The Asterisk War feels like the kind of work that exists solely to cram in tropes. Yes it has the dense but kind male lead, the fiery—and fire-wielding—tsundere female lead, the ditzy but overpowered younger girl, the lead’s childhood friend (also female if the pattern wasn't already clear), the elegant lady in charge of the school, and so on. But do any of them feel alive? Throughout the show I was struck feeling like a glass wall kept me away, kept me from associating too closely with any of them. I also realized that the wall was how they function in the story; there is a pervasive sense that when a character appears on the screen, it is with the sole purpose of pushing a particular emotion or a particular plot point forward. They feel like actors reading off a script just a tad out of sync with a host of faceless puppets, perhaps an ironic charge to hold against an anime work but appropriate nevertheless.
Or perhaps the central problem is that the world is just dull. They exist in a shell of a world with no soul or individuality, a school for magic duels too nondescript to interfere with the plot. The students within the academy can duel for higher rankings, and eventually they will pair up and duel other schools in an intercollegiate tournament with the winners being granted glory and a single wish. Why they have this setup is somewhat lost, although early on there is some post-apocalyptic mumbo jumbo thrown in for good measure. All we know is that being the first season, this will lead to precisely 30% duels held within the school between either the male lead and his female companions or the female characters and random mooks, 20% duels in the final tournament that will be left on a cliffhanger for future seasons, and 50% harem antics occasionally disguised as emotional growth. The school setting writes the whole story before anything even gets going.
But even this wouldn’t necessarily ruin a show—I could have easily been describing Idiots, Tests, and Summoned Beings—so maybe it’s the writing. When I say that the setting writes the whole story, I mean this in the deepest sense possible. Not a single line, from the awkward half-confessions of the heroine interrupted by the girls next door in comic fashion to the deep confessions of trauma, couldn’t have been predicted beforehand, as early as five minutes or five episodes in advance. Mostly because there’s rarely a line that isn’t said twice, three times, or every time the character in question opens their mouth. It’s easy to imagine how unmemorable and unentertaining the dialogue is when anyone could quote the entire show, minus some proper nouns, only having read the description.
The battles provide some saving grace I suppose. It is a sign of the times that fluid battle animations filled with lights and rapid camera movements are becoming the norm rather than a unique selling point, and it’s hard to go wrong in this department with a futuristic setting. The choice of digital hexagons everywhere is about the most bland choice in the book when it comes to futurism, let alone glowing energy swords, elemental incantations, and the like. But they get the job done, and half the people who would even give The Asterisk War the time of day probably only do so for the light show. There is are two cuts in the final fight where the animation quality drops to questionably low levels, and surrounded by normal fluid animation it seems this may have just been a poor stylistic choice rather than the usual budget cuts, although the latter would also make sense considering how much money they seem to have sunk into animating the flashy weapons. Sadly as time quickly moves forward and this level of animation becomes more and more the norm, to the point where The Asterisk War would barely break the mold even a year before its release, those final cuts may be the memorable ones after all.
Or maybe that was the point: to provide something memorable. Because ultimately when soulless characters are put in a soulless environment and read a series of soulless lines, asking for a memorable part of the experience is a tall order. It feels like cheating to write a review so generic, purposefully leaving out any proper nouns so that it could be used as a template for past, present, and future clones of this mediocre nonsense. I guarantee that I could cut half the substantive content I’ve written and still produce a less generic work.