I admit that I have a soft spot for magical girl shows. When I figured out that there was a magical girl show, which had characters from the Fate series, I decided to take a look. (Image Source)
The story of Prisma Illya involves an average elementary school student named Illya who lives with Shirou and two maids. One day, a talking magical wand named Ruby decides to make Illya her master while she was taking a bath. With that, Illya meets Rin and discovers that she needs to use these new powers to capture “Class Cards,” which contains legendary heroes left over from the grail wars that are roaming around in her town.
As seen from the story, Prisma Illya basically plays around with all the clichés from other magical girl shows such as having to capture and collect thing along with another magical girl transferring into the same school. While the show has some resemblance of Cardcaptor Sakura and Nanoha, this is basically a lighthearted parody of magical girl shows geared for guys done while being a similar fashion like Carnival Phantasm. While there are some serious moments such as the Saber Alter battle and Miyu almost being defeated by Beserker, there are a lot of comedic and cute moments when they are not fighting. Even so, the real drawback I have with the story is the pacing because the development varies from being slow to being rushed as seen with Assassin getting defeated within a few minutes while Saber takes two episodes. Since they only have 10 episodes, this is completely understandable.
As for the characters, while there were a good amount of characters from the Fate series (including Irisviel) in this show, the main stars of the show are Illya, Miyu and their magical wands. While Miyu has a cold personality compared to Illya’s cheerful one, I liked how they didn’t have any real advantage over each other. For instance, Miyu is mature and very smart, but doesn’t have the fighting and flying abilities compared to Illya, who processes them. As for the other characters, they are basically used for comedy, especially Rin and Luviagelita, who spends most of their time arguing to each other.
In the end, I thought that Prisma Illya was an enjoyable show even though it was kind of short. Even so, this show has most of the enjoyable aspects of magical girl Anime. Looking past at the pacing issues, I think most people who enjoy this show mostly for the entertaining battles it has and the comedy. Hopefully in the second season will give us some more exciting battles along with introducing a dark magical girl.
Overall Rating: 8.6/10, B, Very Good
More focus on the girls and what they do rather than their obligatory male love interests is what is needed to make a Mahou Shoujo anime good. Then again, my all time favorite Mahou Shoujo anime is Tokyo Mew Mew and…yeah. Still love it, regardless of Aoyama-kun. Eh, he was okay, I guess.
Back to this show. I am ready to embrace the greatness and endure the pain (From what I’ve heard) that 2wei has to offer. Motte ike!
I think the girls are the main focus of magical girls shows since males are viewed as mostly useless. Believe it or not, they usually get the lower end of the stick as seen with Sailor Moon. I wonder how many times Tuxedo Mask had to be saved by the girls…
But aside from that, I haven’t watched Tokyo Mew Mew as 4Kids botched that one up… still, while I enjoyed this, I still think Nanoha is still a bit better with the drama and the fighting. Despite that, I think the next season will probably fix the shortcomings of the first season.
Think the Assassin fight wasn’t quite significant anyway, aside from developing Miyu and Illya. In contrast, Saber is one of the main stars in the F/SN universe, so it’s understandable that a lot of screen time were used on her^^”
A great, fun show. And yay for second season, and yay for Illya x Miyu.
Considering how insignificant he was in Fate/zero besides being used for spying, I suspect that they are the most useless out of the servants compared to Saber or even the other servants. Still, I agree it’s a fun show and hopefully the second season will be good when it starts airing.
if Miyu was a boy would the show be as popular as it is now