What They Say:
“I met her… a sempai who’s cute, but strange!” She loves magic tricks, but she fails every time due to stage fright?! She drags me into the Magic Club and makes me her assistant… and siblings Saki-chan and Ma-kun of the street performers club, and Madara-san of the chemistry club get dragged into it, too. Every day, Sempai fails in energetic yet slightly erotic ways! It’s a gag anime about crummy magic tricks that are painful to watch… but you can’t stop watching!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Magical Sempai seems to have hit the expected split when it comes to how people find. Some wish it had less fanservice so that it would work better, others like the fanservice as a fun way to up the interest in it. Can you guess where I land with it? Just the opening sequence secured my watching it and seeing that start up each time really does get me in the right mood for it because the show embraces this aspect well – but not exclusively. It uses it as needed to enhance scenes but doesn’t live or die by it in being a dominating factor in each episode.
With this episode, Semapi is in serious pain at school and is trying to get away from the room that she and assistant are going to because she realizes her sister is in there. Her sister is a teacher there and comes across as serious and capable but Sempai knows that she’s a total and utter goofball from growing up with her. It’s an amusing disparity to play with and the show handles it well, especially as Sempai keeps trying to show her just how skilled she is to impress her and put her in her place. But her sister is able to really slide in between the lines to cause problems for her. Of course, as capable as her sister comes across as a teacher, she’s also a bit of a goof in the eyes of other teachers and there’s a nice call-out for that toward the end of the segment that I liked a lot.
There’s a lot of fun in seeing how Sempai does her best to get her tricks up to snuff and deals with the problems along the way, especially when assistant notices a sneak to give him an advantage with a torn skirt. The back half keeps things moving well as we see her getting stressed out a bit while still looking to do her best and coming up with all kinds of training exercises to deal with her stage fright and anxiety. Going by things they find online isn’t going to be helpful but it is amusing as he reads off ways to calm her down and it works better than one might expect, not knowing just how receptive she is. All of this leads into the final act where there is a definite slow down in how much I enjoy the show as it’s one that I do think drags on too far and needs to be split in half. Focusing on some kimono time, it is nice to see her in something different while still doing tricks but there’s not much here to really get excited about as it’s just variance on what’s come before.
In Summary:
Magical Sempai is a show that’s hitting a certain sweet spot for me but would be much stronger if it was six minutes instead of twelve and we got two cour out of it. This episode ie stronger in the first half and has a lot of fun with her sister and all the shenanigans that comes from there. It loses some of its energy the further in we go and into the back half but it has more cute moments and silly bits of fanservice that will delight, whether it’s dealing with magic tricks wearing a kimono or getting off-campus after setting the club room on fire for a bit. It’s fun fluff.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
