English Dub Review: The Irregular at Magic High School “Visitor Arc II”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

We’re a few weeks into Lina’s new exchange assignment in Japan, and a mysterious duo (*definitely* not the Shiba siblings, right?) are killing people and draining their blood. Weirdly, students at this magic high school discuss the possibility of these incidents having an occult origin which Tatsuya points out was the classification of magicians not too long ago. Lina’s absent due to an “urgent family matter” (read: kicking ass), while Honoka reports that Shizuku (the student who was sent to America in Lina’s place) informed her that similar incidents have been occurring in the U.S., near Dallas. After Leo gets attacked in a park, Mikihiko theorizes that these “vampires” are supernatural parasites that feed off of spiritual energy, rather than blood. He scans Leo’s ethereal body to confirm, and reports back that his classmate would be comatose, if not for an almost inhuman physical strength. An intense conversation between Jumonji and Saegusa leads to both the revelation that this creature is targeting magicians specifically, and an alliance between their two families.

Our take

Am I getting old, or has the writing in current anime series gotten extra confusing? Maybe it’s always been like this, but it feels like recently there’s a lot less being explained upfront, or even in the series directly. It feels like even critical plot points have become the sort of thing you only notice upon subsequent rewatchings, rather than something that’s clear when you sit down to enjoy a new episode. This sort of approach works if you’re invested enough in the fictional world to do some side reading, and unfortunately for this series, I’m just not. Sure, almost every series is better if you’ve read the manga, but when it becomes required to understand who’s who, what everyone’s powers, roles, and even age are (y’know, the basics) it gets a little annoying. And sure, there’s no reason for every episode to re-establish the world and its players, but the storytelling should either stand on its own, or there should have been just a crumb or two of more context in the expository intro at the beginning of this arc.

I will say there’s some super solid action scenes, particularly in this episode, but it’s just not exactly clear what the fuck is going on. Maybe it’s supposed to make sense if you’ve watched the first season of the series, but it does seem like a lot of characters are being introduced for this particular arc, without many actual introductions happening. It actually feels very similar to the Cat Noir and Ladybug Miraculous World: New York, United Heroez movie I reviewed a few months ago, which is supposedly geared towards a fairly young audience, but was so all over the place plot-wise it got several “WTF mates” from me.

In addition to the perfectly fluid and CGI enhanced fight scenes, the voice cast performs more than admirably this episode. Yoshida Mikihiko gets quite a few more lines this week, which means we get to hear more from fellow Kansan and voice of Donatello in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles battle pass for SMITE, Landon McDonald. Always love to see someone from my home state make it big, even if they are from Overland Park (on the off chance he actually sees this, I’m kidding!) Mick Lauer (you may have heard him as the similarly named Leone Abbacchio in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind) voices Leo, with upbeat warmth that helps differentiate him from Tatsuya’s icy coldness, even if their registers fall in a similar range. Maureen Price (aka Mast Cell in Cells at Work) also gets to speak up as sweet, but shady, Mayumi Saegusa.

While this series so far seems a bit unsure which direction to go in (political thriller? Pure action? Science fantasy high school drama? Murder mystery? Teens save the world? Anything’s possible, really!) and heavily assumes that viewers already know the cast well enough to skip introductions for the most part, it’s shaping up to be potentially interesting. Unfortunately, it’s not quite there yet. But hey, there’s always next week! Hopefully they’ll cover why high school student Lina is the USNA’s secret weapon, what exactly students are training for at this magic high school, and how magic works in this world besides “being classified as a science” or whatever they said in last week’s intro, but we’ll just have to wait and see.