Renmei Kuugun Koukuu Mahou Ongakutai Luminous Witches

As the united world fights for its freedom against the alien forces known as the Neuroi, human girls with magical abilities—called witches—continue to battle. With the persisting conflict affecting morale, Grace Maitland Steward, a retired witch who still serves in the army, presents a plan advocating the power of music as an invaluable support that can change the tides of war.

Unfortunately, her proposal is written off, prompting Grace to find a way to prove the potential of her idea to her superiors. She enlists the help of Aila Paivikki Linnamaa and Eleonore Giovanna Gassion—two witches who have already seen some success as singers—to recruit other witches and form the League of Nations Air Force's Music Squadron.

The campaign manages to produce seven promising candidates. Among them, 14-year-old Virginia Robertson, despite having no military experience whatsoever, seems to possess an ability too significant to ignore.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Robertson, Virginia Main

Narumi, Mai Japanese

Hato, Manaia Matawhaura Main

Yuuki, Misaki Japanese

Linnamaa, Aila Paivikki Main

Mamiya, Ryou Japanese

Gassion, Eleonore Giovanna Main

Tsuzuki, Sayaka Japanese

Shibuya, Inori Main

Hosokawa, Minako Japanese

Dietrich, Maria Magadalene Main

Konaka, Kana Japanese

Cariello, Sylvie Main

Yoshikita, Rino Japanese

Ruslanova, Lyudmila Andreyevna Main

Aimoto, Ami Japanese

Stafford, Joanna Elizabeth Main

Mamesaki, Rio Japanese

Litvyak, Sanya V. Supporting

Kadowaki, Mai Japanese

Maruyama, Hajime Producer

Tokumura, Kenichi Producer

Arimizu, Soujirou Producer

Fukaya, Naruki Producer

Reviews

Sep 25, 2022

Fircoal

Recommended

Coming into Luminous Witches I was hoping that I would have a good time with it. I was expecting more or less a typical idol show and I hoped for a decent amount of fun moments in it. But what I certainly did not expect was the amount of emotional power and impact that each episode had when I watched it. Luminous Witches shines because of this emotional impact. This combined with the fun slice of life moments made a complete show that has a lot to offer.

The fun moments are pretty easy to explain. The Luminous Witches idol group is made up of members ... of the Strike Witches army who for whatever reason wasn't fitting in their previous post. This created a fun aura around the group as most of the members tended to be more on the incompetent or free spirited side. Many fun moments were had with the members of the group creating chaos with the differences between them, or the silliness of the characters and the antics they got up to. Probably my favorite character for this was Mana who is a great example of this. Her free spirited nature made her into a fun character to watch, although not the best solider for the army. She was paired up with a sleepy character named Maria, and the various moments they had together were very fun to watch. The contrast between the two made for many humorous moments. The familiars were also utilized well for comedy as they had their own moments especially with Moffy. Luminous Witches knew when to have it's characters be charming and funny, and these fun moments generally did a great job of making the characters more endearing.

But those emotional moments are really where the series shined. Episode after episode, the strong resonant emotional impact kept on rolling in. Luminous Witches didn't just hit once or twice, it hit episode after episode, and nailed this melancholic hope combination. Many of the episodes focused on the struggles of the girls in the idol group, or the civilians that were effected by the war. There was a wide array of different issues covered with these struggles as each story covered something different, showing the different ways that war can effect someone and the situation that they're in.

Luminous Witches did a great job of showcasing these different struggles while staying true to the feeling and not overdosing itself with the sad feelings. These sad moments were generally understated rather than made to be over dramatic. The OST in particular was utilized well, knowing when to play itself up, but most importantly knowing when to let itself be understated and let the negative moods build up. The mood setting for these struggles was perfect as the show still managed to have fun moments all through these struggles but still set up this feeling of sadness surrounding them. The negative effects of war shone through the work extremely well, not by being overly depressing but by showing the negative while also giving a lot of positive and showcasing the resilience of the main characters to fight through it and to try to help each other and those around them.

I loved seeing the main characters help each other out and always have each other's back. The idol group was split into subgroups to help with the various parts of creating their idol show, which worked well as the different subgroups got focus and were able to be built well and gave a lot of power to their bonds. It was very heartwarming to see that despite the circumstances, despite the fear, and despite their differences they were able to come together and support each other. Each character in the group had their own struggles and their own unique situation in life. And each of them were covered, helped, and made them feel together in the group. And all of these struggles and episodes hit well leading to a strong group that was hard not to love.

I also really enjoyed the framing of the idol group in world. I loved the focus on bringing music and morale to the people and the ability that one has to help others out despite not being on the front lines in combat. I feel like often times morale boosting and other less direct ways of helping tends to be overshadowed and underappreciated, so I enjoyed them showcasing what their music and spirit can do for those effected by the war around them.

Overall Luminous Witches shines. It offers a strong cast, a good amount of fun moments, and a whole bunch of emotionally impactful scenes that warmed my heart so much. If you want some great heartwarming content I highly suggest that you watch Luminous Witches. All of those heartwarming moments, a fun cast, and some fun moments makes a great show that is very worth watching.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Sep 30, 2022

m3h_exe

Mixed Feelings

After the long development of Luminous Witches we have finally gotten it. That being said, I am very pleased with how it turned out, with the animation (not including the CG) is probably the best a World Witches Series has seen. After we got a "Sliver-Link Special" in terms of animation in Brave Witches, and with an increased effort with David Production for RTB, this is best since the Movie in my opinion. CG is clunky, really clunky in Luminous. Which is a shame since Shaft really outdid themselves in the series, keeping the familiar setting and feel, but also adding in that Shaft flare, ... which is really noticeable in Episode 8.

