Review of The Ancient Magus' Bride

I still think this anime is charming (see: my review of the prequel episodes). I don't think I can give it a solid 10 because it didn't do as well as it could've, but I absolutely think this anime is worth the love it receives. So, starting with what I loved, let's talk about the art. I can't go so far as to say the style was unique, but the coloring and character designs used were. The art alone did so much to transport me into the world of The Ancient Magus' Bride. A few of the OST songs, I noticed, were also very effective increating an otherworldly tone. As for the story and characters, this is where it gets tricky for me to talk about.

I do think this anime was able to create a story that diminished the need for character development. I felt the story showed you exactly what you needed to know about the characters, and nothing more, and it actually worked in favor of the plot. The plot itself, or at least, the part of it that spanned the whole season were very interesting. I thought a lot of the character relationships were well written and special to this experience.

So, yes, it was a mostly enjoyable experience because the world itself was enough to keep me interested, however, there were issues. For one, going back to the music, the songs used during the span of this anime weren't always the best. It's totally down to my personal preference, but I prefer original scores to be used over actual songs, and that wasn't always the case in this anime. For two, everything kind of moved a little bit too quickly for my liking. Not as in development-wise or story-wise, but pacing-wise. This scenario would happen frequently: an episode ends, closing out a conflict of some sort, and then the next episode starts with something like "whatever happened in the last episode has caused this character to be incapacitated for two weeks; surprise, it's winter now." It all felt like a really cheap way of progressing the timeline for no reason whatsoever.

The other thing is that this anime doesn't really have a storyline, or at least, not much of one. Yes, characters have a certain amount of continuity that carries through to the end, and there's one character in particular that causes issues the whole time, but there isn't much consistency. It's more like every few episodes, there's a new crisis to take care of, and none of them are related to one another. It didn't bother me all that much because I did really enjoy the characters (and some of those crises were very interesting, but it just felt repetitive.

All in all, though, I really have no qualms with this anime. I enjoyed it more than I didn't, the humor is honestly one of the most adorable usages of it I've seen in anime, and the charm of the world made up for a lot of the imperfections. I'd still highly recommend this to anyone that's interested because, at the very least, it'll take you somewhere really awesome.