Seiken Tsukai no World Break – 01 (First Impressions)

World Breaker is the third generic magic-school-battle-harem anime I’ve reviewed this season and in many ways, it’s the worst. However, and this is a deeply subjective opinion on my part, I found it so bad I was laughing my ass off for the first half of the episode — and that should count for something!

In a nutshell, World Breaker’s… world… revolves around a small group of people who inherit the memories of their ancestors… and magic. Each student’s magic (yes this is a magic school anime) manifests in the form of some sort of energy field armor, as well as being able to materialize historic weapons around the student’s dog tags. Also, some people can cast dark magic in the form of spells or something.

At school, this means that students will know each other, even though they’ve never met… sorta. Many of them have spent past lives together, after all. Though, in the protagonist’s case, he doesn’t have a strong sense of memory and only barely remembers his sister and lover of old.

Summarizing the first episode is pointless. It’s more or less like Absolute Duo, except with more interesting character relationships, but delivered more (or equally) generically. There’s a lot of boob-grinding and flapping of arms and who cares.

The important details are: the protagonist’s ancestral sister and lover are in his class, both want his sexual attention, and that he’s very powerful all of a sudden. Possibly a dragon. Somehow…

The good: What sets this otherwise idiotic show apart from the others in its genre is how absurdly terrible it is — and how enthusiastically it pursues its terribleness. In fact, it spends an uninterrupted 90 seconds AGGRESSIVELY GRINDING the protagonist’s face into some deep breasts at lunch time to prove that point.

World Break takes it’s lack of visual style and general ugliness seriously too. The character design really is weird and abstract but it’s damn well going to make them flail around and show off their skins as much as possible if you’re going to bother looking at them in the first place.

Strange praise I know, but it’s already a strange season.

The bad: About half way through, World Breaker runs out of manic steam and it settles in for a run of the mill magic school fighting story. The protagonist stands up to the bully who bullies his sister and loses until he remembers he’s the best he’s the best he’s the best and then wins with superpowers.

Also, did I mention there are already two other completely generic shows in this genre this season? Beyond the laughably bad, made me shit my pants giggling opening flash-forward where our hero is casting magic through finger painting, there isn’t anything new here.

My first impression is actually hard to pin down. On the one hand, I thought World Break tried so hard to be bad that, at times, it was actually really funny. However, it can’t escape the fact that it is a terribly generic show fully of tropes and soft-ball ecchi that pales in comparison to all the free hentai Google-san will provide for 30 seconds of effort.

I really can’t imagine caring about this show but, I suppose, if you are going to watch any of the shows in this genre, at least it put in the effort. Keep in mind that effort was to be actively bad, but it’s still effort and worth some small respect all the same.