This is a really cute show. It’s not particularly deep or complex, but it’s got punching and weird stuff going on. Much of the middle filler is probably best watched while you’re doing some minor chore that busies the hands, though.

My knowledge of magical girl stuff is from ages ago, and I’d like less dismal stuff in my life, so let’s go through this from the beginning!

Opens with one girl doing sports, then shift to another doing SCIENCE in front of a bunch of classmates, which means pouring stuff in test tubes into beakers until there’s an explosion. Why are they doing this in a random schoolroom? Don’t they have an actual teacher for this stuff?

Then she happens to walk by and just miss the sports team, and there’s a bunch of DRAMATIC CUTS in case we missed that these two are connected somehow.

Then opening song! It seems to involve swiping cards through thingies. It is also remarkably nonsexualized! That’s not a swipe at Japan, I’ve just been reading a lot of superhero comics.

Just look at Sporty Girl’s outfit!

Then it’s the first day of school! Sporty girl and friends chat about all the shooting stars recently. Friend wished on a bunch of them. Sporty thinks they might be bad omens! Science girl tells them that actually they’re meteorites! So I guess the two already know each other. She’s not being a buzzkill either – she says that somehow, them being meteorites being killed by brushing against our planet makes them good wish targets, just not bad omens :D. The others are duly impressed, and Sporty is informed Science knows basically everything. Also, all the boys love her. Sporty then attempts to say she wants to emulate that, but fumbles the word because Sporty isn’t Science! From the opening it looks like she’s a tougher magical girl, though. I guess she’s the melee fighter and Science is the wizard?

I should probably say their actual names. Sporty is Nagisa and Science is Yuki-something. Look, the subtitles move fast, okay?

Naturally, Sporty also has some love letters waiting for her because generally all protagonists are moderately popular. But they’re all from girls! Oh no!!! How will she ever get a proper boyfriend?

Later in class, Sporty is called on and boggles at x-7=19+x. She is apparently on her second year (of…middle school?). Science jumps in to say that the equation is wrong and that second part should probably be another minus! Teacher apologises. Sporty is starstruck.

On the bus home, her friends decide that they should nominate the pair for class representatives, since between them they lock up the boy and girl vote.

Back home, Sporty laments that she wants the boys to like her. Clearly, she needs to get into chemistry. A shooting star goes by! She goes out to see lots of them, and quickly wishes for a boyfriend, lots of cake, etc. This activates whatever the targeting system for magical girls is, and one of the shooting stars smacks into her head and then turns into the card swipe thing.

Then we go to Science, who’s apparently not up on her parasites because she chats with her giant dog while it’s licking her face. It seems she’ll be our Traditional Japanese House character. Then she walks facefirst into a spiderweb and continues to give no fucks about that either. For this, she get to find a neat box with her card reader thingy and cards all collected.

Back to Sporty freaking out and poking the thingy with her lacrosse stick. So sports does not mean brave. The thingy opens up to introduce the obligatory cute mascot, and she freaks out more. Her brother comes up to see what’s with all the screaming, and she attempts to explain, only for him to assume it’s just a cellphone. She trips him in retaliation, so he runs off calling to their mom that she’s being mean to him, so she shouts after him not to tattle, because shouting that so your mom can hear you is such a bright move. Sporty really needs Science in her life more.

The obligatory cute mascot begs to be taken to the princess, and Sporty takes it out in her lacross stick to avoid actually touching the OCM. It doesn’t seem to understand the concept of going around things, so she ends up climbing the wall into someone (Science’s?) backyard, walking past an old lady, and then climbing out again. Haha, Japan! Here in America we just shoot people who do that.

Then a very ridiculous looking guy shows up to menace her. His name is Pissard. Okay. She loses her card thingy with talking mascot! Science then shows up, carrying her own one in her hand because Science isn’t a coward.

Anyway, so they have to transform. Despite not having any clue what any of this is, they do somehow know to shout “Dual Aurora Wave!” after swiping the cards, and then Sporty immediately asks why she’s doing and saying this stuff. Then they transform and give a big speech to the villain, then start trying to figure out why they said that.

Then the ridiculous guy summons a monster that possesses a rollercoaster to attack them, so they hold hands to summon beam attacks, which returns the rollercoaster to its original location and causes the monster to turn into lots of little black apologetic stars. No killing or property damage, I guess.

