Magical Girl Raising Project
(Reviewed on 01/11/2017)
The Magically Violent ROSSMAN
Remember Puella Magi Madoka Magica? Remember how "edgy" and "dark" and "violent" and "OMG, I can't believe they did that in a show about magical girls" it was? Yeah, well the makers of this new anime series, Magical Girls Murder Slaughter Magical Girl Raising Project remember Madoka Magica, and they decided to one-up it. Actually, they four-upped it.
The Magical Girl Raising Project writers and directors added a buttload more magical girls into their story, made the girls a lot more intelligent (not very difficult to do, considering the Madoka Magica characters were dumber than a bag filled with Usagi Tsukino, Tenma Tsukamoto, Shiina Mashiro, Son Goku, and the entire cast of Baka and Test), and upped the drama and violence like dumping the cast into a giant blender, dousing them with gasoline, and throwing in a match just before clicking the "liquefy" button.
What is Magical Girl Raising Project (from here on out referred to as "MGRP") about, you ask, like someone who thinks that Magica Madoka is the greatest thing ever, and HOW DARE anybody even hint at the possibility that another show that copied it could possibly match it, or even (god forbid!) be even BETTER than your precious magical girl baby? First of all, calm the fuck down, or you'll give your fatty fanboy heart an attack. Second of all, MGRP goes a little something like this:
There's this really popular mobile game that girls have begun playing called Magical Girl Raising Project, wherein the player chooses a character type (like regular magical girl, witchy magical girl, ninja magical girl, or cat-girl magical girl), and then they must get their avatar to run around the game world and kill bad creatures and collect candies. Well, it turns out that this game is a recruitment tool (SHOCK!) — a la The Last Starfighter, or Pharaoh: Pyramid Builder — and 16 girls in N-City, Japan are given the chance to become actual, literal, really real magical girls!
Each girl who makes the cut gets to look like their adorable online avatar when she transforms, and they all have their own special magical power too, like being able to feel when people need help, fly super fast on a broomstick, or shape shift into any inanimate object. Nifty!
The game's talking mascot (the weirdly floating, black and white, always smirking Fav) informs our main character, middle schooler Koyuki Himekawa, that she (as her magical girl alias, Snow White) gets to run around town earning magical points (still referred to as "candies") by helping people in need. Soon Snow White is the top of all the magical girls in her town (they have weekly meetings in their own personal chat room, of course), and she's so happy, and everything is just perfect... But then Fav tells everyone that one more girl has qualified to join their real magical ranks, but 16 girls is just too much for this small town's magical mana power, and so there'll be a contest to decide who gets to stay, as they have to get their magical numbers down to 8.
Everyone is bummed by this, especially once they're told that the losers (one per week for 8 weeks) will lose all their magical girl powers and never be able to join the rest of them for fun awesome adventures ever again.
So some girls team up and do tons of good deeds together in order to not be the one to lose that first week, but they needn't have worried, as the laziest bitch in their small circle, Nemurin (an always sleepy girl who can enter other people's dreams as her main power), earns like negative 100 candies, and after she says goodbye to all her magical friends, Fav lets her enter somebody's dream one last time as a farewell present. Nemurin finds a dream of a young child who seems to be looking up to a royal carriage with some sort of ruler inside, and Nemurin, as a parting gift to the world, tells the youth that they too can be a ruler, if they really want to.
Magical Girl SPOILERS (Kinda)
Then Nemurin FUCKING DIES.
Once all the remaining magical girls find out what happened to their ex-comrade, that's when we as viewers find out that this Magical Girl Raising Project is actually a mix of Sailor Moon, Nurse Angel Ririka S.O.S., Bokurano, and Battle Royale. Soon the girls realize that the losers each week not only never get to transform into magical girls anymore, but they don't even get to live. That's when they all start dividing up into factions in order to help each other, and themselves.
Then Fav drops a new "game feature" on the crew telling them that they now have the ability to share candies with each other. Some of the bitchiest girls take this to mean that they can now STEAL candies from other girls, and the slaughter of cute enhanced lasses begins, along with a little ultra-violence and ladies snapping in the most undignified, but supremely psychotic ways.
This is the part of the story where people who wished that Madoka Magica had gone just a little further with its torturing of cute young middle schoolers with its already sadistic plot get what they wanted. The sense of dread and terror that surrounds the cast is almost palpable. The first time watching Bokurano and Battle Royale (with their "many will enter, one will leave" attitudes) is the closest that I can come to explaining how horrible you feel for the characters. You see, as much as I liked Madoka Magica's story, I didn't really give a shit what happened to the protagonists (because they were all so very, very dumb). But the girls in MGRP, I liked them all. Even the total cunts (and there were quite a few of them). They were good cunts. Cunts that you were supposed to loathe. They played their parts well.
