Aru Majo ga Shinu Made

Magic is all Meg Raspberry has ever known. Being raised by Faust, the Eternal Witch, Meg wishes to become a witch as great as her master. However, her life crumbles on her 17th birthday when Faust delivers the worst news possible: Meg has one year left to live. Due to a congenital curse, after turning 18, she will age a thousand times faster than normal and then die in mere days.

Faust tells Meg there is a way to cure her affliction: she needs to consume a seed of life. In order to create the seed, Meg must collect a thousand tears of joy within 12 months. Although she is distraught by the difficulty of the task at hand, Meg nonetheless embarks on the journey to prolong her life, meeting countless people with their own stories to tell.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Raspberry, Meg Main

Aoyama, Yoshino Japanese

Faust Main

Sakakibara, Yoshiko Japanese

Hayter, Sophie Supporting

Youmiya, Hina Japanese

Inori Supporting

Itou, Shizuka Japanese

Cavendish, Fine Supporting

Ookubo, Rumi Japanese

Chloe Supporting

Tanezaki, Atsumi Japanese

Thetis Supporting

Sakamoto, Maaya Japanese

Sierra Supporting

Miyumi, Shuri Japanese

Marco Supporting

Matsuda, Kenichirou Japanese

Russo, Jack Supporting

Nakai, Kazuya Japanese

Iizuka, Aya Producer

Kawamoto, Sachi Producer

Kawando, Kenjirou Producer

Hatori, Ayumu Producer

Reviews

Jun 17, 2025

Marinate1016

Recommended

“It’s the waiting that’s hard”
What would you do if you only had a year left to live? Being aware of one’s own coming mortality makes every day, every interaction and every moment so precious. More importantly, it makes you keenly aware of the impact you have on people. For most of us, there would be an initial shock and depressive stage where you don’t do anything for a while because you’re so upset about the bad news. Not our MC, Meg, though. This badass totally not gay™️ witch sets out to break her curse by bringing tears of joy to people. What we end ... up getting is a very well done character driven anime that took us through every emotion from dying of laughter to bawling our eyes out. If you’ve been wanting more Majo no Tabitabi/Elaina, look no further, you got it.

I should temper expectations, AruMajo never gets as dark as Majo no Tabitabi and the best cases from that series are better than the best ones here, but where this show excels and surpasses that show is the character development and cohesive narrative. This is one continuous journey where we see tangible evidence of Meg developing as a character. Every person she meets has an impact on her and we often see them as recurring characters in the story which can be used as frames of reference for how much our girl grows. Meg is a very real protagonist. She’s not perfect, she goes from wanting fame and success to getting that and letting it get to her head to redeeming herself and understanding WHY she has magic in the first place. In an ideal world, every 12 episode anime would handle character progression like this. I want to look at my MC and know they’re a better person at the end of all their struggles in a season.

Most episodes are self contained mini-arcs where Meg has to help someone, but they’re not disjointed. They all feel like they build on the last and the skills and mentality Meg acquired from the last job are always relevant to the next. It’s a very surgical style of storytelling where there’s no fluff or wasted time, which you have to appreciate in modern seasonal anime.

You can’t have great character growth without great supporting characters and this has them in spades. Whether it’s Meg’s adoptive mother or the numerous members of her ever growing lesbian harem, there’s so many fun and memorable characters here that made this a great experience. I really appreciate how everyone introduced is actually plot relevant and moved the story along too. This is a very purposeful story, every episode and interaction has meaning and now that it’s over, it’s really going to leave a hole in my heart. I really fell in love with this story, the characters, the magic mechanics, the unique mix of magical and modern technology, it’s great.

Production wise the show is solid. Nothing to go crazy about save for a few really cool action set pieces, but I like the character designs a lot. The voice acting is also quite good and helped push me over the edge and cry on a few occasions.

I had a lot of fun watching this show every week and came to see Meg as one of the best characters of the season. She’s beautiful, powerful, determined, but most importantly she’s flawed. She isn’t perfect, but she has a profound impact on those around her through her deeds. I think that’s a lesson we can all take from this show... along with magical yuri being awesome.

Arumajo gets 9 broomsticks out of 10.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jun 17, 2025

HidamariSeashore

Mixed Feelings

A common question that people get asked is what they'll do if they learned they only had a short amount of time left. Something that never gets considered, however, is what they'd do if they had a way to prevent this hypothetical fate. Would they try to do the thing that would save them as soon as possible, or would they put it off until the last minute and end up dying, anyway? The reason why I'm pondering this is the subject of today's review, Once Upon A Witch's Death, which I found out about when the anime was announced and thought seemed interesting. It ... seemed heartwarming yet simultaneously heartbreaking, and....well, in some ways, I was right about that.

