Magatsu Wahrheit: Zuerst

To put this out front, I just finished this series after mostly watching it week-to-week and it largely left me with a feeling of emptiness. The few reviews that I tend to write are pretty well planned out if nothing else, but this time around I'm going to just write this as I go to use it as a way to work through my feelings on what I just watched. So, yeah.... To that end, I'll still keep my usual category breakout format and get right into it:

-----Story - 3 out of 10-----
Magatsu Wahrheit is an anime based on a mobile game which takes place ... in magitech setting, fusing industrial age modern esthetics with classic sword and sorcery fantasy elements mixed in. The main plot centers on how a normal truck driver gets mixed up in a resistance organization while a bunch of political intrigue concerning a magical disease and experimentation goes on in the background. To its credit, I felt that the story structure of the series went really well at first! They drop you into an interesting situation without spoon feeding you a bunch of backstory. Things for the most part naturally come to light and seem pretty interesting. But then, the series just kind of loses focus. They're setting up a bunch of "stuff" and I'm watching wondering if any of it is going to actually go anywhere. There are a few sparse bright spots, like a subplot that takes place with a small village in the forest that I thought was genuinely interesting and touching. But it mostly just meanders along until I absolutely lose all interest in the story. And then finally, they committed the dreadful sin of a grand exposition dump with took up the entire first half of episode 10, betraying the previous more natural storytelling structure. It was so frustratingly bad that I would have been pulling at my hair if it wasn't for the fact that I shave my head. Then the ending came.... Now, I don't really mind a non-conclusive ending, but the final "and the story continues...." crap that they pulled at the end of this left me wondering what the point was in all of this?? I mean, I assume the point was to advertise the mobile game, but still. Could they not have done better? It felt like this was originally supposed to be a 24 episode series, but it wasn't doing all that well so they decided to make it half as long. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe this story will appeal to an audience that is more into political intrigue than I am, but man, I just thought the story was an utter mess.

-----Art - 4 out of 10-----
If I had to describe the art and animation of this series in one word, it'd be "inconsistent". Yes, having some inconsistencies in the production for a weekly TV anime is to be expected, especially when also dealing with COVID-19 leading up to and during its production. But this is some pretty bad stuff. First thing is the hilariously bad opening credits "animation". The first few episodes had a temp-opening which was little more than a Windows 95 screensaver with some text over it. Then, they eventually got a "finished" OP together which was barely better, mostly consisting of the series' central artifact floating around with silhouette action animation mostly consisting of scenes from the show itself. Oh, and then the ending credits didn't even bother with trying to do anything as it was just text scroll on a black screen. Anyway, so what about the look of the series proper? Well, there were some actual good points to this as the animation of the big action sequence in the first episode looked pretty cool! And the look of the series was unique and interesting enough overall; not your typical fantasy look for the most part so it can act as a bit of a breath of fresh air. But then, some of the character designs just look weird and there is a plethora of off-model faces that began to make me laugh constantly at one point. Again, I don't know how fair this criticism is when this kind of thing isn't particularly rare in anime, plus dealing with COVID could have been a factor, but man this largely sucked.

-----Sound - 6 out of 10-----
The highest score I'm giving goes to Sound! And it's just an "it's alright" 6-score in the end. I felt that a good amount of the music was really nice. I was especially a fan of this one particular recurring little ditty that was in damn near every episode. And the voice acting overall wasn't bad, but wasn't particularly memorable either. Honestly, this might have gotten a better score if there was more music, but they did re-use a LOT of stuff. But hey, overall, not bad.

-----Characters - 5 out of 10-----
One of my biggest personal things in fiction is that I can still enjoy a series with a weak story as long as I have some nice characters to latch onto. Unfortunately, this is largely a plot-focused story so there is only so much that good characters can do. And sadly, when it comes to the characters in Magatsu Wahrheit, as a whole they were mediocre at best. I did find our lead Innumael to be enjoyable/interesting for the most part, although he did legitimately get annoying at times. Spunky little Irma was probably my second favorite character in the series, but she wasn't in it enough to make much of an impact. Aside from that, the characters didn't do much for me. I thought the series especially had a major villain problem. One of the best antagonists was a psychotics military commander, but he was pretty much just generic pure evil dude with little real motivation and once he was out of the picture there wasn't much to fill the void since all of the other bad stuff was being worked "from the shadows" or whatnot.

