Magic Knights Rayearth #01 — Time For Your Twenty Minute Tutorial
October 6th, 2026
OH MY GOD SOMEONE DO SOMETHING.
Wait, where did this come from? That's rhetorical, given the Chinese subtitles. Next season, I may give up on trying to specify air dates entirely.
Impressions:
Boy, we're starting off super exciting here. They get portaled out of Tokyo Tower three and a half minutes into the episode, and spend the next eighteen minutes listening to a tutorial. …Cool. This was a big change from listening to the peanut gallery announce every single character's pertinent traits in the most organic of dialogue. "Oh, Hikaru, you are a tomboyish girl without a care in the world. And that girl over there is a rich girl from rich girl's school where everybody is rich and distinguished, not like the girls from that other school, which is blue." By the long overdue time someone finally shows up to fight, not only does the episode end, it ends on them leaving. You can really tell why this is considered an iconic classic. What pacing. What animation. What story. Wait, sorry. Wrong punctuation. What pacing? What animation? What story?
Not impressed. In the slightest. An entire episode spent announcing that they're in fantasy land and they have magical girl powers. Pretty Cure moves at a brisker pace than this. Pretty Cure throws more punches than this. Isn't Pretty Cure currently doing a whole detective thing right now too? So they thwart more evil than anybody did here as well. This has some old school animation style throwbacks, like yelling chibi overreactions instead of yelling regular overreactions. But even if it was novel and special thirty years ago, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting twenty other shows every single season about doing this exact thing, with this exact lack of animation and lack of hook. Not explicitly using RPG numbers because it's so old that the Arabic numberal system hadn't been invented yet is not much of a difference.
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Captjack
Series 1 is only 3 volumes long, so the readaptation will have to pad things out by at least an hour to fill 12–13 episodes. 1994´s S1 added full-on filler plots to its 20 episodes, but it was still a full adaptation. Making this anime one of those cases where you could do a side-by-side comparison for most shots.
S2 adapted only the first of the 3 novels of the sequel manga during its 29-episode run, so it has a divergent adaptation, as it began shortly after the manga. The girl goes back to Japan at the end of Part 1 and returns the same way at the start of Part 2, so the show is going to have an abysmal stop and restart structure. Somehow, it’s still one of the better Fall 2026 anime.
The 3 1997 OVAs are an AU story where the fantasy characters instead reverse-isekai into Tokyo, making it its own thing. One of the Clamp adaptations that barely has anything to do with their plots. It also got a Saturn RPG from Sega itself, plus a few more Japan-only games. Modern games cost too much for anime or movies to get those kinds of tie-ins now. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle (the manga and anime diverge) features AU versions of the girls, and half of Clamp´s roster, but who cares.