Anime Hajime Review: Magical Girl Ore

***Warning, the following may contain spoilers for Magical Girl Ore. Reader discretion is advised.***

Series Synopsis

Saki Uno (voiced by Ayaka Ohashi) is your typical teenage girl. She has big dreams, as well as a crush she fawns over constantly. However, she never finds it in herself to be a coherent human being whenever she is around the person she likes.

Then one day, demons appear and try to abduct Saki’s most special person. In order to save her one and only, Saki must become, of all things, a magical girl.

Upon professing her love for the whole world to hear, Saki begins her mystical metamorphosis. The once average teenager transforms into a valiant warrior of justice, complete with a magical rod, broad shoulders, glistening muscles, and a giant bulge in her pan…wait, what?

Yes, Saki becoming a magical girl didn’t entirely go the way she thought. Rather than becoming the typical adorable hero one might expect, Saki turns into the very powerful, and the very male, Magical Girl Ore (voiced by Kaito Ishikawa).

Although unconventional, Saki is still a magical girl. Despite her constant embarrassment of that fact, she commits herself to protecting the people she cares about.

Series Positives

It was pure coincidence I ended up covering two series in a row that twisted the usual perception of the magical girl genre. The first was the dark and gritty Magical Girl Site, and for this review, we’re looking at the considerably more satirical Magical Girl Ore. Though this pairing was unintentional, this has proven to be a most interesting opportunity.

Watching these shows back-to-back has been fascinating to see how two vastly different directions can meet what is essentially the same goal: the deconstruction of what makes a magical girl anime. For Magical Girl Site, that series took concepts that are often depicted as happy, cheery, and cute and put them under a much bleaker light. On the other end of this spectrum, Magical Girl Ore explored and poked fun at many of the nonsensical and sillier aspects of this genre.

This has also been a chance to see the disparity between a show that found success in its methods and a show that stumbled along its way. Unfortunately for Magical Girl Ore, it was the latter.

Thinking back on this series, I can’t say that it was great. In fact, I can’t even bring myself to say it was all that good. However, despite its many, many hiccups, Magical Girl Ore did have good things in it. And when this show got something right, it really got something right.

Magical Girl Ore was on its A-game whenever it did what you expected it to do. This show was at its most fun when it was satirizing the magical girl genre. I hate that I must be specific since this should have been a given, but sadly, that was not the case. Somewhere along the line, this series thought it would be a good idea to be a lot more than it needed to be.

Long story short, Magical Girl Ore got a bit cluttered. But more on this later in the review.

There are tons of magical girl anime out there, and I doubt I have even seen a fraction of them. Luckily, there is only one magical girl show you need to be familiar with in order to get the most enjoyment out of Magical Girl Ore. I am of course talking about the one and only Sailor Moon.

For the record, I love Sailor Moon. It is easily within my top anime. Nevertheless, my god, it had a lot of problems. There was a ton of BS that went into that show; all of which I covered in my six-part review of that series. Fortunately, Sailor Moon had an irreplaceable charm and five of the most memorable anime characters ever to make up for all of its absurdities. However, those absurdities were still there, and the people behind Magical Girl Ore were aware of them.

For example, in Sailor Moon, it was a little maddening how no one was ever able to figure out the identities of Sailor Moon or any of the other Sailor Scouts. This was despite zero attempts by the girls to hide who they were. Magical Girl Ore’s very premise solved this problem. Why would anyone ever think a small, petite girl and a giant, muscular guy would be the same person? 

Also, and this was a thing that happened in Sailor Moon to a degree, the typical image of a magical girl’s outfit often involves cute, but extremely short skirts. The kind of short skirts that allow certain camera angles to show us everything. This was no different in Magical Girl Ore.

However, if you’re going to get creeped out with what this series did and not bat an eye when most other magical girl shows do the exact same thing, except with characters who are fifteen or sixteen-years-old, then I doubt you can see the inherent annoyance with this trope.

To go along with concealing a magical girl’s identity, transformation sequences in these shows are usually flashy and loud. You know, the kind of occurrences that should make a scene, but for some reason, no one ever seems to notice them. In Magical Girl Ore, whenever Saki needed to transform, she would try to do so in a place where no one could see her. For instance, she might head into a bathroom stall. That’s a lot more than Sailor Moon ever did.

Despite that, though, Saki still had to shout her mantra at the top of her lungs, and her transformation still involved a lot of bright, flashing lights. Everyone in the vicinity was acutely aware that something was happening. It also didn’t help that a teenage girl walked into a bathroom, there was a huge commotion, and then a big burly guy in a cute outfit walked out. But since this was a magical girl show, no one was capable of connecting the obvious sequence of events going on right before their eyes.

This type of mockery happened throughout Magical Girl Ore, and it usually hit home. My favorite of these moments came during Saki’s first fight. Here we got to see this show’s version of magical girl weapons.

Sure enough, the items in this series weren’t powered by the strength of love and friendship. Instead, these weapons ran on gunpowder and actual bullets. However, it was Saki’s item of choice that got me excited, because it had to be the greatest magical object I have ever seen in any magical girl show.

For Saki, she used a stereotypical magic rod to vanquish her foes. Of course, by “magic rod,” I mean it was nothing more than a cutesy-fied metal pipe Saki used to bludgeon her enemies into a bloody pulp. This show was actually very violent. 

Magical Girl Ore got a few really good laughs out of me. This series knew how to be funny, and it was at its funniest whenever its protagonist, Saki, was on screen.

