This, the third season of The irregular at magic high school, faces one major challenge right off the bat: its setting. The high school setting (magical or otherwise) is commonly used in fiction because it is part of the universal modern experience. Most people have been through high school and thus don’t need it to be explained or detailed beyond any unusual or completely new aspects. The issue with high school is that it is inherently cyclical. Major school events—like the entrance ceremony, the Nine Schools Competition, or the thesis competition—happen yearly. Thus, the story needs to be markedly different from the first time while still covering similar events.
In general, this season does great at making things different. Within the school, Tatsuya and Miyuki are now respected authority figures—expected to keep their juniors in line. Instead of participating in events, they plan them. Meanwhile, outside the school, the pair must deal with more and more family-related issues—especially with Miyuki being the front runner for the next head of the Yotsuba family. Because of this, the school aspect of the show largely becomes a familiar backdrop while the real issue, stopping Zhou Gongjin’s newest evil plot, takes most of our attention.
But while the anime deftly dodges the pitfall of being too repetitive, it falls squarely into others. One of these has to do with its nature as an adaptation. The major difference between an anime and a novel (or even a manga) is that we can’t constantly hear the characters’ thoughts. It’s mainly through their words—through conversations with other characters and monologues—that we can get a look at what’s going on in their heads.
Unfortunately, the occasional peeks we get into our heroes’ minds in this anime are never enough—especially as the visual storytelling on display can’t make up the difference. Thus, instead of watching a person deal with emotional struggles step-by-step, we get these odd emotional explosions—melodramatic moments when the characters’ thoughts are laid out and immediately resolved. There’s no real drama—no emotional tension. There’s no time for any of that.
The other big issue with the story is that there are almost no twists in the narrative. Sure, there are “surprises”—the most common being people appearing randomly to try and kill Tatsuya and Miyuki—but the plot for each arc is strikingly straightforward. There’s a problem. Tatsuya discovers the root of the problem. Tatsuya makes a plan to deal with it. The plan works without a hitch, and everything is resolved. This is the pattern for all three arcs of this season. Never is there a moment where things go completely off the rails, and we’re left wondering how our heroes will get out of this one. Because of this, there is very little excitement—unless watching our heroes easily curb-stomp any opposition they face without breaking a sweat is all you’re looking for.
The best story-driven bits of this season are the ones where Tatsuya and Miyuki are not directly involved. The political intrigue between the various factions trying to control and exploit magic users is interesting—especially when it comes to the families of Tatsuya’s friends working against his best interest.
We also get a deeper look into how the Yotsuba view Tatsuya—how they see him as a monster that can’t be truly controlled. They cannot allow him to run wild, nor can they kill him. As the only thing he truly cares about is Miyuki, their only option is to tie themselves to her to the point where the family’s and her desires are the same.
There’s also a notable character bit where we see Tatsuya’s growth as a person start to hamper him. Over his first year at school, he began making connections with those around him. While nowhere near the level of his feelings toward Miyuki, he started to subconsciously treat them as such—as his love for her is the only kind of love he knows. Thus, he started to go out of his way to support everyone and protect the school—to do whatever was asked of him regardless of the physical and mental toll it took. It gets to the point where Miyuki has to reign him in to remind him that she is what’s important—and that she’d rather watch the school burn than have him break down. It’s honestly a fantastic bit of character work showing how, in his emotional inexperience, he takes things too far. It’s just too bad that the lack of seeing what’s going on in his head makes it one of those aforementioned moments where the conflict is first brought up and then resolved in the same scene.
As for the presentation, both the animation and music are exactly what we’ve come to expect from the show. The magic is creative and flashy and there are more than a few fun-to-watch fight scenes throughout the season. On the other side of things, the soundtrack contains many of the same songs we’ve been hearing for a decade now and the show comes with a new banger of a LiSA song for an opening as is par for the course.
Overall, this is a season of The irregular at magic high school where the negatives outweigh the positives. There’s just no tension to the stories being told—be that plot or emotional. Everything always goes according to plan and any deeper character issues are resolved the moment they are mentioned. There are mysteries revealed and conspiracies lurking in the shadows, but that’s not enough to make it exciting. And while I am still invested enough to want to see how the Yotsuba succession question plays out in the upcoming movie, I’m starting to wonder if—after three seasons, a spin-off, and a movie—I’m suffering from the effects of the sunk-cost fallacy more than anything else.
