Sky Wizards Academy

Summary: >

E601 is the worst squad in the history of Mitsogun Wizard Academy. Three girls who can't seem to get along or work together, are about to get a new instructor: Kanata Age. The nearly impossible task of shaping up the worst squad seems well suited to the disgraced sky wizard known as "the traitor". Age makes a deal that if the E601 wins an upcoming tournament, they won't be disbanded. Not a small task for an E ranked team that has never had a single victory.

Thoughts: >

Sky Wizards Academy is a typical fantasy anime with a guy surrounded by girls, picking up every cliche aspect of similar titles (not necessarily the best ones), then going through the motions. I still watch these shows, so it would be hypocritical for me to tell you not to, but honestly this is a lazy effort even by those standards and there are plenty of titles that do it "better". There are shows that do worse, so there's that.

The artwork is clean and vibrant. The voice cast is good too. I have a lot of respect for studio Diomedea putting the work into a title which probably doesn't deserve it. That didn't extend to animation however, where Sky Wizard's Academy stumbles through the "action" parts. Characters lazily slash and shoot enemies to have them blow up in incredibly dull combat - which this show has plenty of. I'd complain about that, but considering this clunker of a title handed to the studio, it's lucky it looks as good as it does.

The girls are the usual assortment of anime tropes. A klutzy girl who wants to do her best, but isn't confident (somehow working as a maid at a cafe cures this), Morissa; a brash hot headed girl who won't listen. A girl with her haughty, never-ending dialog about being a goddess interested me at first, but got old fast. Not only do they not work well as a team, they don't gel well as a cast of characters. I did like the eventual solution in forming the linchpin of the team: Morissa doesn't have much skill or strategy, so instead they decide to channel her high stamina into raw firepower to blow through opponents. She doesn't exactly get better but utilizes her strong points. I wouldn't say there's much of anything that's clever about this title (mostly not in fact) but that part works.

Kanata Age is labeled a "traitor" because a past incident, so now everyone looks down on him and his skills. He takes this in stride because he's so humble and secretly totally amazing. Age is tasked with getting squad E601 operating as a team, so he gives them little tasks with no explanation, then eventually they "get it" and become better. It doesn't work well because it's incredibly vague and not insightful. It's like Sky Wizard's Academy couldn't be bothered to go through the steps needed to build a story, so it instead implies a lot and expects the viewer to connect the dots in their head. More annoying still is Age being a master tactician, which is more like a kindergartener declaring absolutely everything (from lotto numbers to sunrises) to be as they predicted.

The world setup isn't explained well either, but perhaps it just hasn't gotten that far yet. This was a problem problem for me when people lose their memories of a sky wizard when they die. It seems important, particularly when Morissa's (fairly awesome) mom dies and everyone but her forgets she existed. That's important enough to explain right now, yet it doesn't.

Is it THAT bad? Not in the deliberate sense, more that it's incredibly lazy using a template that was lazy to begin with (done so many times before). I didn't hate anyone, although Age annoyed me a lot being a blank slate who is "the worst but actually the best" crap done too often in these shows. It has a few good moments, but it's a lot to watch for hardly any payoff. Unless you're really into sci-fi harem "Academy of X" anime, I'd skip this one.

Screen Caps: >