Then the cardswipe things hug and transform into full cute animal thingies, and they basically say that the two are now magical girls. Science is okay with this while Sporty freaks out.

Then the ending is a romance song about how great candy and hot boys are.

Ep 2: We learn more about the bad guys and mascots (and they are cellphone tamagotchis. Wow, marketing department, wow) and also, evil ridiculous guy is evil and now targets the city’s power because last episode Sporty didn’t see why she needed to fight so he’s going to be causing bigger problems. And he can turn human and talk to humans, but seems to not actually know anything about us, because he was wowed by electricity existing.

Ep 3: More on mascots and stuff, also ridiculous evil guy’s boss is really getting annoyed with his failures fast. Either he’s got to succeed at something soon or else the threats are just empty bluster. He wanders into her school and is mistook for a substitute teacher, at which point he continues wandering silently and glaring because actually trying to seem like the person you’re impersonating is for competent villains.

It does make me think that what I really would like to see is a show about the alien/demon/elf/whatnots wandering around exploring our culture and being a weirdo while everyone fails to notice. To my recollection fics about that with the angry short demon in Yuyu Hakusho being confused or impressed or disdainful or all of those at human culture made up at least 30% of the fandom’s output, with at least passing mention in another 50%, so I’m not alone in this.

Ep 4: Wow, already an ultimatum for evil guy, he dies if he fails again. Also, other minions appear to make fun of him. Which they were right to do because apparently he can turn a whole bus of kids to stone and didn’t think to do this before to solve the problem of kids who have stuff he needs to take. Plus, apparently, one of the mascot things came here a hundred years ago, and that’s why it was in a box waiting for Science instead of falling on her. That doesn’t really fit with the tamagotchi aspect.

…he is really stupid. So he’s running around turning people to stone, which he can apparently do effortlessly, and gets a girl he thinks is Sporty but isn’t, but when she and Science appear to yell at him for this, he decides that never mind the stone thing, it’s time to summon the darkness again, because why use the plan that’s been 100% successful when you can go with the 0% one? Really, lazy lazy lazy show! Bad! What you could have done is shown them realizing that people statues mean ridiculous evil guy and transforming then, and then it turns out that they can’t be turned to stone when they’re transformed. Especially when he goes on to attack them with the statues on the basis they won’t fight back or risk damaging the original people, which is showing a basic reasoning ability at odds with his inability to just turn them stone in the first place. (It’s also a bit confusing why this would be a concern, since everything is always fixed at the end of the battle.) Also helpful: some sign that using power takes effort! Right now the battles are pretty much nonsense sequences.

And then…uh, I think they kill him. That’s the first time they’ve attacked him and not just his monster, and he seems to be vaporized by the blast. Huh.

Ep 5: Okay, so he’s not dead! And his boss isn’t killing him either.

And they get separated and he attacks Science, but just hops around a lot and tosses stuff near her until she drops the cellphone thingy, and then Sporty comes to the rescue and…he throws it back? Maybe the idea is he’s really annoyed at how all the other minions were saying he sucks, so he wants to prove himself, but mostly they were calling him a dumbass, so…

There’s also a big moral argument here, which was either disjointed in the original or butchered by the subs. Can’t make sense of it beyond Science saying being bad is wrong and ridiculous guy not understanding what this morality you speak of is.

And this time I think they really kill him? He turns into smoke and they get his pendant, but maybe he’ll just reform elsewhere and be too weak without it to come back.

And yeah, the OCM things are explaining he’s not dead for real, he’s just returned to his base substance and will never return again. Which, OCM things, maybe we have a different definition here because lighting a person on fire leaves their base substance and prevents them from coming back in the same form too.

And his pendant was actually the prism stone! So I guess all the minions have one. Maybe the stone is required to make a minion and those five made up the entire current population of the dark evil zone.

Ep 6: Hm, they note that they now have three prism stones total, which means that all they need is one more win to give them the majority of the stones.

Also, apparently there’s some safe keeping thing they should put the stone in that’ll protect it, but if so why aren’t their own stones in it already? And they need to find that thingy.

A baby bear is in trouble! Instead of transforming, Sporty rushes out to try to grab it out of the river, but she can’t swim. Somehow she gets back to shore alive.

