This show is trying to do a lot all at once, including: establishing a multifaceted isekai’d character, building an all female harem, introducing us to a world filled with magic, development of magical tools to supplement or substitute for that magic, dealing with family drama, managing a royal succession crisis, dealing with a variety of weird things that result from an implantable source of magic power causes, and a few more problems that would require me to get into spoiler territory. Some of these things it does well. Others are too little explored or too varied to really stand out. For example, while there is a basis for why the MC being isekai’d matters, it’s pretty surface level and not very interesting.
Strangely enough, the closest thing I can relate this series to is Ascendance of a Bookworm, and the characters make that comparison a lot more apt in the final episode where Anis wrestles with the possibility that she effectively erased someone else to come to this world. But that series’ main strong suit is that it keeps things pretty simple and really spends the time developing these characters and their aims. By contrast, this series seems to keep a lot of its characters’ motivations hidden until the last possible moment, making what should be pivotal scenes confusing until later episodes establish why they happened. This series had a lot going on, and it’s pacing and focus suffered for it. At once, I think this series rushed resolutions and unnecessarily dragged out scenes with clunky exposition.
That being said, the animation was great, particularly in sakuga-laden scenes, and the relationship between our leads was genuinely lovely. As the central pillar of the show, it held things up well, albeit not well enough to bring the whole thing together as well as I wanted.
