Mashle: Magic and Muscles

This anime is funny and entertaining and basically a parade of Harry Potter if it was an anime. From Quidditch to Draco Malfoy, it's basically mocking the entire magic school genre, with a main character with no magic, but instead of being an angsty, poor unfortunate outcast, he's a musclehead whose so dense he doesn't realise half the things happening around him, and the scenarios he ends up in because of it are simple hilarious.

I'd recommend it, purely on its comedy chops, but the animation and voice acting are nothing to sneeze at either. I've only watched the dub, but the voice acting is also solid.

I hope we get a 2nd season. I had a blast.

Pros:

• A lot of good action
• Very clean, no sexual content at all

Cons:

• Jokes were overly repeated and not very funny to begin with
• Overly copies Harry Potter, doesn't bring a lot of new material but does have some.

• Character personality is fairly poor and quickly felt predictable. I didn't find myself very excited for any one individual to come on screen.

• Every fight would be heavily interspersed with talking and flash backs which made things slow

Overall I was just a little bored and found myself finishing more for the sake of checking off a box and finishing what I started than anything else. If you don't mind the heavy copying of Harry Potter and aren't too critical you may enjoy this one.

At first glance, you think it's another anime where you have to defeat someone, but after watching the first episodes, you understand that it's something new.

In summary, it's about a boy who has no magical abilities, but instead he is very strong. The protagonist is not very smart (nicely expressed) and is forced to go to a magic school to become the best mage, without magic skills.

The genre is comedy, adventure and fantasy. The jokes are like in "Onepunchman". The story is not perfect and is often silly but it fits the story quite well.

I advise you to watch it if you like "Onepunchman" or "Mob psycho 100".

The premise to this is fine, you've seen it 1000x, "I gots no power, in a world of power." THOUGH, this tries to be very subversive.

PLOT: Simple; boy is born without MAGIC, denoted by a line (or two) on ones' face. THOUGH, in this society, eugenics is the name of the game, and if you're not born with magic, you're literally as good as dead. A man finds Mash, after overhearing him crying in the bushes near the cliff he was about to jump from, to end his own life.

So, it starts out similar to My Hero. It is VERY MUCH structured like Harry Potter, and they're not even shy about it, which is great. It's part of its subversion gimmick.

Where this shines is in the beginning, watching a magic-less user just completely hulk out of any problem that would require magic. At times it's played for a gag, and at other times, it become annoying plot armor. Especially when you notice the pattern.

Most of the fun in this anime comes from watching the writers create "logical in universe" work arounds for Mash's lack of magic. Since he comes off as a dumb character, but you realize he's quite brilliant and extremely inventive. HOW? I don't know? They kind of use the whole, "he had to be clever to go undetected and unmurdered for so long", explanation. It's another one of those, don't think too much about it.

That's the problem, it wants to poke fun at shonen, but also falls into a lot of its trappings. Unearned power-ups or revelations, in Mash's case. Most of the Magic on Magic fights are meh, save for one near the end between two double liners; Orca guy vs Eagle guy. And it does do that thing a lot of these animes do, especially shonen, which is more of a fault of the audience it aims for. Almost every enemy becomes Mash's friend, or learns to respect him.

I like this anime, but season 2 ends with setting up the final boss, this manga has a definitive end, that end has been reached like 2 years ago now... So you can spoil it for yourself if you want. It's as fairytale and predictable as you'd expect.

My biggest issue was by the end, Mash's creativity didn't make much sense especially at the last encounter, where Mash is "flying" by running in place very fast. He does this gimmick during the "Not-Quidditch" match to fly his broom, which worked as a one-off gag, but to try to pass it off as a legit tool in his arsenal is weird.

Without getting too much into it, and spoilers, the last 4 episodes kind of lost me.

Mashle isn't what I expected! This is the funniest anime I have ever watched. Mashle is not only funny but delivers on the action and the story too. Mash is one of the most likeable MCs I've ever seen in an anime. If you like One Punch Man, you'll definitely get a kick out of this one! I also don't find any of the side characters boring or annoying, which is kind of a surprise because there's always this one side character which I dislike even on my favourite animes. The only problem I have with Mashle is that Mash kinda befriends everyone he faces as an opponent at the end of their fights. Maybe this is intentional, but that is probably the only thing I kind of dislike about this show.