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EP. REVIEW: A Certain Magical Index III


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Stark700



Joined: 30 Jan 2012
Posts: 11762
Location: Earth
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 1:03 pm Reply with quote
So happy to see Index back. Honestly, I had expected the season to be rushed a bit with just 2-cour but I'm still entertained by what they've shown so far. I wish they pour more budget into the show though as the second episode suffered some quality problems.

Looking forward to the next arc! (The OP song showed quite a lot of characters)
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Chaos Wings



Joined: 05 May 2015
Posts: 277
Location: Your guess is as good as mine?!
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 1:20 pm Reply with quote
Almost a bloody decade we've been waiting for this, still it fits like a glove and I'm glad it's finally back. Watching these first three episodes I was almost surprised how easily I slipped straight back into the story.
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Izanagi009



Joined: 20 Oct 2014
Posts: 464
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 1:54 pm Reply with quote
Well, I have several opinions on Index I would like to share as both a fan of the older anime, and a former reader of the LNs up to around volume 20 of the sequel series (emphasis on former, that will be explained later).

First the positives:
-In general, I do feel the animation and editing of index is improved over the past season and Railgun, camera seems dynamic and shots have nice framing.

-Sound seems punchy and effective for fights and the like, and I will say the Voice Cast, despite the hiatus, have done well to keep their voices consistent from the old series.

-The thing that drew me into Index in the first place, the technical nature of powers, is still intact and functioning well so I'm satisfied

-Animation for effects seem good for the earth blade though the mech suits need work

now, sadly, for the negatives, starting with why i'm not reading the LNs anymore:
-Touma has lost all sense of relatability and this arc is the small start of that. Touma has gone from the hapless young man cursed to be in desperate situations to being a knight
who charges in. In addition, the amount of characters surrounding him that are interested in him is starting to get absurd (spoiler[hell, the LNs say that the "Kamijou faction" is
growing, yes, he has an unoffical faction]
). His ideals also seem unnuanced and while i understand the appeal of the simple idea of saving all, this feels less appealing
in the current age of anime and LNs with nuance in themes and frankly, Touma doesn't get deconstruction until the sequel LNs.

-Relating to the point about less appealing in the current age of anime, the Characters and Humor of the show feel antiquated now. Itsuwa's characterization seems shallow and
underdeveloped as does Touma's reasoning for hiding his amnesia. In addition, the fanservice based humor seems poorly done by our standards currently and I have a feeling Kuroko's antics, while appealing to me as a teenager, will be offensive at most and annoying at least when they pop up now.

-Lastly and relating to the last two points, Touma as a character has lost all semblance of being interesting, his heroism is too one dimensional and frankly Accelerator and
spoiler[Hamazura Shiage] are more interesting in terms of what they deal with and how they have to overcome it. This in combination with the harem aspect makes me
disconnected from Touma and he becomes the least interesting of the leads.

Well, I do hope and feel that the more power heavy fights with Accelerator will be fun but other than that, I'm a bit cold on the series

Sorry for the long post and please comment and debate, i do love conversation
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killjoy_the



Joined: 30 May 2015
Posts: 2457
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 3:06 pm Reply with quote
Let me preempt this: the light novel's better.

All right, with that out of the way, these 3 episodes of the Avignon arc were... okay. A bit disappointing, but okay.

Itsuwa's presence doesn't really add much outside of fanservice as her fighting style isn't particular enough nor is she from an interesting faction in and of itself. Terra's power is fun to think about, but it feels like he underuses it quite a bit. Tsuchimikado's presence is great (he's best boy) but the way he deals with the powered suits ends up being a bit confusing here - he just loops them around and now they're shut down I guess? Accelerator's role in all this was interesting in a "What is AC doing, absolutely leveling this city?" way, but he doesn't get to perform much other than just spout his villain chuuni speeches (which are great I want to give Accelerator a cookie).

I'm reservedly excited about the next arc. It's kind of jumbled up in the novels on purpose, so I believe the director will try to make it more streamlined like he did novels 2 and 4.
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Fluwm



Joined: 28 Jul 2009
Posts: 881
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 3:27 pm Reply with quote
So is this franchise worth trying to get into? From the beginning? I remember hearing really good things about Railgun back in the day, but also really bad things about the first season of Index (re: pacing and dialog).
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Izanagi009



Joined: 20 Oct 2014
Posts: 464
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 4:05 pm Reply with quote
@Killjoy

The LN may be better but not much better and frankly, its aged poorly

@Fluwm

That's hard to answer as Railgun is better than Index but you need context from Index so it becomes hard to fully recommend the series

I honestly like Raildex a lot but i admit it's hard to get into both anime and LN wise
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killjoy_the



Joined: 30 May 2015
Posts: 2457
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 4:07 pm Reply with quote
Fluwm wrote:
So is this franchise worth trying to get into? From the beginning? I remember hearing really good things about Railgun back in the day, but also really bad things about the first season of Index (re: pacing and dialog).


