It’s time to get our magic on.
What They Say:
It’s a pleasant Sunday morning. The Hackadolls are summoned to help out the ever iconic “magical girls” kids love so much, but the magical girls and monsters in this town are not what you’d expect. The Hackadolls face what might be their hardest challenge yet.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Hackadoll had its cuteness the last time around as it worked the whole idol fetishism aspect, but as I’m pretty much tired of the idol complex and all that’s associated with it, the thing fell kind of flat in a lot of ways. The fun continues to come from the animation and the girls themselves as they do what they do as there’s a great kind of polish, silliness, and just plain fun quality about it all. This time around the show dips back into a familiar genre that’s not as overly used these days, thankfully, but has definitely had its turn in being the big thing that dominates every season for a few years.
Amusingly, the HackaDolls are called in to help out these magical girls that are stuck in the hospital for a bit due to some injuries. They need the girls to handle the monsters that are out there, which sets the stage well with some comical looks at these kinds of magical girls – notably one of them being a gorilla. For our girls, they find themselves having to deal with the weirdly costumed bad guys pretty quickly, but the big sell is the cute transformation sequence that lets them have a brief bit of fun. A lot of the episode is just familiar magical girl clichés that they can’t really build anything with because it’s been done by so many other shows in better form. The action is certainly cute and I like how the girls are fairly incapable against the bad guys since they’re not truly magical girls. There’s some fun fanservice mixed into it too, but mostly you know where this episode is going to go from the start.
In Summary:
As much as I enjoy Hackadoll, this episode is on similar ground to the previous one in that it doesn’t really do all that much for me. The genre it’s working with has been done to death and they don’t really do anything new here. It is very well animated and I love the design work of it, but there’s not much to get me excited beyond that unfortunately. Hopefully the series will finish out on a high note next week.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