Story wise, LW does a lot that I like, but at the same time stays within a pretty standard linear storyline. It definitely comes in waves, as the beginning is pretty boring as they set things up. But once we take off into the universe and start visiting different locations across the world, we get a lot of great one off stories, that either build the setting of World Witches, or help us learn more about the witches. Jo is probably my favorite of the new witches. She has a great side story with Silvie. But Virginia's story is very streamlined and predictable. I thought they could have done more with her. Story is a mixed bag. If you like great world building stories, that not only add to the main cast but compliment the rest of the series, you will enjoy LW.

Music is pretty fire. I've always enjoyed the music throughout World Witches, and this is no exception. I really enjoyed how they were able make music that complimented the era. That being said, not all of them do, but the ones that do, stand out in my head. The rest of the music is similar to the rest of the series' style.

Ultimately, this show is sitting in an awkward position. With production trouble, this could have been much worse. Great animation, fun characters and varied music, tow Luminous out to the run way. But the CG, simple main story and pacing issues make it crash like, Nipa, on a few occasions. I would recommend this to anyone who want a simple and beautiful looking idol anime, or are fans of Military Moe. Its criminally low scored here on MAL and Shaft should do more World Witches, as I feel they would kill an action packed OVA or Sequel.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Dec 4, 2022

garkon_icky

Not Recommended

Mostly incoherent with lots of signs that production of this show did not go well. The key staff involved aren't unskilled or even new to the Witches franchise, but seeing that there are SIX more producer credits than there are episodes, things start to make sense. The badness is jarring after it seemed like they were getting this series pretty well dialed-in after doing Brave Witches, Road to Berlin, and Take-Off in a row, which were all pretty great. This show is not those. Only watch if you will literally die without watching a new idol anime.

The good: The voice acting is fine or pretty ... good. Most of the staff are new to anime, the only negative thing to say is that some characters sound like they're doing impersonations of other Witches characters. The art is sometimes good (there is a big caveat here). They learned their lesson from Brave Witches and striker flying scenes are hand-drawn in closeups and only switches to CGI at a distance, and they all actually look pretty good too. A total of about 2.5 episodes are also executed well with a clear introduction, rise, climax, descent, and resolution. Most of the characters also manage to be distinctive or even likeable. George S. Marshall makes a cameo and he's a fan of the best girl Mana, which is respectable.

The bad: All kinds of stuff. The plot is incoherent. Not just bad or boring, the things happening do not follow from the things that previously happened. Conflicts show up that occupy entire episodes until the characters decide to ignore it and watch it fix itself via a massive butt-pull, which is what always happens. Entire concert scenes are alluded to but happen off-screen because they ran out of time to get them animated. Substituted in their place are massive dialog dumps that remind you of things that you already know to distract you from the fact that everyone was in uniform in the last scene and a concert is supposed to be happening now. It almost develops a plot when they go on tour, but that barely survives 6 episodes, and the show comes apart at the seams between that and the ending. The last 3 episodes are fever dreams running on magical logic. It's a cliche to call something AI-generated when it has uncanny nonsensical properties, but they actually do use AI-generated backgrounds made with photoshop content-aware fill, and towards the end the story is SO convoluted that it's an actual question whether they generated that too. Conflicts are started, ignored, brought back, hijacked by someone else, car-crashed into somebody else's conflict, ignored again, talked about for an entire episode, and finally resolved when everyone decides it was never really a problem and none of this mattered anyway. MAYBE two episodes manage to avoid this. It's hard to see how much of it was fumbled execution and how much of it was stretching when they couldn't execute the original plan on time.

The art gets its own paragraph. Some of the backgrounds look like they were made in Powerpoint. They're glaringly terrible at first glance and get worse the closer you look at them. Perspectives don't line up, low-res jpeg stock art is photoshopped in, they used google maps to make aerial shots, and the mentioned nonsensical AI-generated fills where a pile of metal sticks is supposed to be a construction site. Huge, obvious problems that are almost hard to explain. Kemono Friends had the budget of a family picnic and managed to avoid any of the problems this show has. It's not consistently that bad, and some of it actually looks pretty good, but when it gets bad it makes any other show look better. Also most of the character designs are outright abducted from other idol shows, making the whole thing look more like a cynical cash-grab than it already was.

The ugly: Familiars were a weird thing to add in this show (not really a spoiler, introduced in episode 1). In this show, magical girls become witches when they meet a magical animal and it agrees to be their familiar. If the familiar decides to go away, they can't use magic anymore. This isn't actually a retcon, this is canon to the Witches series, but it only shows up in the mangas and like 10 seconds of the OVA. The other animated shows deliberately ignore them and pretend they're hiding off-screen somewhere. Luminous does absolute back-flips trying to explain how this works and that familiars are really important while we've never seen them in any other show before. They were just invisible! No they're not, we can see them. Other animals in this show can see them. Other witches can see and acknowledge them. They have animal problems and get sick and have to sleep so you can't just ignore them. This is more weird rules about magic in a series that already can't keep its own rules straight. Do the familiars just die when they turn 18 and that's how it works? They can't just adopt another one? Also the reason the other shows ignored familiars is that between the OVA and Strike Witches they decided familiars are just extra characters who can't talk and thus unnecessary, which absolutely becomes a problem for Luminous. One familiar is important to the story while the rest exist to run around in establishing shots or sleep in a corner. A weirdly specific thing to suddenly remember and not use well.

Conclusion: Bad. The thing that worries me is this show introduces a few named characters you've never heard of before and a 503rd JFW. When they did that before was when the 502nd made a cameo in the movie before getting a real introduction in Brave Witches. This implies a Brave Witches 2 might be on the way, and I'm absolutely worried about how they'd execute that after watching this.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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