Over the whole serie, in terms of character arc, Chise feels really incomplete. I know we're supposed to root for her ; the show deals with very serious matters. But her development is stuck in the same pattern for quite some time, maybe well until the very end actually, to the point where she seems like she's never gonna get from place A to place B.
Elias is just foggy and unlikeable. We basically know nothing about him, his abilities are confusing and most 'action' sequences ends up just being some mumbo jumbo casually thrown at us without any sort of solid context. I know it's a magical world, but this 'hush hush, it's magic' thing, is not good enough.
Their relations is where the show fails the most hardly. From the get go the story gives us a complicated situation where an old dude buys a 15 year old as a slave : the show never makes the best out of it. I could not grasp any tangible tension between the two, despite the dialogues and the pretty good music and the on screen events, all tried very hard to make me understand that these two are supposed to have a strong connection, that connection was always paper thin, because the show had a lackluster script : no rooted emotion, no visual storytelling, too much words, too much of the same pattern one episode after another. Sadly it's not as if they did not know how to do it, because the OVA's were pretty good and gave me hope.
One detail that made me tick, I can't begin to describe the cringe everytime Elias lifts Chise with his arms to carry her, or just talk to her or sometimes even for no reason at all. It made no sense and I'm sorry to say, made the Chise character a very weak female lead and Elias an awkward character, the wrong not the endearing type of awkward.
I don't kow about the source material. Now this show suffers from not being able to take a straightstep towards a dominant tone for its narration. It tries to be fantasy, romance, comedy, dark, there's mystery and there's supposed to be psychological developments. Well nothing's done the right way. One interesting detail about Elias is his appetite for humans, they try to use it in his unfolding relation with Chise, but even there, the show falls flat on its back, because of bad storytelling and wrong tonality. One thing I read a lot and can't agree more is the senseless useage of weak so weak cliffhangers, which is a very serious symptom for headless chicken storytelling syndrom.
If you want the romance with a touch of magic, how about going back to Spice and Wolf. Even the currently airing show Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi feels more satisfying, even though it's very similar in terms of premises. Because this Ancient Mumbo Jumbo Fest is actually closer to the Twilight saga more than anything.
