When I finished A Certain Magical Index Season 2, and sat down to write this review, I thought I’d also reviewed Season 1. It turns out I have not – so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this review. Hopefully it will go fairly quickly, because while I cannot speak for the novels, but the anime version of these stories is a remarkably breezy watch.

A Certain Magical Index follows not the character who bears that name, but rather a high school student by the name of Touma Kamijou, who lives in the town of Academy City. Academy City specializes in advanced scientific research and training and grading people with various forms of Esper abilities in their powersets. Touma’s power is, at first glance, fairly weaksauce – he can nullify any supernatural ability his right hand comes into contact with. However, when a young girl named Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the titular Index) shows up on his doorstep, he discovers that magic exists as well, and there’s a shadow war that’s been going on for years between various magical factions, along with the forces of Science! which he has just gotten caught up in. Partway through the first season, to complicate things further, he ends up getting hit with amnesia, and has to try to recover some of his memories while also rebuilding his relationships with his classmates and family – and also dealing with the numerous psychic and magical threats that have decided to watge war over the city.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first, not because there’s a lot of bad, and not because the bad is a dealbreaker, but because the bad is complicated to explain. These two seasons do a really good job of spelling out their plot points, and telling an interesting and engaging story, with well animated action. With all the factions involved, the two seasons do a very solid job of demonstrating conservation of its supporting cast, and knowing when to kill off characters because they’re not useful to the story anymore, and when to keep them around because they’re interesting – and because they represent a faction or group of allies that are going to come up later, and the author doesn’t want to have to introduce a new character to go with that faction.

Also, I think the way that A Certain Magical Index handles protagonist amnesia is the right way to do it. Far too often protagonist amnesia is introduced as an excuse to have characters explain things that the protagonist previously knew (and the audience doesn’t) to them. Here, it’s used as a mechanism for conveying drama and character development. The protagonist has to rebuild their relationships, but in this framework where we have a glimpse of what they were before. In turn, the relevant members of the supporting cast now are in a position where they can – if they want to do the work as well – rebuild a relationship into a form they want, which says something about them over what they want that relationship to be – and what information they’re providing to the protagonist to do so.

Now, for the more messy bits. Neon Genesis Evangelion has gotten crap in the past for taking liberties with religious imagery from Christianity and Kabbala, and just going with what looks and sounds cool (with a side of “what did Ultraman previously reference?”). A Certain Magical Index says “hold my beer”. Some of the religious organizations in the show, if the translation and localization reflects the Japanese names of these organizations, feels like someone rolled on the “Random Christian Organization” table. The “Roman Orthodox Church”? The “English Puritan Church”? This is made more egregious considering that the “Roman Orthodox” doesn’t use any of the trappings of any of the other Orthdox churches (Greek, Russian, or Ukrainian) – which, considering that some of their vestments are very visually distinctive and flashy, would be something that the animators would want to grab onto. Same with the “English Puritan Church” – even if we assume actual Puritanianism managed to persist into the late 20th and 21st century in a way where you could have an organized church that could have this sort of supernatural black-ops agents, they’d also have outfits that would be both visually distinctive, but also plain and minimalist in an unintentionally flashy way. Neither organization, in their attire or behavior, reflects this.

It’s kind of a bummer – I’m okay with this level of religious mad-libs, if you do something interesting with it. With Evangelion, they found visually distinctive ways to use stuff like the Sephirot, and at least gave some thought on what names of Angels (Biblical) to use with what Angels (kaiju). Here they just rolled twice on a table and didn’t give any consideration from there. It’s even a double-bummer because if the Roman Orthodox Church is separate from the Roman Catholic Church, there’s the added question of what are the Catholics doing? In the world of Index, is there some sort of equivalent to Iscariot from Hellsing? Have they formed a covert alliance with the English Puritan church? Instead, because it’s just using words for the sake of using words, there’s a lot of really interesting storytelling that just got left on the table. It’s kind of a bummer.

Still, I liked what I saw – and I’m probably going to watch A Certain Scientific Railgun before moving on to Season 3 of Index.

A Certain Magical Index is available for streaming on Crunchyroll, and the physical release of the show is available from the Crunchyroll Store, and from Amazon (Affiliate Links).

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