Once Upon A Witch's Death, originally titled "Aru Majo ga Shinu Made", follows Meg Raspberry, a young witch who is an apprentice to Faust, also known as the Eternal Witch and one of the Seven Sages. On her seventeenth birthday, Meg is given some shocking news by Faust: she only has a year left to live due to a curse that, once she turns 18, will cause her to rapidly age and die. All hope is not lost for our young heroine, however, as there is one way to break this curse; she needs to consume a Seed of Life, which can be created by collecting one thousand (crystallized) tears of joy. Why did Faust only tell Meg about this when there's not a whole lot of time to collect them all? Because Faust knows Meg well enough that she knows that she'll procrastinate on collecting the tears of joy until it's too late. (Man, ain't that a mood....) Anyway, with this newfound goal and a limited amount of time to accomplish it, Meg starts to help the people of her town of Lapis with their problems, forming worthwhile connections with each of them and really coming into her own as a witch in the process.

Look, I really want to say that I really like Once Upon A Witch's Death, as there is quite a bit of it to like. For example, I really liked the character of Meg Raspberry. She has a cheerful personality despite her circumstances and a willingness to help the people around her, no questions asked. I really liked seeing how her character developed. I also kind of liked Faust, although I wish the series explored her character more than it did. A couple of other things I liked were the opening and ending themes, which are respectively "Drops" by Maaya Sakamoto and "Hana-saku Michi de" by Aoi Teshima; I'm not sure if I would go out of my way to listen to either of these songs (okay, maybe I would do that for the opening theme), but they do fit in with the fantasy setting pretty well. The voice acting is also pretty decent, with Youko Hikasa giving a particularly good performance as Eldora, even though her character doesn't appear much in the series.

With that said, however, I do have one major problem with Once Upon A Witch's Death, and it has to do with the way Meg is going about collecting the tears of joy in the first place. It's a fundamentally flawed method, since there's no guarantee that she'll get the correct kind of tears she needs for the Seed of Life, if any at all; in fact, there are a couple of times where she gets (crystallized) tears that aren't exactly tears of joy. Another issue is that going around and helping people with their problems would take a longer time than she'd be likely to have. There is one episode where she actually gets quite strategic with how she does this, but she ends up being told that she's in the wrong for it, and it turns into a lesson on actually cherishing the people she meets and helps. It's a great lesson on paper, but things like that do take some of the urgency of Meg's situation away. The anime also has a "screw you, go read the light novels" type of ending where we don't get to see the end result of Meg's quest, so there's that, too.

What else is there to say....? Well, there aren't any unlikable characters (at least, no unintentionally unlikable characters), but I didn't really care too much about all of them. I thought Sophie's backstory was pretty sad, but other than that, I don't really have any strong feelings about her character. I don't have very strong feelings about the animation, done by EMT Squared, either. The colors and character designs are very good, and there are some gorgeous shots occasionally; however, there are some moments where the characters' movements feel a little stiff. At the very least, it's an improvement over anime that they've done in the past, and given the fact that the studio was working on two other projects that came out this season (including the pretty boring "Unaware Atelier Meister"), it's a good thing that Once Upon A Witch's Death didn't turn out terrible!

Overall, Once Upon A Witch's Death was an okay anime, which is a shame, since I really wanted to like it more than I did. That being said, anyone who likes witches and is really into the fantasy genre in general might get more enjoyment out of it than I did. Maybe some moments in it might make you cry some tears of joy of your own!

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Nov 16, 2025

Avengers007

Not Recommended

The release of this new anime to the market is among the earlier ones for the year, and it was during the period from October 18 to 20, 2025, that I got to see it. The series is an interplay of the supernatural/fantasy drama genres, and even though it is branded a shonen anime, I must say that I didn’t get that typical shonen vibe at all.

What’s more is that the anime centers a woman, an actual female protagonist?, who is the child of the witch Faust, one of the “Seven Sages.” At the age of 17, she learns that she is under a curse ... destined to die soon. The witch does say that there may be a way to break that curse, but how the girl goes about it and the adventures that unfold… well, that’s for you to discover. (No spoilers, promise!)

Now, if I am to describe the whole experience — I could say it is okay. Not bad, not great at all. The plot has no special thrills or strong characters, hence very little, if any, emotion is developed. The whole thing doesn’t captivate you like a powerful fantasy would. It’s a quality anime of a mid-rate — just a light one that can be watched during casual moments or when you want a little fantasy to fill the time.

I wouldn’t really recommend it strongly, but it’s not a waste of time either. If you are into witch or fantasy-based worlds, you can give it one watch. For me, it’s a 6 out of 10— decent enough, but definitely not something I’d rewatch.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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