Eh, depends on your tastes. Index's issue over Railgun is that the LN was a lot more 'episodic', in a way, at the start. So you get a lot of stories that seemingly have not much to do with each other other than the main character, and you can totally love one arc and hate another. Railgun is a lot more cohesive in that regards, even with the fillers.
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ultimatehaki



Joined: 27 Oct 2012
Posts: 1090
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 5:36 pm Reply with quote
Three seasons in and the director still has no clue how to play out an action scene. Seriously, reading the fight between Terra and Kamijou was more exciting than watching it and that's pathetic. I lost all hope of the 15th novel being adapted as well as it deserves to be.
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Stiles



Joined: 21 Oct 2014
Posts: 105
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 5:44 pm Reply with quote
Very pleased with these first three episodes. The C-Document arc is great and the anime has it mostly correct. Not terribly pleased that they altered Misaka's scene at the tail end, as you don't actually see her in the shower, nor is a shower even hinted at. The shock of learning the truth about Touma actually leaves her stunned and shaking while sitting at her desk.

Other than that, I'd really like to know who decided that the sound effect for Imagine Breaker needed changing. It goes mostly unchanged through two main seasons and two side story seasons and now it's just different? Not only different, but (imo) worse?

Anybody else concerned about how changing sound effects for certain powers affects the integrity of the anime, or am I overreacting?
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chronos02



Joined: 25 Feb 2009
Posts: 267
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 5:50 pm Reply with quote
I personally feel the series has taken a hit on the technical side, Season II was slightly worse off than this Season III (until now) compared to Season I, but what really disappointed me was how the voice acting has taken a VERY deep hit, there's a distance between the voice actors and the characters, the conversations feel unnatural with strangely long pauses, and as a consequence the characters don't feel believable, it's as if the VAs got out of touch with the characters and the VA director simply didn't care, and on that note, Terra's VA doesn't seem to fit him much, though that's more of a personal opinion.
I just rewatched the other 2 seasons right before jumping into the first three episodes of SIII, so the differences simply popped out that much strongly.
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Joined: 17 Apr 2015
Posts: 3017
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 7:55 pm Reply with quote
In response to people asking whether it is still worth getting into this franchise:

Personally, I probably wouldn't still be reading and watching Index if it wasn't a franchise that has drastically changed over time.

Unlike a lot of modern light novels, the first half-dozen volumes of Index were written without much consideration for the possibility that the story might develop into a long-running multimedia franchise. In fact, the first volume wasn't written with a sequel in mind, and the author supposedly turned in the second volume's draft about a week after he was informed that the publishers wanted to turn the title into a series.

A lot of Index's world-building was therefore disjointed and haphazard at the beginning. Lots of plot threads and characters were abandoned just as quickly as they were introduced because the author didn't really have a sense of what he was going to do in the long term. Looking back, I feel that Index was generally pretty rough until the author realized that Touma wasn't a strong enough character to carry the story, which led him to spin the popular Misaka character off into her own manga side-story series and then re-organize the main story into separate, but often-intersecting, stories centered around a number of protagonists and their supporting casts.

For this reason, a lot of people like Railgun a lot more, both because she's generally a more dynamic character than Touma (her power set is better suited to stories in which she is proactive, whereas Touma's defensive power set lends itself towards a more organically reactive story, where he responds to things that other people do) and because her stories were written after the franchise's setting and characters were much more well-established. On the other hand, this means that Railgun has a much more "focus-grouped" feel than the original novels: there's a clear sense that the creators knew what worked, what the audience wanted, and what would ultimately move the most figurines and body pillows of the show's characters. If you want a series that feels much more like the shows that we tend to get these days, then Railgun is definitely your show.

Just keep in mind that some of the stuff in Railgun is designed to make much more sense if you are already familiar with the franchise. For example, there are several major fan-favorite characters who were first introduced in one of the novels that Index Season 3 will be adapting, but because Railgun is a "prequel", they've already appeared in multiple episodes of the Railgun anime in order to explain what they were up to before they showed up in the novels. You don't really need to know that to enjoy the story, but they're definitely included primarily for the benefit of people who are already big fans of the characters. (For those who are curious, the characters I'm talking about are known to anime-only fans as spoiler["the ITEM girls"], and are pretty much my favorite part of the entire franchise.)

Now, that being said, I don't actually like Touma very much, and probably wouldn't still be reading the light novels if he was still at the forefront of every single book's plotline (this season begins the trend of occasionally giving us entire novels where Touma never appears). At the same time, I like that the franchise has something for everyone.
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Lovenox



Joined: 14 Oct 2018
Posts: 11
PostPosted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 9:15 pm Reply with quote
Thanks for the plot summary. It's been a long time since I last watched the Index proper series and I forgot most of the people.
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jr240483



Joined: 24 Dec 2005
Posts: 4369
Location: New York City,New York,USA
PostPosted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 4:54 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
A Certain Magical Index was a trend-setter for the supernatural action anime that have come out over the past decade, and these three episodes affirm that it hasn't lost its touch. While I'm not familiar with how closely or how well it adapts its source material (I've only read the first volume of the source novels), I can't imagine it being an overall disappointment to established fans for any other reason yet.


hate to break it to you, but that WILL happen when it comes to this franchise and its faithfulness to its source materials. especially on railgun's side!

the real question is after these three eps , will it be completely faithful to the LN and go to the next arc, or will it go straight to the WW3 arc as it was hinted in S2!?