Every last girl in MGRP changes and grows in her own way during the course of this story. Yes, the main plot appears to be nothing but an all-out slaughter using magical powers, but the characters grow and change in realistic ways during their journeys into darkness. Some rise to the challenge and become great leaders, some find that the pressure is too much and the potential price is too heavy, and they crumble, and others start looking into ways to buck the system and take Fav and whoever is running the show down from the inside.
Anyway, my point is, DON'T let your little girl watch this show thinking "Oh, it's called 'Magical Girl Raising Project'? That sounds like Sailor Moon. I like Sailor Moon. I watched that when I was a kid myself. Li'l Karen will probably love This Magical Girl show just as much! I'll just put it on the TV for her and then go into the other room to make dinner."
It's one of those shows wherein I had a great time while watching it, but only after it was done did I notice that there wasn't much meat on the bone. Which is fine, in its own way. Not everything has to have a genius Code Geass-like plot. But it did make me wonder what it could have been had they put a little more effort into things. Just a little more story, a little more depth. Yes, we find answers to all the questions that this show brings up (the main one being "WHY are they even DOING THIS to these poor girls?!"), but this anime is basically just an excuse to make you like a whole lot of characters, and then watch them waste each other on screen in bloody, ultra-violent, magically creative ways.
As for the music, the score to the show portrayed the creepy vibe very well, but the op and ed tunes were utterly forgettable. I believe I listened to them once, and then skipped them upon each episode after that.
Cute, and often creative character designs for all the girls was a major plus to the production too. There's no confusing any character for any other; they all have their own theme going for them. I think my favorite is a toss-up between the witch (Top Speed), and the psychotic cowgirl (Calamity Mary). Though Swim Swim's insanely retarded costume, consisting of a white one-piece swimsuit, swimming goggles, a single garter, bat wings, headphones, black leather gloves, multiple tails, and combat boots sticks out as the biggest "Oh SHIT! We have one more girl to design! What should we dress her as? Fuck it! Here's all my fetishes in one!"
Will you like MGRP? This is a tough one. If you don't mind lots of blood, middle school-looking girls shooting or hacking or blowing each other up to bits, and high tension, I say give it a shot. It's fun, but just don't expect the Citizen Kane of magical girl shows. (I would find it absolutely hilarious if whoever gets this series for US distribution puts "...The Citizen Kane of magical girl shows. -the Rossman" on the Blu-ray cover.)
CUPCAKE
Oh........
My.............
God................
No, Japan, no. Please stop. You essentially MURDERED Sailor Moon and all her Sailor Senshi buddies in one broad swoop. Why? Why would you do this? Do you hate Sailor Moon? How can you HATE Sailor Moon? She loves yooooou! Yet you just cut down all her friends in front of her eyes and mine. And you used a whole lot of red paint to do it too.
Was this show truly necessary? Did we really need to see 16 girls stabbing each other to death while dressed in tutus and cosplaying as Kiki? I vote no. No we did not.
This anime stunk of desperation to me. Just like oneupmanship. It was like somebody saw My Hime and said, "That was good, but not dark enough." And so they made Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Then the writers of this show saw that show and said, "Tsk! Amateurs!" This anime wasn't creative, it was just cruel.
OUR LORD AND SAVIOR
"Oh no! They killed off all those pretty magical girls! So sad!"
Guess what, bitches. They killed off THIS magical GUY a long, long time ago, and you don't see me bitchin' about it. Christ! They whipped me and then crucified me, just like Conan the Barbarian! And I take it all in stride... Well, I do bring it up every Father's Day in order to avoid having to buy a gift for the old man. But whatever...
My point is this: Magical made up people die every day. Shit happens. All you pansies whining about it simply need to get up off your asses and go outside and live a little. Go on... Turn of your TVs and computers and fly a kite! Ride a bike! Go to one of my churches and put some money in the collection plate!
I don't know what my point is, other than making a show just to torture and murder young people is terrible! It's terrible! I'm pretty sure that it goes against at least ONE Commandment or something. I think I even said something about it in the New Testament. Damn, that was a long time ago, and marijuana was legal back then. I don't remember much of what I said... You know what I DO remember though? My dad made me get NAILED TO A TREE because of you people! Well, not YOU, but your ancestors. That first ape man and ape woman. Those two fucks ate my dad's apple or something, and then he cursed them and all their kids with sin, and then I had to die painfully in order to free them of...... sssssssssin......... Waitaminute.
DAD! DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD! What the fuck, man?! Seriously?!
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