The Witch and the Beast

Marinate1016★ 9

Majo to Yajuu is a dark and eerie watch full of mystery, intrigue and an awesome character dynamic between the two leads. Fans of the recent Undead Girl Murder Farce will see many similarities and come out of this one feeling satisfied. After hearing hype from manga readers, I went into this one with high expectations. As a fan of dark fantasy/metal style stories I think this one really succeeds in creating an atmospheric setting with a nice adventure plot line. The journey of Ashaf and Guideau to find the original witch who cursed her, leaving her trapped in another body is so fun tosee unfold. It plays out similar to Tsugaru, Aya and Shizuku’s journey from undead girl murder farce with them helping to solve cases involving witches and other magical beings along the way. All the cases were entertaining and had some genuine twists. The world feels very dark souls esque which I love. There’s a lot of worldbuilding and hints to a much wider lore that we sadly didn’t get to see a lot of in these 12 episodes, but there’s a lot of cool directions the story could go in in the future. The magic system is pretty standard, but the abilities were executed well. It’s not a ton of action, but the few fights there are are okayish, the animation and storyboarding outside of the first episode aren’t the best, but they’re passable. For me, that doesn’t matter as the biggest draw for this one is the journey aspect to find the original witch, the atmosphere and character interactions. Speaking of those character interactions, that’s one of the show’s biggest draws. Ashaf and Guideau are so fun to watch on screen. You’ve got the cool, calm and collected Ashaf who won’t let anything phase him, and the shrewd and loud Guideau who due to her body swap situation, basically acts like a guy in a hot girl’s body. Aschaf often acts as the voice of reason, calming Guideau down when she’s about to go wild and keeping her focused on the task at hand. Essentially a brain and brawn type dynamic. Think of something like Inuyasha and Kagome or Tsugaru and Aya from Undead Girl. They share a lot of banter and the seiyuu do such a great job of making them feel alive. Even when there’s no action, the episodes go by in the blink of an eye thanks to them. It’s a bit cliche, but this show really is just a “vibe”. It’s hard to put into words the feeling this show gives me. It’s gloomy, ominous, poignant and just hits me deep in the soul. Production issues aside, the story is gripping, characters are compelling and the world has a lot to offer. Sadly, like most one cour seasonals it does feel like we only just scratched the surface of this world. Onto the manga we go. Majo to Yajuu gets 9 out of 10. P.S Guideau is mommy.

whiteflame55★ 7

There's a good deal I like about this series. It presents an intriguing set of characters that get more interesting as the series progresses. It's got a visual style that really pops with a great deal of magical flair, and you can feel the weight of its fights. I also like the world-building and place-setting this series has done for its next season. And that's the biggest knock I have against it: it does just seem like place-setting for the next season. It's not so much that this is a slow start - we start and finish several short arcs back-to-back over the course of thisseason, all of which have their own little intrigues as various mysteries are solved - but rather that the series seems just fine getting side-tracked as often as possible. The first two episodes set up a central plotline for the series for us to follow: Guideau travels with Ashaf under the auspices of a larger magical organization to hunt down witches with the aim of finding a specific one that cursed her and ending her. She doesn't really know what the witch looks like (I initially thought this was a Dorohedoro situation where the lead just didn't know who his target was, but it's a little more complicated in this case), but she should be able to narrow the field, get the curse removed, and return to a powerful body that Ashaf carries around with him in a coffin similar to Wolfwood from Trigun. So, what I expected was to see them run into a series of witches, gathering clues and getting closer to their goal before having some big finale engagement. And... well, we kind of get that... if you ignore a couple of other short arcs in the middle. To be fair, all the side-tracks the series takes are interesting in their own rights and do establish more of the rules and basic concepts of this world, particularly in who can use magic and how. In one particularly interesting aside, we follow a necromancer and get to see what a completely distinct type of magic can do. It's honestly some of my favorite stuff in the series. But that's the problem: I don't think the central plot has gotten interesting. They've run into a few witches, dealt with a variety of magic, and bent the rules a bit with the curse so that we can see what Guideu's original form looks like. And yeah, it leads to some cool stuff. The problem is that I don't have much reason to get behind Guideau. I know next to nothing about her motivations beyond wanting her body back. Ashaf remains a bit of an enigma. Honestly, we get to know more of the side characters better than we do these two. And that's not necessarily a big deal, but there's also very little in the way of character growth for either of them, and even when we arrive at key climactic moments, they just don't have the emotional heft to make them feel terribly meaningful. Finally, while I wanted to give this a higher score, it ended up being brought down a little by its final couple of episodes. The backstory helped establish a bit about their background together, which is nice, but it felt like an odd arc to leave us on. Combine that with an exposition dump from Ashaf that sets up some very interesting bits of worldbuilding that I'm legitimately excited to see in S2 and, honestly, it made the ending feel like more of a tease for S2 than anything meaningful to this season. Still, I enjoyed the ride. I want to see more of these characters and learn more about them. I just wish they'd focused their efforts better in this season.