Quote:
Though Touma had spats with Level 5 electromaster Mikoto Mikasa before, he became most deeply involved in her affairs during the Sisters arc, where Mikoto must contend with a vast number of clones of herself created to be level-raising fodder for the Level 5 Accelerator. (This was shown in episodes 10-14 of the first series and gets explored in much greater detail in A Certain Scientific Railgun S.) This arc has many lasting ramifications, including Mikoto taking a romantic interest in Touma (though she won't admit it!), her surviving clones occasionally popping up in later stories, and Accelerator continuing to make appearances, including getting roped into working for Academy City directly at the end of the second season.
Kuroko, a Level 4 teleporter, is a member of the student police force Judgment. She is Mikoto's roommate at Tokiwadai Middle School and has a powerful but one-sided romantic interest in Mikoto


which is why their have been the takes on the similarities between index/railgun & danmachi( is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon?)/ danmachi - sword oratoria! especially when it comes a potential love story between the MC , the popular female and the interlopers! the only differences i can tell is that unlike touma , Bell is more likeable as a MC and unlike mikoto, Aiz isn't a massive tsundere!!!! unfortunately the one thing the series do have in common is a very obsessive interlopers (aka the men hating lesbians kuroko and lefiya)!

luckily for the rest of us, we wont be seeing kuroko and any of her crazy ass antics AT ALL for this season! THAT IS, if its 100% faithful to the light novels!!!

Izanagi009 wrote:


-Lastly and relating to the last two points, Touma as a character has lost all semblance of being interesting, his heroism is too one dimensional and frankly Accelerator and
spoiler[Hamazura Shiage] are more interesting in terms of what they deal with and how they have to overcome it. This in combination with the harem aspect makes me
disconnected from Touma and he becomes the least interesting of the leads.


you REALLY shouldn't be surprised by this since your an LN reader

it comes with the category since its technically classified as a light novel harem series , and as you should know, all of the MC's from this genre (excluding DxD's Issei ,shinmai mai no testament's Basara ,kyokai senjou no horizon's Aoi , & trinity seven's Arata) have the same MO.

THEY ARE ALL COMPLETELY OBLIVIOUS , UBER GIRL PHOBIC & HAVE THE DENSITY OF A PLANET WHEN IT COMES TO THE OPPOSITE SEX!!!!

hell , he would have been considered the worst light novel main character in existence if it wasn't for the unbelievable density that ichika orimura displayed!!! (though the worst and rightfully so the most despised harem male character IN GENERAL will always be makoto ito from school days)
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Izanagi009



Joined: 20 Oct 2014
Posts: 464
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
PostPosted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 9:58 pm Reply with quote
jr240483 wrote:

Izanagi009 wrote:


-Lastly and relating to the last two points, Touma as a character has lost all semblance of being interesting, his heroism is too one dimensional and frankly Accelerator and
spoiler[Hamazura Shiage] are more interesting in terms of what they deal with and how they have to overcome it. This in combination with the harem aspect makes me
disconnected from Touma and he becomes the least interesting of the leads.


you REALLY shouldn't be surprised by this since your an LN reader

it comes with the category since its technically classified as a light novel harem series , and as you should know, all of the MC's from this genre (excluding DxD's Issei ,shinmai mai no testament's Basara ,kyokai senjou no horizon's Aoi , & trinity seven's Arata) have the same MO.

THEY ARE ALL COMPLETELY OBLIVIOUS , UBER GIRL PHOBIC & HAVE THE DENSITY OF A PLANET WHEN IT COMES TO THE OPPOSITE SEX!!!!

hell , he would have been considered the worst light novel main character in existence if it wasn't for the unbelievable density that ichika orimura displayed!!! (though the worst and rightfully so the most despised harem male character IN GENERAL will always be makoto ito from school days)


Just because it's expected doesn't make it a good thing. Besides, it's more than just the harem aspect that makes Touma unrelatable. the unnuanced nature of his heroism is something that makes him stand out even more as a unrelatable character.

Regardless, to get back to original point, i wouldn't say he's the worst LN main character as he isn't offensive and not that bland because of his lack of luck but the harem aspect and unnuanced heroism really don't help his case
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Taskforce



Joined: 05 Nov 2004
Posts: 72
PostPosted: Tue Oct 23, 2018 7:11 am Reply with quote
Guess I'm in a small group of fans then, because I can't stand Accelerator, nor am I a big fan of Mikoto's secondary cast in Railgun. In fact, the fact that Touma takes a back seat to Accelerator for full books of the light novel is the one thing keeping me from reading the light novels. I just can't stand Accelerator that much. Nor did I ever finish the Railgun seasons of anime or touch the Railgun manga as Mikoto -- who makes a fine main character -- has a really annoying set of side characters in her group. Kuroko being the biggest of them. Her antics have never been and will never be funny, she just annoys the heck out of me. Without Touma, whom I actually personally REALLY like as an MC, I would be moving on to something else.
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