A Certain Magical Index is a true phenomenon in Japan, having spawned multiple spinoffs (one of which, a manga called A Certain Scientific Railgun, has gotten a two-season anime adaptation in its own right). It has become a franchise on the level of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in terms of how sprawling it has become, with loads and loads of characters and requiring an encyclopedia to keep track of everything that’s happened. The light novels (which this anime is based off of) continue to this day, and as of this writing the light novels have entered their eighteenth story arc. This re-release collects all 24 episodes of the first season of the anime adaptation of the “base” franchise, on 3 Blu-rays and 4 DVDs in a combo pack. And, in the end, this set barely scratches the surface.
Like a lot of sprawling universes with spinoffs galore, it starts off fairly simple. Touma Kamijou is a high school student living in Academy City, a state-of-the-art city dedicated to the scientific study of humans with psychic powers. Every single student is given an “Esper Rank” to indicate their power, and Touma is as low as you can go: a Level 0 with no psychic talent whatsoever. The one thing he has going for him is that his right hand has the Imagine Breaker, which cancels out all psychic powers sent at him. But even Imagine Breaker brings a hefty drawback: Touma is cursed with some of the worst luck in the world. Considering Academy City is filled with punk youths who can think of nothing else to do with their powers than to abuse them, you can bet Touma has a knack for finding himself in trouble.
Naturally, his bad luck winds up causing the story’s plot to happen. A young nun by the name of Index literally drops onto his apartment balcony. Her name is meaningful, since she has over 100,000 forbidden magic grimores memorized inside her head. Naturally, bad guys want her. And everything winds up sprawling out from there.
To be honest, it is easy to lose track of what’s going on in the series after the first arc. Every few episodes, the anime moves on to another story arc, piling on more characters and more story elements, without always explaining the characters and their existences, much less their motivations. Female protagonist Misaka has a ton of clone-like people who look exactly like her but have a tendency to speak robotically in the third person, and the anime does not do a good job justifying why they exist in the first place. There is almost a sense that the anime expects you to have read the light novels, and this anime is merely supplying the visual for the text in the book. Explanations do eventually occur for most of the events in the series, but the series also commits the cardinal sin of making it seem like some important prose or text is being passed over.
That being said, the series is fun to watch. J.C. Staff is not in the upper tier of Japanese animation studios, but there are some pretty nice fights on display throughout the series. The highlight would likely be Touma versus arc villain Accelerator, resulting in some slickly animated fisticuffs and some wonderfully demented facial expressions from Accelerator throughout the confrontation. The fact that Touma is reliant on his right hand to do any damage at all to his opponent makes things interesting because Touma has to come up with creative ways just to get close to his opponent in order to strike. The abilities demonstrated by opponents and allies are varied, some are rooted in technobabble (like Misaka’s “railgun”), while others are described as using outright magic (many of the bad guys). Overall, the slick appearance manages to hold up for all of the 24 episodes, which is a nice achievement.
It’s too bad that the characters themselves don’t really stand out outside of a few exceptions. While they look visually distinct, they tend to be generic personality-wise. The anime (written by Masanao Akahoshi and directed by Hiroshi Nishikiori) also doesn’t utilize the large cast to its fullest extent. Despite being the titular character, Index is absent from the series for long stretches at a time. People come in and out without warning, and it’s difficult to get attached to them. The only consistency is Touma and eventually Misaka and Accelerator. It’s no surprise that the primary spinoffs of this series are both based on Misaka and Accelerator because the anime goes through the effort to make them memorable in their own right. But overall, I just get the feeling that the anime rushed through a lot of the light novels or did events in an odd order and as a result it’s difficult to become emotionally invested.
Interestingly, in a rarity for such a series on either side of the Pacific, the male and female combatants treat each other as equal threats in battle. While this results in a plethora of strong female characters, there are also many sequences where Touma punches out a female opponent and sends her to the ground. While the reasons so are justified repeatedly, some viewers may be uncomfortable with a heroic character like Touma unapologetically using physical violence on women even if his life is clearly at risk. If you are uncomfortable with that, this is not the series for you.
The music is composed by Maiko Iuchi. At first the music is almost solely electronica, switching from ambient for calmer/comedic situations to house and techno for battle. Starting with the Accelerator fight an electric guitar starts roaring to life in the fights as well, giving things a nice edge. While the soundtrack doesn’t succeed in making emotional moments more sentimental, it does succeed, wholeheartedly, at giving the fights a huge boost in energy and urgency. It is proof a low-budget score doesn’t have to be forgettable.
The openings and endings are, however, uniformly forgettable. J-pop starlet Mami Kawada performs both of the opening sequences (“PSI-Missing” for episodes 1-16 and “masterpiece” for 17-24), and IKU performs both ending sequences (“Rimless—Fuchi na Shino Sekai” for episodes 1-19 and “Chikai Goto—Sukoshi dake mō Ichido” for episodes 20-24). All four of them are generic J-pop set to generic visuals that any seasoned anime viewer has seen before. The openings do succeed in providing a small energy shot for kicking off each episode.
The dub, directed by Zach Bolton, generated a lot of controversy upon initial release because many of the actors (particularly Brittany Karbowski as Misaka) did not pronounce the Japanese names and terms correctly. While this is a noticeable flaw, the dub does manage to flow rather smoothly. Barring the few awkward sentences, the dub succeeds at articulating the meaning and intent of the lines well while sounding fairly natural in English. The actors are picked with the intent of making everyone sound like natural Americans in their age groups (particularly important if your cast is filled with teenagers). While this may make someone like Accelerator sound less intimidating in the dub, it does make a 15/16-year-old boy sound like a 15/16 year old boy, which has its own advantages. Austin Tindle gets a lot of credit for making Accelerator sound as intense and psychotic as he is without losing the youthful tone.
The sub has some truly stellar performances in it as well, particularly Satomi Arai’s performance as Kuroko and Rina Satou’s pitch-perfect Misaka (who both would take on starring roles in the afore-mentioned A Certain Scientific Railgun spinoff). The voices aren’t quite as natural as the English dub, but they are more varied in general which allows the character’s personalities to shine through a bit better. An interesting point of contention is that the English dub has Ms. Karbowski voice Misaka and all of her clones, but the Japanese version uses Rina Satou and a few other actresses for all of the Misaka variations.
Unfortunately, Index (Yuka Iguchi and Monica Rial) sounds equally annoying in both dubs, so in that particular case you get to pick your poison.
Extras are four episode commentaries and clean openings and endings. There is nothing new added from previous releases of the series.
Overall, A Certain Magical Index has some of the pieces necessary to make for a memorable action series, but often gets bogged down in its own minutiae, making much of the story feel incoherent and failing to make a lot of characters and stories as memorable as they could have been. Will subsequent series or the spinoffs fare any better? I hope so, because this is not an auspicious start to such a sprawling franchise. In the end, it feels like Index started off with the equivalent to Iron Man 2 instead of Iron Man in terms of quality: a rushed mess with a few good scenes that makes the final product ultimately watchable but overall forgettable.
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