The overall animation and visual of the anime are good. Nothing stunning but nothing bad. I really liked how the anime manage to be colorful and still maintain an overall dark atmosphere, I really liked the using of light, shadow and colors during the whole anime and the chara-designe of the site-admin are also very creative and interesting. I would just say that in therms of staging and imagery, the anime is kinda poor.
The sounds in the anime are also good, there’s nothing to say about it. But the musics are kinda bland. There’s nothing very original and there’s no particular theme that manage to stand out. The only theme that manage to stand out for me, and not in a good way, was “Innocent Murderous Intent”. The song is basically your very cliché horror song with kids singing and it makes every scene it’s used in more kitsch either than making them more scary or disturbing.
The opening is very good. I think that it really manage to retransmit well the dark atmosphere the anime is trying to create. The ending on the other hand… I can really take seriously actress in school girl uniforms dancing on the top of a building with giant 3D sperm flying around them. And as far as I’m aware there’s no particular symbol or something like that that justifies it.
The characters are very bland. Most of them are bad person ( which doesn't mean they are badly written character ) and because of their way of thinking and acting they will confront the consequences of those, but they will never be questioned or learn something through those events which lead those character to never grow or change. The only development characters in this anime have is their background ( which is sometimes thrown just before the death of the character just to hope you will miraculously become attached to them ) which is basically always the same: “some bad shit happened to me ( bullying or murder ) so now I’m an asshole that do not hesitate to kill”. Some character could bring some interesting theme but they are never developed fully. It always just feels like those element are here for the anime to look more dark but after that nothing interesting is done with those elements with potential. There’s literally a character in the intrigue that stay in the background and seems to become more and more dangerous because of how unstable he become but then he just get killed by another antagonist before having any impact on the story. One thing I liked however was at the end of each episode where we view thing from the big brother perspective, I found those moment really funny and it also build the megalomania of the character.
The story is very interesting with some good plot point but it suffer from a terrible execution. Has I said, the story try to munch to be “dark” with it’s character, it’s just “let’s make them suffer but let’s not try to do anything or say anything through it”. But the story is also full of plot hole ( and I’m usually very forgetful about plot hole ) and by reading the manga I discoverer that most of the incoherence and plot hole are because of some explanation or scene that allow to understand what’s happening are missing in the anime adaptation. And I think that the story get even worse when it throw a beach episode out of nowhere. It’s not just that it almost served nothing for the plot, it’s also that, in my opinion the anime destroy it’s own credibility by making some weird fan service episode when it constantly tries to be dark. Overall, there's a ton of more or less smaller element that just make the story not work for me.
But overall, I did enjoy quite a bit this anime. In my opinion, it’s part of those bad fiction that are enjoyable because of bad they are. There were still some moment that where legitimately boring, but overall it was still fun to watch. But on a more serious note, it’s also very hard to not compare Mahou shoujo site to madoka magica. It’s not the same story and also not a copy of MSMM, but it does takes multiple plot element from it, and the thing that, in my opinion, makes them bad or not as good, is that Mahou shoujo site doesn’t try to give depth or meaning behind those elements and use them just because “it’s dark”, and by forcing it to munch, the “dark” element of the anime become more laughable than anything else. But it’s still an interesting watch that I would recommend if you think it’s your type of anime.
