In the interest of testing SMA's recommendation quality, I'm taking the obvious route of watching some of the shows it recommended. This is one such anime.

EDIT: This is not representative of SMA's top recommendations, as SMA previously glitched when this title was culled from it.
***

I’ve seen this before.

Not this exact title, but just in general. This feels like a mishmash of anime that preceded it. Sure, an obvious comparison is Dokuro-chan, but that’s just the most immediate one. I could point towards Excel Saga to a degree, to Puni Puni Poemi even more so and so on, but it would just get to the general vibe: I’ve seen these characters, I’ve seen this atmosphere, I’ve seen these gags. But a title doesn’t have to be unique to be good, right? To quote from No First Prize, “Novelty for its own sake is no virtue. Emulation in the pursuit of excellence is no vice.” Yet Dai Mahou Touge isn’t pursuing excellence. It’s just taking an average version of the same goods and putting them in a similar package. So even if this were entirely fresh to you, it still wouldn’t impress.

It’s not that Dai Mahou Touge isn’t funny. It kind of is. But it’s too quick to reach for the obvious, for the easy, to avoid taking risks or challenging itself in its steadfast dedication to cribbing from its predecessors and refusal to develop very far beyond its basic premise. Ha ha, the world of mahou shoujo is actually cruel and despotic despite its light and fluffy aesthetic! And now what? Where do you go from there? How do you use this as your foundation for jokes and not as the sum total of your humor? And it doesn’t really seem sure, instead opting to repeat gags (yes, they couldn’t come up with enough to fill four episodes with unique gags) and keep returning to the well for more permutations of the same, basic reversal of expectations that defines the series. (Small joke spoilers) The mascot is actually a grizzled, violent veteran despite appearing cute, the cute magical girls rule by violence, the cute little sisters are actually violent and murderous and on and on until you want to throw your hands up in the air and shout “I get it already! Please, give me something new!” but something new just won’t come and the joke simply isn’t funny or clever enough to hold up while being stretched that thin. In about 12 minutes you’ve got the whole series down and the rest is largely a regurgitation demonstrating that they have an idea, not a show.

The animation similarly fails to impress. Movement looks cheap outside of fight scenes and even those are rather limited and lackluster. It’s not Petit Eva levels of outright terrible (which, if you’ve never seen, looks like it was animated on a budget of $5 an episode) but it only serves to make fight scenes that already lack action even less fun. And that’s really in line with everything about the show. Music, character designs, animation, humor, it’s all stuff that could be worse and at least gets the job done, but the end result is more along the lines of “stomachable” than something that’s genuinely fun and pleasant.

This isn’t necessarily to say you should avoid Dai Mahou Touge. You’ll probably get a few chuckles and wring some enjoyment out of it. But when you consider that everything it’s going for has been done better before, with better animation, better jokes at a faster clip, more wit, more originality, Dai Mahou Touge is something that should be far down on the list. Because if you want what this is imitating, you don’t have to settle for this. It’s a weak, average series. A low 5.

In the interest of testing SMA's recommendation quality, I'm taking the obvious route of watching some of the shows it recommended. This is one such anime.
***

(spoilers)

You wanna know the real problem with Best Student Council? At the very end, they bring back a whole bunch of characters that appeared during the show and rather than "Oh boy, them!" the reaction is more "Oh yeah, I guess they were in an episode, weren't they?" The show ends by bringing back these characters who showed up once and played a minor role very early on and there's really no logical reason to bring them back at this point. I guess it gives the series a way to end, but eh. And that's because the series never spends any time developing its plot until right until the very end, but the long stretch of bland high school club comedy before it simply does not support it. So when they go full throttle on the plot development, they still leave a whole bunch of questions hanging and it's not even rewarding, because who cares about this background thread that rarely gets visited during the show while it's more focused on silly curry cookoffs and other assorted hijinks? The greatest flaw is that Best Student Council tries to maintain two moods, but doesn't give enough time to one and isn't that great at the other. The show can never get off the ground like that.

The animation here sure spared plenty of expense. You can really feel the effort they didn't put into this when characters are talking but their mouths never start moving. Well, it wouldn't be current J.C. Staff if it wasn't disappointingly mediocre, I guess. It's not like there's terribly much going on in this show that'd require effort to animate, anyway, so to not even bother with mouth flaps at times is just supremely lazy. Maybe not Petit Eva levels of lethargy, but come on, these are basic expectations.

What I find funny of course ain't necessarily what you find funny, but Best Student Council is more stomachable than anything, filled with one-note gimmick characters that typically get an episode of barely being fleshed out. None of them ever rise to the level of "notable," just like the show itself. Best Student Council does a better job of convincing itself it has a soul lurking beneath its stale humor than it ever does of convincing the viewer of that. Woefully bland and excelling at nothing, Best Student Council still doesn't do anything exceedingly wrong, other than it's lack of doing anything particularly right. An average show that's probably not worth your time.

I guess I can't fairly consider this a failure on SMA's part, though, since the site only parsed part of my list when it suggested this.

(All below was written prior.)
***

...And several attempts to get SMA to process my list again later, I discover the first crop of results was only processing a very small portion of my list to generate recommendations. And that titles like this one are actually pretty far down the list once it actually takes everything into account. So I conclude that SMA, as a site, could certainly work better, and that what I've been watching to test its value isn't actually representative of its top recommendations for me.

Well, at least I discovered that pretty early on. But since the three things I started were SMA recommendations all the same, I'm not removing the "SMA Test" tag from them. But I won't base my judgement of SMA on them too much.

Joshi Kousei is an underambitious series that largely delivers on its aims, although that's not very impressive. Animation in Joshi Kousei is nothing special worthy of any particular note. Characters and plot don't develop in any meaningful sense. Jokes are simple and predictable, too often going for the low-hanging fruit. There's a bit of groan-worthy fanservice at poins, but it's ultimately a sometimes mildly funny series with sometimes mildly interesting but standard characters, boilerplate plots stuck in the doldrums of their own lack of imagination, uninspired music that sounds like it was composed in a slightly more advanced version of Mario Paint (I can't help but suspect that one of the songs has farts in it) and it all comes away as watchable if a bit boring. A bit shy of average. A high 4.

All below was written prior.
***
Well, this represents the last of what was mistakenly acquired when SMA exhibited a glitch in processing my list. Even if it was acquired by mistake, I might as well try watching it since I already downloaded it, right?