League of Nations Air Force Aviation Magic Band Luminous Witches

Mostly incoherent with lots of signs that production of this show did not go well. The key staff involved aren't unskilled or even new to the Witches franchise, but seeing that there are SIX more producer credits than there are episodes, things start to make sense. The badness is jarring after it seemed like they were getting this series pretty well dialed-in after doing Brave Witches, Road to Berlin, and Take-Off in a row, which were all pretty great. This show is not those. Only watch if you will literally die without watching a new idol anime. The good: The voice acting is fine or prettygood. Most of the staff are new to anime, the only negative thing to say is that some characters sound like they're doing impersonations of other Witches characters. The art is sometimes good (there is a big caveat here). They learned their lesson from Brave Witches and striker flying scenes are hand-drawn in closeups and only switches to CGI at a distance, and they all actually look pretty good too. A total of about 2.5 episodes are also executed well with a clear introduction, rise, climax, descent, and resolution. Most of the characters also manage to be distinctive or even likeable. George S. Marshall makes a cameo and he's a fan of the best girl Mana, which is respectable. The bad: All kinds of stuff. The plot is incoherent. Not just bad or boring, the things happening do not follow from the things that previously happened. Conflicts show up that occupy entire episodes until the characters decide to ignore it and watch it fix itself via a massive butt-pull, which is what always happens. Entire concert scenes are alluded to but happen off-screen because they ran out of time to get them animated. Substituted in their place are massive dialog dumps that remind you of things that you already know to distract you from the fact that everyone was in uniform in the last scene and a concert is supposed to be happening now. It almost develops a plot when they go on tour, but that barely survives 6 episodes, and the show comes apart at the seams between that and the ending. The last 3 episodes are fever dreams running on magical logic. It's a cliche to call something AI-generated when it has uncanny nonsensical properties, but they actually do use AI-generated backgrounds made with photoshop content-aware fill, and towards the end the story is SO convoluted that it's an actual question whether they generated that too. Conflicts are started, ignored, brought back, hijacked by someone else, car-crashed into somebody else's conflict, ignored again, talked about for an entire episode, and finally resolved when everyone decides it was never really a problem and none of this mattered anyway. MAYBE two episodes manage to avoid this. It's hard to see how much of it was fumbled execution and how much of it was stretching when they couldn't execute the original plan on time. The art gets its own paragraph. Some of the backgrounds look like they were made in Powerpoint. They're glaringly terrible at first glance and get worse the closer you look at them. Perspectives don't line up, low-res jpeg stock art is photoshopped in, they used google maps to make aerial shots, and the mentioned nonsensical AI-generated fills where a pile of metal sticks is supposed to be a construction site. Huge, obvious problems that are almost hard to explain. Kemono Friends had the budget of a family picnic and managed to avoid any of the problems this show has. It's not consistently that bad, and some of it actually looks pretty good, but when it gets bad it makes any other show look better. Also most of the character designs are outright abducted from other idol shows, making the whole thing look more like a cynical cash-grab than it already was. The ugly: Familiars were a weird thing to add in this show (not really a spoiler, introduced in episode 1). In this show, magical girls become witches when they meet a magical animal and it agrees to be their familiar. If the familiar decides to go away, they can't use magic anymore. This isn't actually a retcon, this is canon to the Witches series, but it only shows up in the mangas and like 10 seconds of the OVA. The other animated shows deliberately ignore them and pretend they're hiding off-screen somewhere. Luminous does absolute back-flips trying to explain how this works and that familiars are really important while we've never seen them in any other show before. They were just invisible! No they're not, we can see them. Other animals in this show can see them. Other witches can see and acknowledge them. They have animal problems and get sick and have to sleep so you can't just ignore them. This is more weird rules about magic in a series that already can't keep its own rules straight. Do the familiars just die when they turn 18 and that's how it works? They can't just adopt another one? Also the reason the other shows ignored familiars is that between the OVA and Strike Witches they decided familiars are just extra characters who can't talk and thus unnecessary, which absolutely becomes a problem for Luminous. One familiar is important to the story while the rest exist to run around in establishing shots or sleep in a corner. A weirdly specific thing to suddenly remember and not use well. Conclusion: Bad. The thing that worries me is this show introduces a few named characters you've never heard of before and a 503rd JFW. When they did that before was when the 502nd made a cameo in the movie before getting a real introduction in Brave Witches. This implies a Brave Witches 2 might be on the way, and I'm absolutely worried about how they'd execute that after watching this.

