Magical Boy Cherry's first episode impressions

Even though I have a long list of drama series I need to catch up on I wanted to watch something new to start getting back into doing drama reviews. Thus I have begun to watch Magical Boy Cherry's, if mainly because it has only half-hour episodes and with its premise should be fun.

From the first episode I am very on the fence about it. There are signs that this could be a lot of fun to watch but there are also signs that it could be hard to get through at parts. Mainly when the show does not take itself too seriously and indulges in how silly it all is, it is a fun show to watch for just how off the wall it is. When it decides to be all serious though it loses its appeal and those parts I can see being hard to sit through at times. I just hope that the first half of this episode that was much of the latter was just part of a learning curve and now that all the characters are moving in the world of magic there will be much less of that.

The story so far focuses on Dougami Tetsu (Hashimoto Ryosuke), who is not very popular in school and has a missing older brother who was popular. Tetsu has a crush on a classmate but does not seem to have any plans about doing anything about that. He is also noticing that he can somehow read people's minds and that ability is what catches the attention of a group of mysterious individuals. This ends up leading him into the world of magic, but that is about where the episode ends. Tetsu really has little going for him other than he is broody. Hopefully his character will be given more personality than that as the series continues.

The other four members of A.B.C-Z do not get much screen time this episode. Yet I found them to be one of the highlights of the episode despite how small their parts were. Thankfully it looks like we should be getting more of them, especially Date Tsutomu, aka Ben (Totsuka Shota), as Tetsu recognizes him as a friend of his brother's.

To be honest I really did not think I would care to see anymore of this series until it got to the "battle" of the episode. Apparently in this world where only virgins can use magic the battles they have are dance battles. This is the scene that made me willing to commit to watch more as this is the over the top silliness that I was expecting and it delivered. I now can only imagine all other magic battles in other series being dance offs. And it is glorious.


Overall it is a rocky start for the series. It does show promise though so I will be willing to stick around for a couple more episodes at least. I believe if it is willing to embrace its silliness it really will shape up to be a fun series to watch, as series like this work best being as over the top as possible. So I hope to see more of that as the series progresses.