In a world where sorcery is real, witches were persecuted for years by frightened humans until the eighteenth century. In a bid to survive, witches pledged themselves to the rulers of their countries, and in time, all countries would come to have their own witches working in the shadows. Now in the present day, when the strength of a witch determines the strength of her country, humanity seeks stronger and stronger witches, even establishing a school to train aspiring witches—all while oblivious to the seeds of resentment and revenge that lives on in the heart of every single witch. At Sternenlichtl, a prestigious school where witches learn their craft, Alice Keating is the brightest girl in her year and the descendent of the school's founder. Her world is turned upside down when she is assigned to be the tutor to Mari Muguruma, a strange girl who seems out of place among the other witches. As the two grow closer, they also begin to learn the secrets of their respective worlds.
For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to shorten it's title to Witch's Love. If there's one word I can use to describe Witch's Love, its ambitious. Seriously, in just three volumes, Witch's Love goes from being a slice-of-life yuri series in a magic school to discovering a centuries long elaborate plot to destroy all of humanity and trying to stop it, wasting absolutely no time in getting its plot rolling and committing to it. I actually liked the overall story and how the various characters play into it, as Witch's Love has a lot of neat ideas, like witches raising their pupils to focus only on revenge, discarding feelings like love and genuine compassion for their cause, and how falling in love causes a witch to lose their magic. Those are really interesting, though the series doesn't really flesh them out much, other than a few brief reveals at the end. If Witch's Love was longer, it would have had much more room to explore those ideas and the history behind why Sternenlitchtl enforces them with an iron fist.
Yeah, let's not waste any time. Witch's Love could have been something amazing, but all of its flaws are due to it being only three volumes long. This results in a lot of things being really rushed, such as character development, pacing, and world-building. A lot of the story's lore is just sort of exposition dumped in sporadic intervals rather than being shown more organically, kind of like how The Heike Story, as a result of only being 11 episodes long, was made to truncate a lot of events from the novel and have a bunch of characters info-dump their backstories and activities to get to the important stuff faster. As a result of trying to rush through its story, the characters and what development they get feel very half-baked. Plus, a good chunk of the story is supposed to be romance between Alice and Mari, but the way the story presents said romance feels extremely shallow in that the scenes that are supposed to establish their budding romance come off less like the characters are genuinely growing closer and more like they're only interacting because the author made them do so. It doesn't help that for a series that proclaims to be a yuri romance, there's nothing to really indicate that they're even falling in love beyond hand holding and admiration, not to mention they don't even kiss or act like a couple, so I question why this even needed to be a romance at all.
Actually, the cast of characters besides one also suffer from the book's short length, as again, even their development is rushed, resulting in them coming off as bland and cliche. Alice is the stoic ace who becomes nicer thanks to Mari, the clumsy yet bewildered problem child, and so on. Alice's girl posse is just there to take up space, and while I actually do like what they did with Miriam at first, she gets a rather unceremonious end and not much beyond her role in the plot. Plus, the series makes this huge deal about Mari's mother being important to the plot, but said character only appears in two scenes and has absolutely no impact on the story itself, so why bother making her important if you're not even going to do anything with her? The only character who is actually somewhat interesting is Madam Dolly, the headmistress of Sternenlichtl, and her spotlight chapter is the only one that doesn't feel like it's expected to finish everything under a tight deadline. It's a shame, because, again, had Witch's Love been given more time, the author could have fleshed out her characters even more, and maybe have them relax a bit rather than have the whole story feel like it's being resolved 25 chapters earlier than it should. Which is weird because the author notes in one of the volumes that Witch's Love was originally going to be just two volumes, but was expanded to three. Yeah, this really should have been way longer.
As for the art...it's okay. I'm not familiar with Kujira as an artist, but from what I can see, her artwork is serviceable, if a tad underwhelming. There aren't much in the way of backgrounds, but I did like the character designs, with the exception of Alice's reverse mullet that makes her look like someone chopped the back of her hair off. But having been spoiled by the likes of Witch Hat Atelier and Eden of Witches, the lack of attention to detail in everything, from the art to the setting is just yet another example of how bum-rushed Witch's Love feels. It's a serviceable story, and I would very much like to see it be expanded on in every way, because there is potential for something great here. Sadly, A Witch's Love At The End of the World is both too short to carry the weight of its material and crippled by its own ambition. Seriously, it feels like a series that got cancelled even though it's technically complete. If you want a short read that you don't need to think too hard about, Witch's Love won't be a waste of your time, but plenty of other witch series exist that manage to do everything that Witch's Love didn't have the time to do.
