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At the start of Fall 2015 we were treated to a couple of LN adaptations of magical battle high school anime: Asterisk War and Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry. The premise of these two shows is about as generic as an anime can get nowadays. This was not helped by the fact that these two shows aired 5 hours apart from each other with their first episodes appearing almost identical.


Translation:

• Unusual school setting
  
• Oujo-sama heroine
  
• Sees her panties while changing
  
• Penalty for peeping will be your life!
  
• This leads to a duel
  
• MC is a sword user
  
• So is the heroine
  
• Heroine is fire-based
  
• Cinders
  

Source

The tricky part is that in spite of their similarities Rakudai's first episode was superior in every way to Asterisk War and is one of my favourites so far this season. It didn't suffer from the same levels of info dumping, death by terminology, or tired fan service tropes typical of the genre (the "walking in while she's changing" scene being the only one). Rakudai's fight scene was better choreographed and hinted at future fights being more tactical. Better still, the MC and female lead had good romantic chemistry which is rare for a genre that normally relies on harem building. On the other hand, Asterisk War played out all of these genre cliches and came off as very generic.

[I plan on expanding on these points]