This is a spin off of The Irregular at Magic High School that focuses on Miyuki instead of Tatsuya. It covers the Enrollment and the Nine Schools Competition arcs, which is approximately the first 2/3s of the first season of the main series. While ultimately it covers the exact same story, the elements focused on are pretty different. Furthermore, it glosses over or skips significant portions of the original plot in favor of spending more time focusing on the new content. Understanding the original story is still necessary to understanding the new content however. Thus, this spin off should only be watched after already being familiar with the the first two arcs of the main series.
Also, while Miyuki is the main lead in this, she’s focused on a lot less compared to Tetsuya in the main series. Instead, it focuses quite a lot on her friends. This of course includes her friends Honoka and Shizuka, but Eimi as well. Eimi has essentially no presence in the main series but in this she seems to be as close a friend to Miyuki as Honoka and Shizuka, which is somewhat strange. Especially as it tries to write around why she isn’t present during certain story events in order to try to stay consistent with the main series. There’s also a pretty large focus on the girls that compete against them from Third High School in the Nine Schools Competition, who aren’t present at all in the main series as far as I remember.
There is an attempt at fleshing out and giving character development to everyone, but with the reoccurring characters it was pretty constrained by not really doing anything beyond the main series which didn’t really have them as a focus. As such it just takes the minor character beats that were already present in the main series and expands on them a bit. It works decently enough, especially if you’re already fans of the characters, but its nothing too major. The new characters were more interesting, mainly Airi and Shiori, which makes sense as the writing had more freedom to do whatever it wanted with them.
The Enrollment has a bit of substance, but not much. For the most part it just feels like a speed run of what is in the main series but with more CGDCT in it, which is enjoyable enough I suppose. But the real meat of this spin off is really in the Nine Schools Competition Arc. While the main series focuses on Tetsuya’s amazing capabilities as an engineer, this spin off focuses much more on the girls actually competing. Their motivations, what they went through in training, their bonds with the friends, and their thought process during the actual competition. As such it’s where the girls really shine. There’s still a good amount of focus on Tetsuya being overpowered. It’s different from the main series however in that instead of just showing Tetsuya being overpowered, the focus is on the girls gushing over how awesome he is, which was pretty amusing. Especially with Miyuki as her already strong bro-complex seems to have been cranked up a bit in this.
The art is essentially the same as in the main series, though the animation was noticeably weaker unfortunately. The character designs are the same for the most part and solid enough. The highlight character design wise were the new costumes for the competition which were all pretty great. I don’t remember well enough to be absolutely sure they’re new, but at the minimum they’re focused on much more in this. The OP’s visuals and song really grew on me and by the end of the anime I loved it. Even though it plays during the Enrollment Arc as well, it’s entirely focused on the Nine School Competition Arc, which sounds kind of strange but was probably for the best considering that’s the most prominent arc. The ED was also decent enough in terms of the song and visuals. The soundtrack was kind of strange in that it had a lot of great and memorable tracks, but they were used in ways that really didn’t fit at times.
As a random tangent, it’s pretty strange how the members of Course 2 basically feel like senpai to the girls in Course 1. I kind of noticed it in the main series, but it’s especially prominent here. A core part of it is of course the relationship between Miyuki and ‘onii-sama’ giving off a certain overpowering vibe. But it kind of applies to the rest of Tetsuya’s friends and Miyuki’s friends as well respectively.
