Sadly complete and utter atrocious garbage
Creative Staff
Story: Magica Quartet
Art: Mura Kuroe
Translation: William Flanagan
What They Say
Oriko sees her use of Kiriko as an attack dog against other magical girls as a justifiable means to achieving a greater purpose protecting the world from the destructive force of Walpurgisnacht. However, their arrangement has piqued the interest of another magical girl, who has her own reasons for wanting a magical killer like Kiriko at her beck and call…Will her savory offer sway Kiriko’s allegiance and leave Oriko herself open to attack?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
To get this out of the way first: this book is really, really rough, and so poorly stitched together that it quite frankly is more than a little rough to follow. At its core, this volume “follows” the previous one, and largely focuses on a new set of magical girls coming into the picture. A group from Kazamino has come this way chasing down another one named Sasa, because her powers let her control witches. Which, by the way, is incredibly underused throughout the course of the book, but that’s the least of the issues here. Anyway, she ends up in an alliance with Oriko and Kiriko for hard to follow reasons, and they work to take down the other girls together.
In the midst of all this, we get some really haphazard and poorly constructed backstory for the girls, and of course a big fight breaks out. And good lord is it ever poorly put together. Like, a character gets literally decapitated, and I completely missed that in my first pass (perhaps because she keeps talking afterwards for a bit. Which maybe, maaaaaybe could work with the rules of the series, but is still incredibly awkward). And even with closer investigation it’s hard to tell precisely what was supposed to be depicted as happening there. And that’s just one example of plenty of little pieces that simply don’t fit together right, leaving a giant jumble of supposed “action” that’s really just a complete and utter mess.
Again, it took some rereading and stitching it back together to fill in the gaps, as the flow is horribly out of whack here, but apparently this was all one big plot (presumably aided by Oriko’s premonitions) to lure Madoka into danger so that they could get a brief glimpse at Honoka in order to better take down the heroine of that far better initial series. But that most sure as hell doesn’t come across smoothly in a read through the book in the least. Oh, and then we end on a brief and fairly inconsequential look at the abused little girl from the original Oriko manga. So yeah, good luck following any of this in the slightest if you’re not plenty familiar with both the Oriko series and the Madoka anime, as a lack of such knowledge would take this from messy and hard to follow to full on incomprehensible gibberish.
In Summary
I will not pull any punches here, and come out and say it off the bat: this is absolute garbage, and likely the worst thing I have ever reviewed. Thanks to all the issues present in the initial volume, such as appallingly poor art direction and action scenes, this series was already on exceptionally poor standing. But this goes one step further, and becomes borderline unfollowable. It’s as if there’s a critical lack of understanding of even basic story structure, leading to a jumbled mess of poorly stitched together, halfhearted chunks of ideas rather than something worthy of even being called a “story” in the first place. Even in piecing together what I could of this slop, what’s there is just really poor and underdeveloped versions of ideas explored far better in even the original Oriko manga, to say nothing of how far the anime is above this. To put it simply, if you are misfortunate enough to mistakenly purchase this, you have my deepest condolences, as this is pure trash, and it isn’t even close to being worthy of anyone’s time, much less their money.
Content Grade: D-
Art Grade: D+
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: Older Teen
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: February 21st, 2017
MSRP: $12.99
