

So positives are few and far between and negatives are overwhelming. This episode isn’t alone in this though as Index has gradually worn away any leeway I was willing to give a franchise I genuinely liked. I’m now at the point where I just have to wonder why they even continue to churn this out.

Then I realise, I’m still watching it. As are a lot of people. So either other people like it more than I do, or we’re all just continuing to keep up the popularity of an anime that really should just fade away. One thing I do know, A Certain Magical Index is falling flat for me right now and while I’m committed until episode 13, I’m almost certain to drop it after that.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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That Moment You Know The Magic is Gone

Posted on December 2, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 9 Review

Let’s be real, I haven’t been overly thrilled by the return of A Certain Magical Index at all this season. The first arc was mostly nonsense that even on going back to season two it is still fairly hard to figure out what was going on or why. The second arc ditched the protagonist altogether. Now we’re in this third arc and the glaring issues with this narrative are becoming almost impossible to ignore. It isn’t a case of being fun anymore surrounded by exposition dumps. It is now a case of tired attempts to recapture something of the spirit that drew people to the show being crammed in amongst nonsensical dialogue just to ensure the audience hasn’t cracked their nose on the keyboard when the dozed off.

Alright, that was pretty harsh and actually not true.

At heart the lightning, the movement lines, the cheesily delivered lines mid-fight all still actually work for me, but – and this is a huge but – now these feel like inserted filler to a narrative about characters I don’t care about in a world that has become increasingly random.

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 9 Kanzaki

Maybe it is all a byproduct of the long gap between seasons. Maybe it is a result of my being much older now and less easily impressed with shiny, pretty things (who am I kidding, I love shiny pretty, things), but I just know that I almost forgot this even came out yesterday and when I did watch it I found myself really just kind of nodding along to the expected beats.

Kanzaki turned up as the last minute hero of last episode and lasted less than five minutes before she was coughing up blood. I’ll admit, they were a cool five minutes. Actually, I’ll fix that. There was about a cool minute in those five minutes of actual fight, meanwhile the two saints prattled various bits of nonsense at one another that I guess passes for plot or exposition at this point but honestly, who could care.

Then we have Acqua more or less pounding Kanzaki while pointing out how stupid she is and her church for even fighting if they are that weak, blah, blah, blah… More big hits, more property damage, where the hell is anyone from Academy City while the churches are fighting it out destroying entire levels? Nope, no answer to that one.

And then there’s the revelation. Team work. Kanzaki calls on all the glorified extras who were beaten down in last week’s bit of filler and they all jump down an entire level and then proceed to more or less just stand totally still while Kanzaki and Itsuwa try a repeat of the saint spell they used last week and they still would have lost except that Touma manages to arrive, at that precise moment, in the middle of the battlefield and blocks Acqua’s attack with his hand.

Wow.

While watching this, it occurred to me, that not even the shiny, pretty action is that shiny anymore. During that final strike we didn’t get to see the characters in relation to one another once. We had close up of Kanzaki, close up of Itsuwa, close up of Acqua, one very brief panning shot of the scene that didn’t even make it down to Touma, and then back to close ups. There was no chance to get a sense of what was actually happening and all the characters had more or less identical pained looks on their faces so if they were going for revealing emotions, they kind of failed.

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 9 Touma and Itsuwa

I’m giving this one to episode 12. At that point, I’m almost positive I am done. It is going to need to do something pretty spectacular in the next three episodes though because to be honest, this was just bad.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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A Fight Between Saints Should Be Exciting, Right?

Posted on November 28, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 8 Review

Part of me wonders if maybe I’ve just outgrown this series? Looking at this episode from a distance it should be really exciting. We’ve got a whole pile of characters from the church gathering themselves together to take on a saint. It’s a dramatic fight, the music is pumping and we move through multiple set-pieces leaving destruction in their wake. Their inevitable defeat isn’t a problem because they aren’t the protagonists, not even close.

Yet, as I watched episode 8 of A Certain Magical Index, I couldn’t help but find myself wondering why I was supposed to care.

Touma is in the hospital after being severely injured and then thrown of the bridge last week and the saint gave him one day to hand over his arm. The fight now isn’t doing anything. A day hasn’t passed, Touma isn’t even awake, it is all just filling screen time. Perhaps if I thought there was any chance they might have resolved the situation prior to Touma waking up their might have been some point to it, but all and all it just seems like an excuse to throw around more terminology and jargon and have a ‘cool’ fight sequence.

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 8

This impression isn’t helped with the arrival of Kanzaki after the B Team are definitely taken out despite Itsuwa getting all fired up. Kanzaki was a cool character back in season one but she just kind of shows up now, broods a bit, occasionally does something cool with her sword, and then Touma will show up to save the day. And while I get they were trying to show that Kanzaki is a part of her group, using more or less the same sequence of attacks that we just watched against the enemy but faster and more powerful isn’t all that interesting.

Then of course the whole thing is proven to be pointless by the post credits scene where Touma wakes up and instead of sensibly resting in his hospital bed off he goes to join the fight leaving the conveniently sleeping Index oblivious to the plot as normal.