-----Enjoyment - 4 out of 10-----
So how was my personal enjoyment of this series? Well, that's kind of what I'm trying to figure out. I ended up giving this series a personal score of a "4", something that I don't do very often with my broad tastes and largely forgiving critiques of entertainment. But with how empty and pointless the whole experience of watching this felt, it definitely fit the "Bad" label that a "4" holds in the "Your Score" dropdown on MAL. While I was enjoying myself and interested in the series for the first few episodes, I then began to enjoy it less and less until it became a legitimate chore to sit through around the 8th episode. But at that point, I was in it for the long haul and just watching it once a week wasn't PURE torture or anything. But man, in the end I just couldn't grasp what the point of this all was. Innumael kind of seemed to have grown throughout the series, but also mostly felt the same. The main promo image used on Funimation's page for this series shows a 2-halves look at Innumael and Leocadio, one half of them as they look at the beginning of the series and the other showing more badass versions of them sometime in the future. But in the scope of the anime, these fully badass versions are never seen, with the only part that's truly realized being the cut across Leo's face. Again, it feels like this was originally meant to be a 24 episode series that got cut short, or you're just expected to move from this to the mobile game. Who knows. But whatever the reasoning is, I felt fully unsatisfied with this series in every way and it hurts all the more because of its earlier potential.

-----Overall - 5 out of 10 (Conclusion)-----
In the end, I'm going to go ahead and bump my overall review score for this series up one point from my personal enjoyment score. I admit that a major reason for that is me being influenced by the fact that prior to me writing this review, the lowest review score given was a "6" and the literal majority of reviews posted are 9s or better. I MUST be missing something, right? Did I just "not get" this series? Again, I'm generally rather kind with my critique of anime as I have pretty broad tastes. Usually, if I don't like something that others do, I can recognize it largely as a matter of personal taste. And granted, the average score for this series is not great (6.60 at the time of writing), so maybe it's mostly just people who enjoyed the series that are inspired enough to review it, while those who didn't like it simply didn't care enough to write a review? I don't know. I guess there might be something here to enjoy if magitech and political intrigue are things you're REALLY into. But for me, that just wasn't enough to counteract the inconsistent production, incomplete and uninteresting story, and overall meh characters. And with that, I guess this came out just about as extensive as most of my other reviews. Well, hope this was somehow helpful for someone to read! It was at least a nice way for me to gather my thoughts on this series.

This show is like a deviantArt entry that is well colored in, all the darks and lights are in, but anyone trained to draw or to evaluate art can see that the anatomy and line art is sloppy and the colors compliment each other poorly.

On one hand at least this isn't an isekai...

On this other, this show suffers from many problems...

Art: 7
The occasional low budget character drawing but not that bad its solid. Mostly its the backgrounds that are good though.

Sound: 7
... They tried. It's nothing catchy but nothing earsplitting.

Character: 6
This is where they have kind of bit off more than they can chew. There is a relatively large cast for a 12 episode series. Most of the characters I can't remember their names after seeing them. There are supposed to be two main characters mainly, but one of them is effectively a cardboard and the other one is just a coward. Of the 2 (3) main characters, between 1D to 4D, they are about 3D-3.5D. Side characters are like, 2D-2.5D. They are there as just a drawing that moves, does things, but it barely has a personality. Overall, this area is barely passable. I do understand it is 12 episodes.

Story: 6
While the characterization is largely inept, this bit had potential. Especially after all the setting and conspiracies are revealed, this really could have been done better.

First off, we have a generic Deutsch-because-it-sounds-cool empire. Okay... but could we elaborate more on this? What's the culture like? aside from copying pre-WW2 Prussia and adding magic.

Next, we have the ethics spoilers that got revealed mid series. This was a great chance to explore a philosophical/ethical theme... but... no. Just... bland game plot of good guy, bad guy, and big government plot. Best part is, this was left hanging.

Enjoyment: 6
I wanted to enjoy this...but... every time I thought something good was going to happen, something else happens to make me cringe instead...

Overall: 6 (I'm being somewhat generous here)

I don't get why all the top reviews are of 9 or 10. The time I'm writing this review the rating of this show is 6.67 which literally means that only those who like it are writing the reviews and others don't care at all what happens.

It was clearly a political drama with a fool sitting at top of the chain.
Also this is the first anime I have seen where a supporting character who doesn't even appear in many scenes gives an aura of main character.

Story:
Nothing in the story gave any sort of satisfaction as such. The summary of this show made this show a ... great catch at beginning, but it was just a show off. I literally was in a bind trying to understand what actually the show is trying to tell?
beginning was hap hazard and ending was obnoxious.

Only a single mystery needs explanation and I don't really am interested in that mystery anymore.