Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - Raihousha Hen - Episode 13 [END] - 10 Second Anime

Tatsuya needs to save people from a collapsing skyscraper. A new school year starts as the anime season ends.

Visitor Arc XIII

Hmm.

Mahouka’s season finale didn’t make as much of an impact as the first season’s last moments. Recreating a huge building is not as literally explosive as leaving a huge hole in the middle of the Korean peninsula. That ending also shifted global geopolitics since an unknown strategic-level magician made his power known and no nation registered or disavowed him. Nations can’t abide an independent walking, talking nuclear bomb.

The anticlimactic ending here was a victim of the story arcs from the source material not fitting well into 12 or 13 episodes of Mahouka’s second season. Being faithful to the light novels’ chronology left us with a smaller ending than the huge military action set piece from the first season. I read the second season as a transition into the larger story of the Seven Sages controlling the world of magic power as they compete. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another six years before we see that third season.

Heh.

It may be 2096, but people still panic like uncivilized beasts. Tatsuya hopes to get Shizuku and Honoka out of the hyper tower before he needs to take steps. Hayama and Minami are on the team. Tatsuya is creepy! He just created a save point for Minami. Tatsuya gets to play James Bond wearing that tuxedo. Who’s protecting whom between Miyuki and Minami? Minami will become used to this stuff soon.

Har. Tatsuya does his data immersion to scan the current situation. Minami asks if he’s using visual magic. He says, “it’s similar.” No, it’s not! Eep. Earthquake? Coincidental? “Someone” wants to make sure the magicians don’t get public sympathy by successfully evacuating the tower before destroying it. Negotiations have failed. Time for Tatsuya’s flawless victory. Not so flawless. The terrorist leader started the chain reaction destruction spell.

Tatsuya realizes he needs to restore a save point for the entire building. Can his brain hold all that information at the same time? He’ll need to find out. He did it. Minami asks if this was the deed of a human. Tatsuya Shiva the Destroyer tells no lies if you ask him no questions. He’s merely tired. Miyuki's lap pillow is the solution.

Time for a new school year. Who’s president now? There’s the former one with her younger twin sisters. They’ll be joining the Shiba harem soon. Fun. Minami goes to the same high school now too. And lives with the Shibas too as Miyuki’s attendant. The end.

Final Thoughts.

Mahouka’s second season felt smaller than the first season, but that was because we had 26 continuous episodes back then covering slice of life introductions and other fun stuff while establishing the world’s issues with magic users and regular people. There was a lot of ground to cover. The second season’s single cour dealt with the aftermath of Tatsuya introducing his power to the world and then conflated it with blackhole aliens. This choice of telling the story of a single American hunting Tatsuya and blackhole aliens diluted the strength of both stories. Too many times we saw plot developments appear on the screen without proper foundation and suspense building. Too little time.

That feeling of not enough time also affected Mahouka’s endearing slice of life features. I loved how the little touches of background music and themes to signal when the fun stuff was about to happen was still here, but there just wasn’t enough of it. We also missed out on the fun characters from the first season, like all the quirky kids from the engineering club where Tatsuya spent so much of his time.

The better choice would have been to concentrate only on Angelina’s story while fluffing out the rest of the episodes in a twelve-episode arc with character driven comedy like they did for Valentine’s Day. Seniors were graduating at the end of this season, so why not visit with those characters before we hardly ever see them again? Well, Mahouka decided to make sure we hardly ever saw them again, but from a time frame of six years ago. That wasn’t great from a fan service perspective.

I wonder if all those missing slice of life moments will be in the upcoming Mahouka anime focusing on Miyuki. If that’s the case, then I withdraw all my complaints and can’t wait for The Honor Student at Magic High School premiering later in 2021.