Then new ridiculous guy, Musclebound Uglyface, attacks and transforms the mom bear. Oh no, how will they rescue it? Writers, maybe you shouldn’t have shown everything be magically fixed always upon defeat. The vacuum cleaner was in at least two pieces when they beat it, but it turned back into an unbroken one. Plus, the solution is just to do a different magic attack. Seems pointless.

Then they beat Musclebound Uglyface, who is even dumber than previous ridiculous evil guy. Not sure why he was even sent. And they find the stone protector thingy, but for some reason only put the new stone in. Maybe the other stones are required for their powers but it’d be nice to actually say that’s why. And get a magic diary. Marketing people go!

Ep 7: Where Sporty is off her game because she thinks Science and her crush are together. Then Science attempts to run distraction for Musclebound Uglyface to avoid the game being disrupted, because she’s suicidal, and Sporty goes out and they defeat him easily, and then Sporty learns that crush is Science’s childhood friend who she views as a brother, which is reassuring on the love front because Not That Kind Of Anime, thank god. They don’t even think to use their magical girl powers to rush back faster. Come to think of it, since it’s a possession sort of thing, maybe they can’t.

Ep 8: Sporty worries more about her crush, then when Science goes out of her way to try to get them to talk and proves she really isn’t a girlfriend threat, Sporty just flips out over that. Bad Sporty! Love triangle’s already getting grating. Her pining was okay cute, but everything beyond that is annoying. And poor Science is getting the brunt of it.

I guess character stuff has to get a focus because Musclebound Uglyface is so dull himself. When will he die return to the darkness?

Ep 9: In Sporty’s recap, she notes that even though they were arguing during the battle they still took the guy out easily. Yes, that’s why he sucks.

This episode, main OCM gets sick and also confiscated and they have to try to get him back. The evil guy ends up getting him first, and, showing they’re pathologically incapable of planning, they ask to get him back so he won’t die (having somehow intuited that’s something the evil side doesn’t want for some reason). He gives it to them, Sporty’s first words are that haha sucker now they can transform. INSTEAD OF HEALING OCM AND THEN TRANSFORMING. God damn it Sporty. And as a result of transforming while he’s sick, she’s sick, although it doesn’t seem to impact her abilities in any way. And then they win and then heal him.

What is cute is the resolution is to ask the teacher again to please please please let her keep it, rather than just running off with it.

Ep 10: Science’s parents come to visit and robbers attack and Science explains to them robbery is bad and they repent and then Musclebound Uglyface shows up and this time for no reason their ultimate magical girl attack doesn’t knock him away but the jewels all start glowing and also smack him.

Sporty’s continued bullying of her little brother pleases me.

Ep 11: Okay, now Musclebound Uglyface is the one being told to succeed or else. If we follow the same pattern as before, that means several more episodes of him begging for another chance.

And he’s breaking tanks at the aquarium! Oh no, I sure hope this is instafixed by defeat like stuff was before. It’s getting confusing the more of a delay there is between the initial attack and their fight.

They continue not to transform in advance. Maybe they really can’t.

He’s in his final form. That usually means actual defeat time. And yes! He’s gone. Hopefully the next one will suck less.

Her brother nearly sees them but luckily is knocked out. They generally seem to make little attempt to keep the magicalgirlness a secret and things just work out.

Ep 12: Reference the tank breaking at the aquarium, although they seem to know it only as a rumor. So, did the damage remain or is it that people saw the damage and evacuated, then everything was fixed to their confusion?

And wow, competence! This time the villain is pretending to offer free chocolate samples, and while she coos over them, villain lady sends a tiny dark thing to grab her OCM. Good job lady, dunno how you know so much about humans but maybe you’ve been boning up since the initial wtf electricity bit.

She cannot compete with OCM’s laziness, and he just sleeps through her interrogation.

Okay, now she’s going for the kill with Science and just making her hallucinate infinite flowers of her choice and then taking her to meet her science crush to make ghost professor ask for the OCM. Maybe they’re still not too clear on how humans work. I guess villain lady was going to make Sporty hallucinate infinite chocolate but stumbled across someone giving out free samples and tried the other way instead.

Then they’re saved because the first OCM transforms and runs back to them. Be more competent, all of you.

Villain lady is at least smart enough to leave while they’re transforming.

Episode ends with them wondering if the grandmother remembers what happened and speculating on how bad it’d be if their secret was out, so maybe that’ll actually happen!