Writing So Much About the Appeal of the Magical Girl Raising Project Series That Anyone Who Hasn’t Read It Will Absolutely Want To

※This is a repost of an article originally published over six years ago.

　Writing So Much About the Appeal of the Magical Girl Raising Project Series That Anyone Who Hasn’t Read It Will Absolutely Want To

　I just finished the newest volume of Magical Girl Raising Project(MGRP), the first mainline release in three years. And it was absolutely, unquestionably a perfect one hundred out of one hundred. It’s split into two volumes, and I’ve only read the first half so far, but based on this series’ track record, I can say with total confidence that the second half is going to be incredible. The accumulation of trust is just different: no matter what, you know it’s going to hit you with despair and developments several times beyond your expectations.

With Magical Girl Raising Project: Black, once I got into the final stretch, I kept sighing every time I turned a page, thinking, “It’s a problem when a story is this insanely good and there isn’t even a release date for the next volume yet.”

　The fun of MGRP is something only MGRP can satisfy. From a publisher’s point of view, it’s already amazing that a series with black-based covers can still sell in this era. Works this dark, with this gloomy an atmosphere, just don’t sell the way they used to. Of course, part of that is because Maruino-sensei’s illustrations shine brilliantly even within that darkness, but it’s also because the series delivers exactly the “blackness” its readers are hoping for.

　So this time, I’m just going to talk and talk about what makes MGRP so incredible, for people who haven’t read it yet.

The excitement before you even start reading

　Magical Girl Raising Project is, basically, a series where around sixteen brand-new magical girls appear each time (sometimes with a few returning characters mixed in), get caught up in some kind of incident, and are forced into a death game or survival game.

　Which means that every single time you buy a new volume, you first stare at the two-page character introduction spread and think:

　So these are the magical girls who are going to end up killing each other because of some sudden disaster this time?

　Who’s close to whom? Who’s going to betray who? Which ability is going to be the worst possible match-up against which other one?

　You make all these predictions first, and then you start the main story.

Reading the character introduction pages in Magical Girl Raising Project and thinking, “So these are the lovely magical girls this time, and these are the powers they have! I bet this girl and that girl are going to shine, or clash with each other! …But they’re all going to die, aren’t they…” —that is genuinely one of the greatest pleasures in my life.

　Because every volume is packed with new characters, you can never predict how any of them are going to move through the story. And because the explanations of their magic are written in ways that allow for endless interpretation, you can imagine an infinite number of ways they might shine in the main story. For example, in the image I posted earlier, there’s a cute, seemingly cooking-themed power: “With these magic mittens, I can grab anything.” But since it literally means anything, it turns out to be one of the strongest combat abilities too, because you can just grab and throw whatever you want.

Dense daily-life sections

　Before they get dragged into some incident and forced to kill each other, the characters in MGRP are generally living peaceful lives as magical girls.

　They might be students, or office ladies, but their biggest worries are often things like romance or friendships—very ordinary, life-sized worries, especially when you think about the fact that they’re soon going to be risking their lives in battle.

　And before the main story truly begins, you usually get daily-life scenes for most of the characters, which lets you emotionally invest in them and understand how they relate to each other while everything is still peaceful. In other words, it’s not just that all sixteen magical girls are given roles and powers—they’re also each given their ordinary girlish side, their everyday personalities. And the series does this every single time. And it’s always incredibly fun.

　It’s hard to even imagine how much work it must take to prepare sixteen new characters every time. And in fact, Maruino-sensei, the illustrator, has to endure watching the magical girls they designed get killed off one after another in every installment.

　Thanks to these daily-life sections, all sixteen magical girls are guaranteed at least some amount of screen time, which means you can’t easily predict obvious cannon fodder or throwaway characters. On top of that, MGRP has a rich collection of short stories, where you can catch glimpses of these girls’ ordinary lives outside the main plot. Characters who are already dead, or who will later kill someone, get to have their peaceful everyday selves shown off in separate books. That’s one of the joys unique to MGRP, too.

Relationships that change

　More than anything, the thing I love most in MGRP is the way relationships that were once casual friendships—or vague, half-formed bonds—change drastically once those characters are suddenly thrown into a situation where they have to kill each other.

I’m convinced that everyone in the world loves the kind of relationships Magical Girl Raising Project reveals: the love-and-hate dynamics between girls that would never normally emerge in everyday life, but appear when they’re placed in the extraordinary situation of having to kill each other, along with the emotions of girls being cornered as death draws close. So honestly, I can’t understand people who haven’t read Magical Girl Raising Project.

　If they had just kept interacting as ordinary students, those girls would have remained just friends. But once they’re placed in a life-or-death situation, they discover whether they truly trust each other, or whether the other person isn’t actually important enough to stake their life on...

　You get to watch an endless number of warped relationships and emotions between girls—and when they transform into magical girls, they’re all forcibly made beautiful on top of that. That’s my favorite part!!!

In closing

When I recommend Magical Girl Raising Project to other people, I switch between these three pitches: "The one where girls transform into magical girls, are forcibly made gorgeous, and then crash their emotions into each other until they die.", "The one where ordinary friendships between girls get twisted into warped relationships once they’re thrown into a deathtrap.", "The one where brainwashing magic absolutely cannot be broken by something as cheap as love or friendship."

　Another thing I love is that brainwashing-type magic is never broken by friendship or love. The effects of magic are absolute. That kind of mercilessness is exactly what makes it so good.

　Recently, the series finally started getting Kindle editions, which makes it much easier to recommend. And the pace of new releases has picked up too. So first of all, please read volume one. Since it has to do a lot of work explaining the basic concept of magical girls, it still feels like the groundwork of the story more than anything, but it’s a great volume packed with the mercilessness that comes from that early, feeling-things-out stage.

↓AmazonLink

　And once you understand the series’ foundation and atmosphere, move on to the next volume, restart. restart is genuinely incredible. From there on, the standard format becomes two-part arcs (or single volumes that are extremely thick), so the way it lays its foreshadowing, builds up each character, deepens your emotional investment, and then gives you these dense, intertwined relationships between girl and girl—only to tear them apart in brutal ways—will absolutely shake any otaku to their core.

　So first, please read these three books.

↓Amazonリンク

That was me talking about how much I love Magical Girl Raising Project.