"Magical Girl Raising Project" Review

Somehow, it seems that lately no genre is more open for parody or skewering than the “magical girl” manga.  I think the last one I ever read was “Tokyo Mew Mew” for god’s sake!  Puella Magi Madoka Magica combines it with angst and ennui and a Deal with the Devil.  Magical Girl Apocalypse and Magical Girl Site (another big fave) combined it with ecchi, gore and some intricate storylines.

Magical Girl Raising Project seems like a mix of both and, for once, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing.  And it even feels like it’s thrown in a bit of Game of Thrones.  Game of Thrones Lite, if you will.

(Author’s Note: For the sake of saving space on the page and having you guys have to read less, I will use some acronyms from here out.  You can probably tell what they mean from the context, if you’re smart.)

In this series based on a novel (or maybe even a series of novels), magical girls like La Pucelle and Snow White gain their special powers by playing the titular cell phone game.  In the game, you can gain points in the form of Magical Candies for beating up the bad guys.  IRL, you gain said MC by doing good deeds…and you can freakin’ DIE if you don’t have enough!  We see this fate befall La Pucelle and Snow White’s mentor Nemurin on page.

The site admins of Magical Girl Raising Project claim that this is being done because they accidentally made more MGs than they can handle, so the number must be cut in half.  They had sixteen, so that means eight of them must die.

And die they do.  What ensues are several chapters of brutal betrayals, risky alliances and deep looks into some of the MGs’ pasts.  (Spoiler Alert: La Pucelle is a BOY!  Granted, there’s a male MG in Magical Girl Site, too, but still…  At least that explains the slightly yuri-ish feels I got in the first few chapters.)  It doesn’t help that, in addition to helping people, one can also steal someone else’s MC to gain their points.

Lots of people die off fast in the first volume, so logically that might mean that the remaining 10 girls die off much more slowly, leading us into more character depth and longer, drawn-out battles.

Fingers crossed.  I, for one, fully intend to keep reading.  We’ll see just how long this series manages to hold my interest.

No ideas for my next couple of series.  But the year’s still young.

Any suggestions?