While we can’t really blame this on “Madoka Magica Effect”, we can’t because this isn’t even trying to lure you …. still, you know that series’ success was bound to spawn magical girl manga like this.
Frankly, this isn’t the more absurd “magical girl but edgy” take, heck, this predates Magical Girls Ops Asuka, which has them weilding realistic firearms and getting PSTD, maybe we’ll do that sometime, but i wanted to do something magical girl related because the new Madoka movie somehow finally released in Japanese theathers not even a week ago.
That said, after all, what do you expect from an action horror manga called Magical Girl Of The End… or Magical Girl Apocalypse,, but i prefer the original title.
Written and illustrated by Kentaro Sato, Magical Girl Of The End begins where most of these shonen horror series do: with a massacre in a Japanese high school class, where an average and distant teen, Kii Kogami, sees a weird gothic lolita dressed humanoid appear and explode people heads like the Fourth Of July, only for the cadavers to rise as zombies, and thing have started going to shit outside too, as a flood of those weird monsters chanting “magical” drops from the sky.
Kii manages to escape the school alongside his childhood friend Tsukune and other survivors, bending together to try escape these “magical girls monsters” as they keep swarming and causing even more death and destruction…..
it’s some “fine” thrash in the vein of HOTD, with lots of gore, lots of nudity and big boobed anime schoolgirls, just notable levels of horny fanservice and to quote a certain Konami pachinko trailer “erotic violence”, with attempted rapes and exploitation horror style stuff, like it’s something when you can see the vulvas’ outlines, regardless of there’s a torso or head still attached to the girls pube.
Again, this is that kind of horror thrash, and i gotta say, it t manages to keep up the debauchery, as the first volume is basically a basic zombie outbreak story set in Japan, just with deranged twisted “magical girls monsters” that explode people heads and create zombie minions with the corpses, while keeping you on edge because you’re never quite sure who is gonna make it alive, and then in volume 2, which has them do the classic zombie story beat of going to the mall, it hits you with what is hands down the best character, Rintaro.
A deranged psychopatic trigger happy hyper-perverted policeman, his panel introduction is menacing the protagonist with his dick out while two naked dead girl lay close to him, and trying to basically rape two of the girls in the group as he has a gun and “he’s the law”.
To say nothing of the parasite magical girl that transfers herself from a gyaru into a child by french tonguing her, just so we can have the preschooler go around and throw people heads into cakes.
Again, as i said, the series does manages to keep you interested by throwing even more absurd or outrageous twists at the viewer, and is telling how time travel isn’t even of the more weird and ridiculous stuff the narrative pulls, it’s not even much of a spoiler as it happens even early on, there’s plenty of weirder, more excessive edgy twists and turns… okay maybe not the freshest of reveals, like, sure the guy who seems too nice and inoffensive sure isn’t up to anything, but it’s done in a very fun way that you wanna see where this cavalcade of super-edgy nonsense is going.
And while yes, the perverted cop is the best one, he really is, as he constantly sways as begruding anti hero and trying to find a way to use this to give himself some insane power, he’s never fully redeemed so you never know what he’s gonna pull, the other characters aren’t too bad, i ended up liking them more than i’d expected, even if they ain’t exactly great and fall perfectly into the expected stereotypes, but they also are more than merely perfunctory tools.. mostly, but we got some expected focus on romance subplots.
The issues don’t even necessarily lies with the “shonen-ification” of the premise, as by the end of the “first season” part (which is volume 8 out 16), they decided to go further into battle manga territory, but it’s still lots of fun and full of fun excesses and surprises.
Sadly it doesn’t manage to keep outdoing itself in absurdity, or more appropriately, once it has to overdo itself… it actually does a little too well, making the story hyper convoluted and reliant on how the author wants to bend time travel (and more) rules, but i must say that it more or less feel planned to be like that…. for the most part, in the final volumes it really becomes a very convoluted mess with prolapse levels of asspulls to try and have the script avoid writing itself into a corner.
The finale is sadly the culmination of the progressive shone battle-ification of the story, as it gets more convoluted, keeps piling up new power dynamics, and trying to have it both ways, leading to a happy ending that kinda feel out of place, almost as if the editor told him to “wrap it up nice” or something along those lines.
Actually, this reminds me of how Jack Frost The Amytyville in terms of “succubing to the shonen tropes”, though a bit more convoluted, and where the first “season” is the strongest, then kinda morphs into a time travel extravaganza and the final part is the very definition of “ i don’t know exactly what’s going on anymore”, or i do, but the writer is basically freestyling asspulls to get us to some actual ending, which is kinda shit, it kinda feels like a set up for a fake out, but it’s not.
To be honest it does feel like, despite being more planned out than you’d expect, the story got out of hand and became “bigger” than originally envisioned (which is also very common for first serialization by shonen manga authors, to be fair), because i do feel it would have been better for the series as a whole to be shorter. And maybe to stick more to the horror side of things.
Yet i was curious even at his worse to see where it was going, a pity because for 2/3 i was really liking it, but then the final “season” part doesn’t manage to keep up, feels like its running on fukes and random shit the author had to wing in order to give this an ending, a very happy pappy ending that is so stock and honestly feels lazy and unfitting, i don’t mind happy ending but not this sloppy, just for the sake of it type of happy ending.
A shame because Magical Girl Of The End could have been a good fun ubertrashy action horror romp, grindhouse exploitation style, very nasty and questionable expecially in terms of fanservice, but it kinda sputters into the demographics low hanging fruits and ends as one of those that are “decent and above” not also not quite “good”.
If nothing else, it’s a fairly well drawn manga, there is a fairly solid style to it, and the magical girls designs live up to the absurd, starting fairly vanilla with the slightly Burton-esque gothic lolita magical girl, going into freaks magicals with Baki style body builds, cartoon mascotes gone rogue, there are a lot of fun designs for these and the absurd methods of killing people, which includes “boring” stuff like gravity control, explosions, pyromancy, and twisting people into flesh churros.
Given it was also very popular, i do wonder why an anime adaptation was never made, but one did happen for the spin-off series, Magical Girl Site, which is apparently even darker… butt hen again who i am i kidding, i already know why Magical Girl Of The End never got an anime, is because you couldn’t really cut out “Maniac Cop” out of the story, and he is not a performative “nice pervert” like the Turtle Hermit, Rintaro’s introductory scens is him elicoptering his erect dick around with a gun near two big boobed dead girls and the second thing is him trying to do a double rape on the alive ones, so….
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