Soushin Shoujo Matoi

Title:Soushin Shoujo Matoi
Matoi the Sacred Slayer
装神少女まとい
Overall:Watch
Keywords: , , , , , , , , ,
Notables: Animation - WHITE FOX
OZORA Naomi
SUWA Ayaka
TOMATSU Haruka
Teenage girl Matoi Sumeragi would like nothing more than to live a peaceful, unremarkable life. But, while serving as a shrine maiden, she finds herself entangled in a situation which is both terrifying and amazing, and suggests that her future will consist of nothing but excitement and danger.

12 episodes
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Watch 9 9 8 5 5 5 Ggultra2764 [series:3259#1552]
Matoi the Sacred Slayer is your typical otaku-pandering magical girl shlock with its gimmick on middle school girls becoming "exorcist girls" to battle interdimensional demons. While a nicely animated series, Matoi suffers from the typical pitfalls that many titles of its ilk have in that the characters are defined mostly by whatever archetype they get tacked on (lead girls defined by character types with some backstory in an attempt to give them depth and villains are completely one-dimensional), needless fan service scenes (show making an occasional gag of Matoi and the girls being nude when they return to normal outside of an obligatory beach/ hot springs episode), awkward attempt to balance comical and serious moments, and Matoi's moments as a magical girl getting a good deal of deus ex machina due to being the "chosen hero" of the series. It's not the worst I've seen out of the magical girl genre, but it does nothing to really stick out since it seemingly exists to play to otaku audiences. Overall, a mostly forgettable romp.

Last updated Wednesday, June 14 2017. Created Wednesday, June 14 2017.
Unevaluated Stretch [series:3259#628]
(Three episodes watched):

While I didn't write down a whole lot about the first episode, one thing which struck me about this show was that it seemed to be one which had taken the trouble to do something which all too many anime don't, namely, create a rich cast of likeable, dynamic, developed characters. The banter between Toi and Yuma effectively establishes them as interesting people who you wouldn't mind being friends with, rather than the usual generic characters which never really strike you as having distinctive personalities. This step is important, because if you don't care about the characters, it's hard to care about the plot. Another thing which occurred to me was that while I'm not a big fan of the occult and demons and stuff like that, and usually expect shows which include such things to do it in a ham-fisted and predictable manner, here I wasn't turned off. Perhaps the story had managed to maintain an element of mystery which intrigued me, rather than just hurling weird stuff at me in order to hopefully thrill me with action and violence. I was left curious about what the explanation for all the strange things that had happened might be, and whereas in most shows I would expect the explanation would be unremarkable at best, here I got the feeling that some significant effort had been put into writing and animating this story. Just what the ratio of horror to humor would be was unclear, and episode two would need to make some sense of this. But the preliminary vibe I got from this anime was of above average quality, and I decided to continue to watch.

Unfortunately, the feeling I was getting after three episodes was that this demon fighting business (or whatever it is) was actually rather confusing. Things like 'Divine Union' (whatever that is) and other strange but completely unexplained terms left me scratching my head. A magical battle takes place, but I had no idea what sort of weapons were being used or why they had whatever effect that they did. Instead of fearing for the safety of the good girls, I could only wish that I had a better idea of what was going on. And when an evil clown-like character showed up, my interest in this show rapidly evaporated. It has a well-crafted cast, but that largely goes to waste because the basic plot makes little sense. I was not going to struggle to make sense of this since it seemed so corny and completely generic and uninteresting; the usual 'secret magical organization striving to defeat demons' or something like that. The sense of mystery which I had felt in episode one rapidly evaporated and it turned out that SSM was in fact pretty much just the sort of show which I had initially feared. At one point this was looking to be one of my favorite anime of a vibrant season, but in the end I could only conclude that my precious time would be better spent somewhere else.

Last updated Thursday, May 03 2018. Created Sunday, October 09 2016.

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