English Dub Season Review: Smile of the Arsnotoria Season One

Based on the Japanese mobile game created by Nitroplus. The story revolves around some magical students who are in an ashram, where all the students known as the “Pentagrams” who are predominantly female, interact with each other at random while all of them are being taught about magic and culture. However, underneath all the sweetness and goodwill, a sinister presence creeps its way toward them…

On the technical side, the anime was produced by Liden Films and directed by Naoyuki Tatsuwa, with Midori Gotō handling the scripts, Takahiro Kishida adapting Ōtsuka’s character designs for animation, and Ryo Takahashi and Ken Itō composing the music. The opening theme song is “Hajimari e to Tsuzuku Basho” by Hanauta, a group composed of Misaki Kuno, Miharu Hanai, Miyu Tomita, Eri Yukimura, and Eriko Matsui, while the ending theme song is “With you” by Band-Maid guitarist/vocalist Miku Kobato and her Cluppo solo project.

As expected of a game adaptation, rarely does it fit the narrative to some capacity, especially if it’s based on a mobile game. Takt Op: Destiny at least sort of worked as a prequel to the current game’s narrative, but unlike that adaptation, there’s little to no engagement or attempt at creating a good story or characters. And to make it worse, the tone completely changes at random times with a large “Warning” sign in advance before showing random out-of-place hyperviolence caused by some aristocratic-dressed knights who hate all magic and wanna murder the shit out of the witches and anyone who is possibly protecting any sort of magic-related relic.

I have absolutely no idea what the director was trying to accomplish with this project, or even struggle to comprehend the point in foreshadowing a more serious story within the show’s Intro and within every episode for a few seconds and then never connecting it to the main story or characters. But if the people in charge of this disjointed narrative want to mix both, at least try to make some sense and tie these separate subplots together. Heck, even So, I’m a Spider managed to accomplish that in comparison.

Overall, If I had three choice words to properly describe this anime they’d be “confusing”, “disjointed”, and above all, “disappointing” on almost every level. The art style and scenery are gorgeous, but it teases the possibility of some sort of climatic magical battle happening, but it might as well not exist for the lack of detail this show provides. It suffers the most from an identity crisis in terms of the random shifts in tone. And not only does it suck as a mobile game advertisement (which is most likely a Japanese exclusive), but also fails the most in terms of any kind of big payoff with a shitty ending that overshadows almost any redeeming qualities that could’ve saved it. If you want a more engaging magic school anime, don’t waste your time with this, and watch Little Witch Academia instead…