The Plot: Aya Asagiri is bullied and beaten at school and abused at home by her own sociopathic brother. When she stumbles across a mysterious website promising to make her a magical girl, it provides just enough incentive to continue moving forward, especially when she finds a weird heart-shaped gun in her locker the next day which leads to the deaths of two of her school bullies. What she doesn’t realize is that entering this world of magical girls will set her on a collision course with others of her kind that wish to kill her and others like her to become the one magical girl strong enough to survive the impending “Tempest”.

The Opinion: This series strikes me as pretty polarizing. It starts out very bleak with our protagonist being severely beaten and kicked on the ground by girls in her class. She goes home and gets punched in the gut by her brother who then chokes her until she blacks out. The next day those same bullies bring in a big guy to rape her. It’s at about this point I’m starting to think this show is just trying to entertain by shock value. While it definitely does go for shock at times, it also eventually starts to widen its palette more, leaning into its gonzo premise (a sort of mix of Madoka Magica and Future Diary) with a certain amount of camp. Adding in other characters like a teen pop idol dressed like a dog, a samurai girl, a busty psychopath in glasses, a psychic crossdresser and other broad tropes, it starts to become clear the show is more about the spectacle of it all than anything else. Heck, it even works in a beach episode because of course it does. So how successful is this weird, grim, gory and goofy concoction? I guess it depends on what you are looking for in a show. The characters are paper thin and the plot occasionally doesn’t make sense. But at the same time, it has a certain free-spirited go-for-broke attitude that manages to engage and entertain at times anyway.

The Deets: The transfer from Sentai Filmworks is a pretty standard, crisp and clean digital animation transfer with nothing of note in terms of blemishes or issues with the audio similarly solid as expected. The extras are a little different than the usual “Clean Opening/Clean Ending” stuff that typically gets dumped onto a lot of these anime series discs. Instead we are treated to a couple of live action music videos starring the actresses who played two of the lead characters in the series as well as accompanying “Making Of”s for each of the two videos. The videos themselves are ok for what they are (although the one with the j-pop idol dressed as a dog comes across as kinda sleazy). I actually thought the ‘making of’ featurettes were pretty interesting though. They do a good job of show the nuts and bolts and sheer tedium of a video shoot like this by taking a fly-on-the-wall approach at times.

The Verdict: This is definitely not a series for everyone. It tackles some very dark and depressing themes in places and can also get exceedingly violent (parents, do not confuse this for a Sailor Moon clone for the kiddies!). But in the right gonzo cheese camp headspace, you may find this one entertaining in the same way a series like Highschool of the Dead is.