Yeah, I really don’t know why I’m watching season three of this. The issues with the plot and characters just get more and more pronounced with every passing episode.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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A Certain Villainous Laugh and Meandering Plot Line

Posted on November 18, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episodes 6 + 7 Review

Episode 6 brings kind of to a close all the factions fighting for the tweezers, though they do throw out a new name of a new faction at the end and really there was no where near enough of an explanation for all the crazy going on from these people during these episodes or the lack of response from the city as they literally tore it apart. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t full of cool moments, because who doesn’t like a good screw-driver to the ear scene while listening to terrible puns, but it does mean the whole experience seemed relatively empty.

Even the reuniting of Accelerator and Last Order couldn’t really get me excited about what was happening here. Too little context and too little connection to any of the characters and too little care about Aleister and his secret plans, whatever they may be, just leads to all of this just being flash and noise on a screen and if I just switch off I can enjoy it enough but afterwards I just have to wonder why I’m bothering.

Then episode 7 switches us back to Touma and Index and what do you know, he’s being targeted by another Saint from some holy kind of organisation with a long name that I won’t remember, and another organisation is going to protect him. Wait, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this story before.

Anyway, of course the best way to protect Touma is to send the girl in, even though she’s never once actually succeeded at protecting anything and is regularly rescued by Touma. And the best thing that back up crew can think to do is orchestrate a date sequence for them. Shouldn’t they be doing something like actually looking for the crazy guy?

Never mind.

Crazy guy found them and they ceased to be of consequence (assuming anyone ever thought they had any). Then crazy guy proceeds to beat up Touma and toss him off a bridge before telling him to cut off his arm and hand it over before the end of the next day and then he’ll be allowed to live.

What is it with villains doing stupid things like this?

I mean, the guy can’t fight back and you’ve taken out all the back up. Just cut the damn arm off and take it as a trophy. Done. Oh no. Let’s give them a whole day to rest, recover, rally some strength and have a bigger smack down that you are likely to lose.

Idiotic villains. I just want one villain this season that doesn’t suffer from a severe case of stupid.

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Karandi James

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A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 5: I’m Glad I’m Not The Only One Confused

Posted on November 5, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

A lot of the dialogue this episode was taken up by characters either trying to identify or asking which group others characters were a part of (not helped by on the the groups being called GROUP) and it made me feel relatively happy that I wasn’t the only one lost as to who belongs to which random name. The real problem though is that even within groups there ends up being dissent so even if you didn’t remember their names you remembered who was working together, until they decide not to work together. So colour me confused on the specifics of who is helping who and who is fighting who.

That said, Accelerator, Tsuchimikado, the Aztec guy and girl wearing bandages (see, I’m paying a lot of attention) remain fairly much the main focus and more or less everyone is against them so whether you remember which party the opponent comes from becomes more or less an exercise in pointlessness.

And all of that might make Index sound like a terrible mess which, from a strictly speaking point of view, it is. However, you can’t tell me that watching Accelerator turn up the villain act to 100 as he squishes a bug who thought he could best a level 5 esper just because he’s a little off his game since taking a head shot isn’t entertaining. It is over the top, it is really cluttered and messy, there’s way too many characters, groups, and powers bouncing around the place to actually keep track of it in any meaningful way if you are only a casual viewer, and yet there’s so much fun energy here.

Now, the one criticism I’m not going to hand wave past because it was fun anyway comes back to the Aztec guy as he’s facing off against someone from his previous organisation. And after she pretty much loses the fight she starts unravelling, fairly literally, because apparently she took a grimoire into herself (apparently it didn’t matter as long as she killed the Aztec guy – so great thought process there). Now, it has been forever since we’ve heard about the grimoires and to be honest I forgot why they were such a big deal (seriously, the show is named after Index who houses a bunch of the things, they really should show up more often), but even that isn’t the problem.

The problem is, Aztec guy just says what he’s going to do to stop it and even admits he doesn’t know if it will work and then we cut scenes. Later, Aztec guy meets up with everyone else on the team.

So, what happened? Is the girl alive, dead, consumed by the grimoire, ran away, what? I mean, they might tell us later but whatever they do now it will be telling us about this confrontation rather than showing us and to be honest Index does a little too much stand around and technobabble at the audience to explain things that we could just as easily learn by seeing.

However, with that complaint out of the way, I had another very fun time watching this episode and amazingly enough we are still Touma free. From reading other posts from people familiar with the source it seems he won’t be appearing in the arc, so I guess we’ll see but to be honest I’m not actually all that upset with his absence.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 4: Ditch The Main Cast And Go For A Ride

Posted on October 29, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

Theoretically we might have met a lot more of these characters before than I remember. I haven’t watched seasons one and two of this for awhile but I’m going to be honest and just say that I recognised maybe four characters in this episode. The rest of the time we were just blipping between groups of people and locations as everyone kind of went about either planning to do something or planning to foil someone else’s plan and lots of stuff went boom in between.

