So this was one of those anime I'd often see recommended back when I first got into anime in the late 90s and early 2000s, but for whatever reason, I never got around to watching it at the time. But now that I finally found it on Nozomi Entertainment's YouTube channel, what I found was a product of its time that's aged rather poorly. Or maybe I've just grown too far out of the target demographic.
I'd heard that this was a magical girl series going in, and while that's technically not wrong, it's pretty clear that it expects its audience to identify more with the pervy guy who runs the club than any of the girls. At least it never quite hits harem territory, even if it's about a nerdy guy, the hot young women that surround him, and a gay guy whose only character trait for 90% of the series is to "humorously" hit on that nerdy guy (I don't think I've ever seen an anime filled with as many gay panic jokes as this one, and it's exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds). The main girl still has a lot of screentime and a character arc, but it's nothing deep or that interesting. Sae's whole thing is that she's clumsy and doesn't believe in herself, which she feels the need to tell everyone around her over and over again, until she finally learns to believe in herself. It's the same kind of thing you've seen plenty of times, usually done better than this.
That isn't to say that everything about it fails. The alien threat is interesting in that it actually manages to feel alien and isn't like anything I've seen in a magical girl series before. I liked the gag early on where two of the girls treat being part of a group of magic users trying to get into a big fight with aliens as boring and worth blowing off.
The nerdy guy's absurd pervy fantasies managed to make me laugh once, even if they failed more often than not. And there was one small story arc between the gay guy and one of the girls that ended up being kind of sad and sweet. I just wish the rest of the show could have had an emotional core like that.
This probably still makes it sound like I disliked the show more than I did. It's hardly awful, and I don't regret my time watching it. I feel like I would have been really into it if I'd seen it at around age 14, but in my early 30s, I don't feel like there's a whole lot for me here.