Now as a long time fan of the "Strike Witches"/"World witches" franchise who has seen S1+S2, the movie, and Road to Berlin (S3 or right after the movie), as well as Brave Watches, I feel bad for this series because at this point, it has a VERY niche audience to seek out. Newcomers would be easily turned off by the very premise of the idea of "Witches", real world WWII ace pilots turned into cute anime girls with kemonomimi ears and tails that fly around in "striker units", and long time fans would be put off by both the lack of any actual fighting againstthe Neuroi, the fact that the girls now occasionally wear pants (yes, I KNOW you guys out there), and that it's basically an idol show now, complete with CGI'd song and dance performances. That being said, I definitely enjoyed the show as a way to further flesh out the I guess "World Witches" universe, exploring more countries than ever, and adding the idea of "familiars" to the witches mythos. To keep things short, if "Strike Witches" was half war with Neuroi, half CGDCT SOL, and "Brave Witches" was mostly about the war, then Luminous witches is mostly a CGDCT SOL with elements of strike witches sprinkled in. There's plenty of heart and character to each of the girls though, regardless of the lack of fighting and it's still plenty cute-lewd with the usual yuri-bait. Just don't expect it to be as lewd as original SW or that one Brave Witches OVA, and you'll have plenty of fun. Unfortunately, I don't see there being too many like me that'll thoroughly enjoy this, as strike witches is incredibly old by now and the few fans that remain might not like this new direction, and the "world witches" is again, a very hard sell to a new anime viewer. I do hope that "Noble Witches" will get an anime next though.

After the long development of Luminous Witches we have finally gotten it. That being said, I am very pleased with how it turned out, with the animation (not including the CG) is probably the best a World Witches Series has seen. After we got a "Sliver-Link Special" in terms of animation in Brave Witches, and with an increased effort with David Production for RTB, this is best since the Movie in my opinion. CG is clunky, really clunky in Luminous. Which is a shame since Shaft really outdid themselves in the series, keeping the familiar setting and feel, but also adding in that Shaft flare,which is really noticeable in Episode 8. Story wise, LW does a lot that I like, but at the same time stays within a pretty standard linear storyline. It definitely comes in waves, as the beginning is pretty boring as they set things up. But once we take off into the universe and start visiting different locations across the world, we get a lot of great one off stories, that either build the setting of World Witches, or help us learn more about the witches. Jo is probably my favorite of the new witches. She has a great side story with Silvie. But Virginia's story is very streamlined and predictable. I thought they could have done more with her. Story is a mixed bag. If you like great world building stories, that not only add to the main cast but compliment the rest of the series, you will enjoy LW. Music is pretty fire. I've always enjoyed the music throughout World Witches, and this is no exception. I really enjoyed how they were able make music that complimented the era. That being said, not all of them do, but the ones that do, stand out in my head. The rest of the music is similar to the rest of the series' style. Ultimately, this show is sitting in an awkward position. With production trouble, this could have been much worse. Great animation, fun characters and varied music, tow Luminous out to the run way. But the CG, simple main story and pacing issues make it crash like, Nipa, on a few occasions. I would recommend this to anyone who want a simple and beautiful looking idol anime, or are fans of Military Moe. Its criminally low scored here on MAL and Shaft should do more World Witches, as I feel they would kill an action packed OVA or Sequel.