Part of me wonders if everyone just realised that Touma is a really boring character and that Index contributes nothing given the two of them were completely absent for the entire duration. Now, at first I tried to rationalise this by thinking that maybe they still weren’t back in academy city but that logic doesn’t really work when Tsuchimikado and Accelerator are both running around in this episode. Alternatively, Touma is probably back in hospital again but given Accelerator went by the hospital to harass the only doctor who ever appears in this anime at one point, we could have at least seen Touma in a scene to confirm that. So basically, Touma’s just vanished and apparently the audience isn’t supposed to ask why or where. I’m sure he’ll turn up later in this particular story and solve everything by punching something but in the meantime I guess all these characters are a lot more interesting even if I have no idea who most of them are.

The episode is very concerned with you not getting bored though. We’ve got one group taking some guy into custody before the truck gets bisected and the guy gets killed by another group who are apparently planning an assassination to act as a decoy for stealing some long titled widget from a lab. But another group are annoyed about that and are going after them as well leading to a wrecking ball going through a truck and a guy jumping off a roof. And there’s yet another group that blew up the apartment that belonged to a guy in the group that took the first guy into custody and then the guy who owned the apartment apparently used Aztec magic to turn himself into one of the group and infiltrated it and they are apparently trying to steal a computer virus (or something) as a decoy because they are actually after another lab that has something to do with a satellite.

Did I mention somewhere in there we also got a quick scene of Last Order being taken home from the hospital? I’m sure that is somehow important but can’t for the life of me figure out why.

Right, I have no idea what is going on. Or why. And for some reason I don’t really care because this was really fun to watch even without much of a context. I’m just going to assume eventually this will all make sense, and in the meantime the characters can all just keep running around and making things go boom.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 3: More Jargon, More Punching

Posted on October 22, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

Part of me wonders whether there’s any reason why after two seasons of this show I firstly still like it and secondly am still watching it. Basically, while the plot continues to become yet more convoluted in the jargon they like to babble at the audience, every incident is resolved much the same way with Kamijou eventually punching whoever is responsible and destroying whatever mystic whosit they were chasing by touching it before getting somehow knocked out or injured to the point where the next time we see him he’s waking up in hospital, again.

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 3 — I love how the assumption is that there is definitely a weakness to be found.

Yet, the answer to the question of why I am still watching A Certain Magical Index is actually pretty clear. While this formula is repetitive, it is great fun and when accompanied by the music and the general intensity all of the characters put into climactic scenes, it is difficult not to get swept up even if we are just waiting for the right hand to nullify everything and call it a day.

The other reason is that this show continues to bring back ideas from each of its previous stories and continues to build a fairly complex (if at times nonsense) kind of world. This opening act delivers that beautifully with Misaka’s return as a reoccurring character and while it was nice in the first two episodes to see her hounding Kamijou yet again, the phone conversation that she overheard where she finds out that he has in fact lost his memory (something that I kept hoping someone would realise much earlier on) kind of brings things nicely together. We also get a return from Accelerator that really doesn’t add anything to Kamijou’s story but helps with world believability because even after his injuries he’s still pretty much a weapon of mass-destruction.

So while A Certain Magical Index has done nothing to address its problems, three seasons in there’s probably little inclination to fix them because more than enough people are on board with the story as it is. There’s a lot of fun to be had with this cast and the overblown nature of everything is just par for the course.

Although, one of these days it would be nice to meet a villain who isn’t a complete psycho.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episodes 1 + 2: That Time Something Happened to Kamijou

Posted on October 15, 2018December 16, 2018 by Karandi

I’ve previously reviewed season1 of a Certain Magical Index and at the time I kind of made it clear that while I had fun enough with the show, I preferred the Railgun spin-off, in a very rare case of preferring a spin-off and that Index has some real issues. I never did review the second season individually because really it was jut more of the same. Well, back for a third season, eventually, and the first episode finally available for people in more regions and the question is what are we in for?

There’s a simple answer though; nothing has changed. We still have Kamijou wandering around Academy City harmlessly going about his business and being just really unlucky in the events and encounters he has during episode 1 of this return. On the brighter side we’re reminded quickly of the key players in the academy and they even throw a shooting into the mix just so we’re reminded that despite looking like a goofy school club anime this show actually does have some darker ideas and fight sequences in it so just wait around.

Yet they don’t make the audience wait long, or even let the plot and exposition even catch up, as we scene change to France in episode 2 where Kamijou teams up with another girl from the previous seasons, and I’m really struggling with my memory to place her, to destroy some mystic pipeline and instead they get attacked by a guy who claims to be the right seat of god.

Yeah, they haven’t eased up on throwing every term and idea they can drag out of any theology book on the planet at the audience in great big exposition dumps either so it really is business just as usual for this show. The fan-service is also plentiful with panty shots, blushing girls, and other revealing outfits coming thick and fast in these two episodes.

So pretty much if you’ve enjoyed this before, it gets right back into the same tone we left off at and it is still just kind of fun. A little head scratching at times with some of their ideas about religious organisations and the way they use some of their terminology, but still fun.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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Exposition On A Plane With Index And The Terrorist

A Certain Magical Index Season 3 Episode 10 Review

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