#mahou shoujo ikusei keikaku

I made the girls from Magical Girl Raising Project with the Lily Story app

I’m seeing a common trend of production companies greenlighting series that intend to hook audiences at the beginning with shock factor and leave the quality of the series as a toss up depending on staff. Often times the person in charge of series composition on such projects has a history of big hits often thanks to their scenarios containing many twists.

A fact that we often take for granted is that all the anime that come out every season are in competition with eachother for viewership.

A show that hooks a sizeable audience at the start despite a poor story will still have a larger audience than a show with a slow start but delivers a big payoff.

The production companies know this and take advantage of it. Why wouldn’t they? The number of of shows that comes out every season keeps going up. They’re fighting for your eyeballs.

Two examples from this season: Izetta the Last Witch and Magical Girl Raising Project.

Izetta’s writer, Hiroyuki Yoshino, is arguably one of the worst in the industry. You may have heard he was a writer on Code Geass but he was the assistant. His bigger claim to fames are Guilty Crown, Strike the Blood, and Vividred Operation. Most of the shows he’s worked on that were good are mostly because he takes on the role of building the scenario with the series’ creator. And many of his series are hits which is why they keep bringing him back. One of Izetta’s heavily marketed qualities was the WWII setting and the authenticity of the WWII weapons and vehicles. Battles and military tactics were portrayed with a high degree of realism and for a time early on, that was heavily praised. This entire element of the show was swiftly phased out as the series chose to focus more on the magical warfare aspect and culminated in a witch vs witch battle.

The writer in charge of series composition in this case was Yoshioka Takao. His resume speaks for itself: Elfen Lied, Freezing, Highschool DxD, Ikkitousen, Queen’s Blade, Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance, Sekeirei, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso (wait what? that doesn’t go here…), Shinmai Maou no Testament, and Zero no Tsukaima. Anyway, remember the opening scene of MGRP? A room of dead girls? Based on the first episode discussion, many people were already sold on the whole series. The scene was revisited for all of one minute at the beginning of a later episode but since it was a side character’s flashback, there was no impact on the main story.

A director (whose name I can’t remember for the life of me) once commented on this trend in interview saying that if he wanted to hook an audience, all he has to do is kill someone in the first episode.

tl;dr Be wary of shows that rely on gimmicks in their first episode. Directing and establishing themes are far stronger indicators of a quality anime.