There was a bluntness to Saki that was hilarious. It didn’t matter if she was her usual self or if she was transformed. In fact, I want to give credit to both actors who voiced Saki: Ayaka Ohashi and Kaito Ishikawa. Regardless of what she looked like, Saki was always the same character whenever it was either Ms. Ohashi or Mr. Ishikawa playing her. There was never any change in her personality.

Throughout this show, Saki had to deal with a lot, and she tended to not handle things very well. Saki was an exaggerated version of what Usagi Tsukino was like at the beginning of Sailor Moon. Both characters were cowardly, lazy, and had difficulties getting used to their sudden roles as magical girls. However, if they were upset, Usagi would get pouty whereas Saki would just punch the S.O.B. who pissed her off.

Like I said at the top of this review, there were a lot of good things in Magical Girl Ore. That’s why it hurts to say that this was only a small part of what this series was. Everything else was hard to sit through.

Series Negatives

I need to get this out of the way. I’m not going to mark this as a point against Magical Girl Ore because, for all I know, the people behind this series might have tried to make it happen, and, perhaps, things simply didn’t work out.

The joke should have been to get Ms. Kotono Mitsuishi to play Saki’s mother, Sayori Uno. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Ms. Mitsuishi was the original voice actress for Usagi Tsukino, a.k.a. Sailor Moon, a.k.a. the magical girl of magical girls. This was a missed opportunity if I do say so myself.

However, the actress who ended up playing Sayori Uno was Ms. Aya Hisakawa, and Ms. Hisakawa was the original voice actress for Sailor Mercury, or as I like to call her, the best character of Sailor Moon. That makes up for things, I suppose.

Getting to the things that annoyed me about Magical Girl Ore, this show wasn’t at all enjoyable until episode two. The opening to this series was almost unbearable, and this was one-hundred-percent the fault of the character Kokoro-chan (voiced by Kazuya Ichijo).

Every magical girl needs an adorable sidekick. For Magical Girl Ore, that meant giving Saki a yakuza-like fairy familiar. That in itself wasn’t a bad idea. The problem was, whoever told Mr. Ichijo, the actor for Kokoro-chan, to use the voice he used in this show needs to be fired. This was ear-wrenching. Kokoro-chan didn’t sound tough or intimidating. And you better believe he wasn’t funny. This was just awful.

Thank Christ, Mr. Ichijo’s performance toned way the hell down as this series went on. But in that first episode, it was hard to pay attention to anything because that would have meant needing to listen to this character speak.

That aside, the first episode of Magical Girl Ore still felt rushed and overpacked. This series introduced much of what it was going to do right at the beginning. However, although we got a glimpse of Saki’s magical girl form at the end of this episode, we didn’t get the fallout from it until the next one. Since a small girl transforming into a huge guy to fight demons was the point of this show, is it any surprise that once that happened, things began picking up?

When this series got to episode two, that was when Magical Girl Ore found something akin to a stride. Unfortunately, that all ended upon the introduction of the cyborg hero Fujimoto (voiced by Megumi Ogata). At first, it appeared as though this show was setting Fujimoto up to be a rival for Saki.

Instead of doing that, though, this was how Magical Girl Ore brought in its biggest mistake: meta-humor. Out of nowhere, the characters started to acknowledge that they were in a show. This was never used to critique the magical girl genre. This series used this as a way to poke fun at anime in general. For what it’s worth, there’s nothing wrong with doing that.

However, once Magical Girl Ore began doing this, this series hit a massive brick wall.

Meta-humor can be hilarious when done right. Too bad this can also lead to some of the cringiest examples of comedy when done wrong. Nowhere was this most egregiously wrong than in episode five. What was this?

Problem: Saki wasn’t in this episode. Why would you do that, show? Why would you EVER have your main character, not to mention, best feature be off doing something else? Why would you, instead, focus on a bunch of nonentities while parodying the most recent Godzilla movie?

Also, I don’t give a crap that Saki did appear at the end of episode five. As far as I’m concerned, she wasn’t in this episode.

After this point in the show, it was hard to regain interest. Granted, there were other funny bits in the rest of this series. But regarding me caring about the main point, that ship had sailed. This was why the finale of Magical Girl Ore was a bit odd.

The last episode of this show stopped being a parody. Instead, Magical Girl Ore actually became a magical girl anime. No joking, no silliness, just the kind of stuff you would expect out of this type of series. And it was so lame.

Right at the end, Magical Girl Ore chose to forgo its sense of humor. It didn’t try to satirize this aspect of magical girl shows like it had done before. Usually, this series tried being as loud as possible, but it concluded on a weak whimper.  

Then it ended. For a show that did so many good things, it couldn’t stop itself from becoming a choppy mess.

Final Thoughts

This series had some of the best commentary on the magical girl genre I have ever seen. There was some really funny stuff here. And that’s the tragedy of it all.

This show had the right idea so many times. It knew exactly what it needed to do to highlight the absurdity found in this genre. Too bad this series forgot to put its good ideas into a story free of its own absurdities.

It took too long for things to get started. This show wanted to do way more than it needed to. And this series fizzled out at the end.

Even though it means missing out of a lot of clever parody, Magical Girl Ore is still one you can skip.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? Have you seen this show? What would be your advice concerning Magical Girl Ore? Leave a comment down below because I would love to hear what you have to say.

And if you liked what you read, be sure to follow me on my social media sites so that you never miss a post or update. Also, please share this review across the internet to help add to the discussion.

I’m LofZOdyssey, and I’ll see you next time.

               Google+                        Facebook                         Twitter