The anime follows a squad of misfits in a witch-hunting school. The world is terrorized by magic that usually does more harm than good. Takeru Kusanagi is a special snowflake MC and leader of the misfits squad. He uses a katana rather than guns, usually spouting some edgy sword attack (Kusangi Style: Dragon Strike) when he defeats his enemies, which ends ups just being a generic sword swing with name emphasis only there to sound cool. Luckily for the MC his entire squad is filled with cute girls.
I have no idea if the source material is crap or Silver Link decided to butcher it in their poor adaptation. Regardless, the anime quickly rushes past character and villain arcs in a 2-episode formula. The formula is as follows: a female character has her troubles with the past in the first episode, the second episode follows with the MC winning the female over by swinging his sword around in his robo-samurai armor and swearing he will carry “half of her burden”. Every few minutes there will be world building attempts where side-characters attempt to act mysterious by spouting random magic mumbo jumbo (Arthur Pendragon resurrected, philosophers stone, the Esper organization, the Alchemists whatever) in the looming background. The result at the end of each arc is a jumbled mess of a show with half-baked details and gibberish. It seems clear the writer wanted this to be something like Nasuverse or Index, but the anime’s poor portrayal doesn’t make up half of the respective latter worlds.
It's quite unfortunate because the character themselves have great designs and endearing personalities. They however can’t get beyond general interest in to deep and meaningful characters win because their arcs are horribly rushed. A lot of the side characters too are likeable but they are quickly forgotten and left in the dust once a specific arc starring them ends. There are also some pretty grim moments from children zombies to clone genocides which would have left a pretty dark impression on the world build, but they are censored and delivered so poorly with the harem hijinks that they feel awkward.
The production values are lazy and boring. The animation in fights feel incredibly generic where the MC is swinging his sword left and fight and not an ounce of effort was placed in choreography. I found myself dozing off in the moments that should have had my attention glued to the screen. It's hard to think a robotic-samurai destroying monsters and dueling other robot smaurai with a katana could be boring, but Silver Link manages to achieve that with this lazy production. The music is forgettable and dull.
In the end Taimadou can be thought of as “what if A Certain Magical Index” failed. Imagine if A Certain Magical Index was cut to 12 episodes and each arc had to be rushed in the short time the developers had. The only positive thing I can say about Taimadou is that it has a great cast of female characters, but even they end up being disappointing with their improperly developed character arcs. Taimadou is a show that will be forgotten once Fall 2015 is over and it is a clear example that trying to jump in on what the current popular bandwagon is does not work.
