Magi – 15 – 17

I haven’t dropped Magi yet. It’s just that out of all the series I’m blogging, it takes the least priority. In the past few weeks I was a bit busy, so I’m just going to combine these three episodes in one. They close off the Balbad arc in any case, so it fits pretty well.

Here this show moved from the politics to more action, in a string of battles to wrap up the show. To be honest, the battles were not that interesting. What I mean by that is that they took too long. The whole ordeal took up 3 episodes in total. First they fight, then they wait for Aladdin to arrive, then Aladdin fights. Only near the end did it get interesting when Alibaba confronted Kassim about their past. I really liked that, and that is where the dragged out pacing really worked. The way in which it just kept switching back and forth between the two of them. That really worked.

I also liked that there is consequence in this series: Ugo seems to be gone now. It’s now up to the creators to play with that and turn that into interesting development for Alibaba without making it just an excuse for him to become more powerful. It was interesting that the creators put him and that other Magi in a coma, but if you do: don’t start waiting for them. What the show now needs to do is develop its setting correctly: go iin-depth into what it takes to turn Balbad into a democracy, instead of just pulling the “everyone lives happily ever after and the tory moves somewhere completely different”-card.

Kudos to the animation department by the way. The fight scenes were long, but they did have some pretty neat animation and camera work to spice things up. A-1 previously did a prime-time series with Ao no Exorcist, but I think that the animation in Magi really is a step up from that.
Rating: 4,5/8 (Good)