English Dub Review: Magical Girl Raising Project “New Character!”

There are far worse things than wholesome lesbian romance.

Overview (Spoilers!)

Horrified at the actions of her fellow magical girls, Sister Nana begs Top Speed and Ripple to help her put the fighting to an end. Ripple is frustrated by Nana’s idealistic ideas.

Now the leader of Tama and the twins, Swim Swim reveals that she plans to steal more candies.

At home in their human forms, Nana and Weiss Winterprison share an intimate moment. Nana suggests that perhaps Magicaloid can help them, because she did so in the past. Newly magical, Nana was desperate for her girlfriend to become a magical girl as well so the two could be equals. Sensing an opportunity to make a quick buck, Magacaloid used her power (to summon random, useless objects from the future) and sold those objects to Nana under the guise that they would help Weiss. But lo and behold, her scam somehow worked, and Weiss became a magical girl anyway!

In the current day, Magicaloid helps Calamity Mary threaten a mob for money (and candies). She agrees to talk to the game admins for Nana, but only because Nana pays her.

After sending Nana a request to meet, Cranberry reveals that her motivation is to fight powerful magical girls; she engages Weiss in battle, but Weiss and Nana are able to escape. They meet with Hardgore Alice, the new magical girl, but Alice seems only interested in Snow White.

Snow White herself is tormented by the deaths of her fellow magical girls, but she’s comforted by La Pucelle’s presence—could she have feelings for her childhood friend? Unfortunately for this couple, Cranberry chooses La Pucelle as her next target.

Our Take

Is this episode disjointed? Kind of. Is it confusing? A little. Does it have much to do with the main story? Honestly, not really.

But is there a beautiful love story? Yes, my dearest reader, yes there is!

A lot of this episode is taken up by backstory and filler, but those sequences are so cute and funny that I can’t really fault them. Sister Nana is adorable. Weiss is charming, thanks to Morgan Berry’s cool, natural voice acting (and thanks to Weiss’s A+ style in her human form). And the romance between these two? It’s lovely to watch.

It’s not often that you see sweet, domestic moments between a healthy lesbian couple on TV, and my heart was melting the whole time. I really like that Nana puts so much value on the two of them being equals, and I care about the two of them a whole lot more as characters now that I know the stakes of what they’re fighting for. Incidentally, I love that the nun-themed character is dating a woman. What a great slap in the face to the people who think religion means gay love is wrong.

The scenes between Nana and Magicaloid are also pretty great, if only because they made me laugh. I mean, an insect gender identifier? That’s hilarious. Magicaloid is so insensitive, and the idea of a robot being obsessed with money is too funny. What does she need money for? But it does make me wonder—what’s up with Magicaloid? Why is she a robot? She has a human form too, right?

My main issue is that the last episode of this series introduced Hardgore Alice (what a wild name) as the new magical girl and implied that she’d be a really important player in this week’s installment. I mean, this episode is even called “New Character!” But in the end, Alice was only onscreen for one short scene in the second half. All throughout the first half of this episode, I found myself asking, “Hey, where’d that new girl go?” and it was pretty distracting. I also found it a little unbelievable that Weiss, who doesn’t trust easily, just tells Alice where Snow White is without a second thought.

This episode also veers off-track from the main plot of the series. It’s important to give some limelight to the other magical girls, of course, and I do like learning about them. But unlike with Ruler and Nemurin, whose backstories were woven pretty well into the narrative, the focus on Nana and Weiss here completely overshadows our protagonist Snow White, leaving her with very little airtime. And I do want to know how Swim Swim and her cronies are dealing with Ruler’s death, too.

Additionally, I sometimes find it difficult to determine which human forms correspond to which magical girls. Maybe because of her dark hair, or her voice, or the fact that Nana calls her magical girl persona “mysterious”—I initially thought the human Weiss was Ripple. When I figured out that the girl living with her is Nana, for a shocking couple of moments, I believed Ripple and Nana were dating. Their conversation makes basically no sense in the context of Ripple and Nana—they talk about being a unified front against other magical girls—so it was pretty confusing. In my defense for this silly mistake, Weiss has basically never spoken in the show up until now, and I straight up just forgot she was a character.

Or perhaps I got confused because we’re tantalized this week with a snippet of Ripple’s backstory. I’m excited to learn more because Ripple is a really intriguing character. I like the way she and Top Speed work together, how Top Speed understands her and can translate her tsks to the other magical girls. Speaking of which, I’m interested to see what Top Speed means when she says she doesn’t want to die “in the next six months.” What’s up, Top Speed?

Since I’m new to reviewing this show, I thought I’d offer a brief opinion on Magical Girl Raising Project as a whole so far. This show is Madoka meets Danganronpa, but it manages to maintain a pretty light tone with a cast of quirky and likable characters. I evoke Danganronpa especially because of a clue revealed in this episode, where FAV (our half-white, half-black mascot character) reveals that magical girls fighting and stealing and dying is a game to him. And of course, it’s easy to compare MGRP to Madoka because the two premises are so similar—they both present a world in which magical girls fight and kill for a resource that keeps them alive.

But where Madoka does a masterful job of exploring the consequences of hopelessness, suicide, obsession, and the savior complex, Magical Girl Raising Project fails to pack the same emotional punch. The characters are definitely fun, but because there are 16 leads, it’s difficult to develop any of them enough to make a meaningful point (although Danganronpa did so perfectly well). But honestly, I don’t mind that this show isn’t that deep. Despite some heavy subject matter, MGRP succeeds as a lighthearted, humorous ensemble piece with a lot of heart to it. Plus, the dub has pretty good acting and quirky character voices that add to the charm of characters like Ruler and Calamity Mary (and this is coming from a guy who almost always prefers subs). So far, I’m enjoying this show!