English Dub Review: A Certain Magical Index “The Dark Side of Academy City”

What, we some kinda…Science Side Squad?

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After some VERY summarized recap of how he got here, we join the top-ranked Level 5, Accelerator, as he takes on secret missions with his new gang that works directly for Academy City. This club brings together several talented agents from all over in order to complete these tasks. The members consist of:

T-suchimikado (who we’ve seen in the past few episodes)
E-tzali (an Aztec magician under the guise of a student named Unabara)
A-ccelerator (who I’ll get to later) and…
M-usujime Awaki (a teleporter)

So, naturally, this gathering of individuals to become a team is designated as…GROUP.

After neutralizing a dealer known as “Management”, GROUP starts using him track down his own…group, but he’s killed by those associates before he can be of use. Unabara searches his apartment for clues but gets attacked by a new team before he can find much. He uses his Aztec magic to peel off the skin of one of them and uses it to assume their identity and lays low amongst them while also leaving a lead for his teammates to work from. Turns out this team is en route to snipe Monaka Oyafune for her advocacy of student voting rights. Thinking fast, Accelerator asks Musujime to teleport him to where she’ll be speaking in order to cause a distraction and draw away the sniper. Tsuchimikado pinpoints the group who hired the sniper: SCHOOL. In addition, similar organizations also show up in his findings, such as MEMBER, BLOCK, and ITEM.

ITEM is led by the fourth-ranked Level 5, Mugino Shizuri, and is made up of three other girls, each with their own speech quirk, and one guy named Shiage Hamazura, a former member of a Level 0 gang called Skill-Out. They’re also on a hunt for why Oyafune was attacked, and know of SCHOOL’s connection to the attack. Their next move will be following SCHOOL’s lead in taking advantage of the confusion, specifically a special laboratory. Upon getting there, they’re attacked by SCHOOL and get scattered. Seems SCHOOL is being led by the second-ranked Level 5, Teitoku Kakine. He’s taken off with “the tweezers”, something he thinks will get him closer to the head of the city.

GROUP gets wise to SCHOOL’s plans on their own and get a call from Unabara. Seems the snipers were actually part of BLOCK, who wants to gain control of a satellite control center.

OUR TAKE

Well, we officially have had more episodes with Tsuchimikado this season than with either Index or Toma, which isn’t changing for at least the next two. This new arc is apparently the only full book where Toma never shows up at all, which is fine in and of itself. There are times we need to be able to see that the world of the story functions without the main character around, and what better way than by properly introducing us to two more of the seven Level 5’s that we haven’t met before? Which I guess makes Accelerator, the strongest of the seven, the kinda-sorta protagonist of this arc, a role he has had coming to him for a while.

Accelerator has had a far rougher ride in this story than someone like Toma, despite not showing up as much. He started out as the main villain of the third arc of the first season before getting defeated by Toma, then showed up a little later in that season to get depowered a bit and be given a little Index-like sidekick of his own to show how much better behaved he’d gotten. By the end of the second season, he’d more or less settled into a calmer life until his past came back to bite him, making him realize he couldn’t really belong in civilized society or be happy with his little sister clone (long story), and that’s how he got recruited into GROUP.

And the fact that I had to explain all of that (while leaving out at least 20,000 other relevant details) is one of the first strikes against this arc for being a complete continuity lockout for newcomers on the fourth episode of the season. Longtime fans like me will likely know and appreciate a lot of this going in, (as well as the re-introduction of ITEM, a villain group that anime-only viewers will remember from the second season of Railgun), but even then, with the sudden throwing in of at least two other groups, it’s kind of an overload of where focus is supposed to be. That’s without mentioning all the techno-jargon word salad that’s been tossed around which basically equates to “bad guys want to get the thing, but other bad guys want the bigger thing”.

I don’t know how much of this has to do with cutting this down to three episodes from the usual four-to-six an arc would get in the first two seasons, but this first one was an absolute mess. I’m still looking forward to seeing the top dogs of this show’s power scaling duke it out, but it’s definitely just the chips in an overly air-filled bag right now.