The Good things:
Concept:
The concept was great: a human girl who wants to be a witch falls into the witch realm, and finds it different then what she was dreaming of.
In theory a great start, yeah? I'll tell you where it went wrong at "the bad things".
The art, holy-moly the art was fantastic. It was refreshing, almost realistic, but not off-putting. It seemed to have come directly from a colorful web-comic like W.I.T.C.H. (but with even better art). There are so many wonderful designs for objects solely used by witches (the dog-chest, the dragon-house etc.).
The only thing that was off-putting were the facial-expressions sometimes. They picked the weirdest times to show off their skills in the "dramatically-disturbed look" department. (you know the one, big eyes, forehead-zoom in that looks really creepy).
Voice acting: The voices showed off the character's personalities well (tbh, I wouldn't be able to pull of Arusu's up-beat character for so long even If I had the training).
The only voice-actor that left me wondering was the one of Lennon (Renon), whose gender was supposed to be ambiguous, but the voice left little to the imagination.
The mediocre things:
Characters: Don't get me wrong I like them, archetype and all, but their personalities were either too consistent or all over the place. A change of one's mind could take up a few minutes before they'd be back to their old personality again. Their motivations are also vague.
(Does Arusu want to go back to the human realm, or does she want to stay? Who knows, not her).
Sound: I didn't hear anything special in it. The Opening was just a less than epic instrumental and the ending, though soothing enough to make you fall asleep, didn't really stick with me. The rest of the OST didn't stand out to me and was sometimes a little creepy- though that did fit the situation sometimes.
The bad things:
The plot:
With the plot I mean the following: Structure, pacing, possible potholes and other plot bunnies that never came to fruition.
Man oh man, from the beginning I could tell the pacing was off, and it irked me bad. The beginning wasn't a beginning but a flash-forward, just like many of the scenes to follow were either badly timed flash-forwards or flashbacks. Take this and put it into a structure that already had no clue where it was going, and you have a mess.
The storyline started off simple enough; one objective, and a punishment if it wasn't done. But the objective was not only undoable, but also unfair and mathematically (or evolutionary, depending on how you look at the fairy crisis), nonsense. [You want to tell Me, there's only one fairy of every species in that entire world? Makes no sense at all.]
There were many things that, in the end, didn't get resolved (or I had to guess at, like the timeline of the Witch realm and the human realm: a complete mess). Facts were almost always presented late, or kept as guesswork.
Some questions I have that contains spoilers- read at own risk:
[Why is there such animosity between witches and warlocks? When was the human realm and witch realm divided, and how? How did daddy dearest have two children in different timelines (which doesn't add up), How did a child survive alone in that dimensional sea? ] /End of spoilers.
Conclusion:
It's such a shame it turned out this way. If the story-boarders had just paid a little more attention to the structure and maybe a little less time on quests that didn't make it through anyway, I might've actually given this a way higher grade.
If you just like to watch something when you're bored, this show is not a bad way to kill time, but don't expect too much, or you might get dizzy.
