Shelf Life

Familiar with Zero

You're probably wondering to yourself, “Why is this guy describing the beginning of Puella Magi Madoka Magica to me? Did I travel back in time?” Now, before you run to check on your DeLorean's flux capacitor, let me assure you that this isn't 2011, and I am not describing the intro to one of the most famous and well-regarded anime series to come out since Neon Genesis Evangelion. This is the introduction to the Selector Infected Wixoss, though I don't blame you for confusing the two shows.

To be fair to WIXOSS, it isn't a complete rip-off of that genre-defining wunderkind. Whereas Madoka Magica applied its particularly twisted lens to the magical girl genre, Selector Infected Wixoss' plot takes on the form of a card-battle anime. The story follows Ruko Kominato, an average, if somewhat unsociable, young girl living the quiet life in the big city. In an effort to get her out and socializing, Ruko's brother introduces her to a popular card game called WIXOSS (short for “Wish Across” and pronounced “We-cross,” because anime). WIXOSS' hook is that each player's deck is led by a character chard called an “LRIG”, and Ruko is understandably surprised to discover that her particular LRIG is a little white-haired girl named Tama that can move and speak behind the veneer of her cardboard home. Ruko eventually ends up befriending another girl with a living LRIG card, Yuzuki Kurebashi, who explains to our heroine that while for most people WIXOSS is your average trading card game, for some girls it is much more than that. These special individuals have chosen to be Selectors, and have been gifted with a living LRIG partner. Their goal? To find and battle other Selectors in magical card-game combat. The Selector that wins enough battles will be granted any wish that her heart desires. Those that lose too many times, however, lose their right to be called a Selector. Ruko and Yuzuki are eventually befriended by a third Selector, a painfully shy girl named Hitoe Uemura, and the three girls decide to work together and do battle alongside their LRIGS to make their wishes come true.

If you replace “Selectors” with “Magical Girls” and “Other Selectors” with “Witches”, and Selector Infected Wixoss and Puella Magi Madoka Magica share basically the same plot, not to mention a penchant for nonsensical and overlong titles. Now, this is not an inherently terrible thing. Madoka Magica is one of the greatest anime ever made as far as I'm concerned, and if Selector Infected Wixoss is going to copy notes, it might as well be from the smartest kid in class. If WIXOSS used a familiar formula to tell a thoughtful, interesting, and exciting story, then all the more power to it.

The problem isn't that WIXOSS is blatantly stealing from Madoka Magica's playbook (though it absolutely is doing that). The problem is that WIXOSS has no idea how to steal effectively. Even divorced from the shadow of that show, WIXOSS fails to meaningfully cement the stakes of its own game, and its narrative momentum completely flounders from doing so. The show spends far too long setting up its pieces, assuming that audiences will want to spend over half of a show waiting for the characters to realize what a viewer could have figured out in roughly five minutes. If WIXOSS were a more confident show, it would understand that in order to justify such a laborious build up it would need to fill up all that time building suspense with interesting and complex characters.

WIXOSS is not a better show. Ruko as a protagonist is fairly bland and unexceptional, especially taking into account the fact that her character is nearly identical to the one the protagonist of Madoka Magica faces. When the show does introduce elements to differentiate her from the anime heroines that have preceded her, it is too little, too late. Hitoe is the archetypal “Adorable Shy Girl Who Only Wants to Make Friends”, and when the show tries to use her arc to illustrate the darker cost of WIXOSS, she ends up becoming little more than an excuse for exposition dumps and plot contrivances. Of the three leads, Yuzuki ends up coming out as the most interesting and nuanced. Her wish is one that goes against the grain of what society finds acceptable, and WIXOSS does an unexpectedly good job of taking her conflict seriously when many other shows would have played up for laughs, or worse, titillation. Her story is far and away the most compelling narrative thread in the show.

Yuzuki's arc alone can't make up for a dearth of interesting villains, however. Aspiring model Akira Aoi shows up early on, and though her near-sociopathic disregard for the fates of other Selectors is supposed to come across as intimidating, she's mostly just obnoxious. Akira's rival Iona Urazoe is the closest thing the show gives us to a proper Big Bad, though we learn so little about her that her motivations come across as muddled and vague, lacking any real sense of danger or urgency until literally the final few seconds of the series. When all of that urgency is suddenly severed by a cliffhanger, you realize that WIXOSS never intended to tell a complete, cohesive story in the first place. The first 12 episodes of this show are all setup for a second season that promises to really bring on the action and excitement and drama. Hitting this cliffhanger doesn't really make me want to see the second season, though, so much as it makes the preceding 12 episodes seem even more padded and needlessly stretched thin in retrospect.

As a Blu-Ray set, Selector Infected Wixoss is a typical release. Funimation has collected all 12 episodes of the show on DVD and Blu-Ray, and at the time of this review you can find the set online for about $40, which isn't bad so far as anime goes. The English dub, which I watched for this review, is perfectly fine given what the actors had to work with. Lindsay Seidel does a good job of imbuing Ruko with as much charm and likability as the script will allow, though Jamie Marchi struggles as Akira, forced to chew her way through over-the-top jeers and lame insults. Of the main cast, Apphia Yu gives the most compelling performance, which is unsurprising since her character gets more to do than just about anyone else in this show. The visual and audio-quality is also perfectly acceptable, though the Blu-Ray version of the show has a weird problem with the menu shading that makes it hard to tell what you are and are not highlighting. The extras are pretty bare-bones: the usual textless intros and outros, and a handful of commentaries from the English dub crew.

At the end of the day, this isn't a terrible show, but it is an aggressively mediocre one. Its animation is passable, its action scenes are perfunctory at best, and as much as it tries, it just cannot escape the fact that it is the off-brand knockoff of a classic of the medium, and doesn't even do a good job of being that. Maybe the second season will retroactively justify the pacing of the first. If that possibility is enough to get you through WIXOSS' first season, then maybe it's something you should check out. As it stands, Selector Infected Wixoss consistently fails to make an argument for its own existence, and based on that fact alone I can't recommend that anyone spend their time or their money on it when there are so many better shows out there to experience.
-James[TOP]