After a long long wait, A Certain Magical Index III brings the third season of the anime adaptation of the light novel series. It is a little bit lengthier at 26 episodes long. It is set in a world filled with people with magical powers, although they are separated into two main factions: Science and Religion. The science users are known as Espers, while the religion users are Magicians. Most of the abilities that we see tend to be offensive based and has the potential for huge amounts of destruction. Academy City is the headquarters of science, with the current situation being that the Roman Church is effectively waging war upon them.
One of the main protagonists is Toma, who has the ability to cancel out any magic or other special powers with his right hand. He calls it the Imagine Breaker. He’s a typical anime protagonist who is selfless and will jump to any situation to “save” or “protect” anyone without asking. He was bland and generic in the previous two seasons, and he’s still bland and generic now. All too frequently he yells out that he has such misfortune whenever he encounters some sort of fan service event. It was overused before, and it is overused now.
Joining Toma is Index, a young nun who memorized 103,000 grimoires in her head. She’s not very important now and she ends up being an annoying character anyway. She’s not portrayed in a very good light since she’s always sitting around doing nothing, waiting for Toma to bring her lunch. Then when Toma doesn’t because he had a legitimate reason, she’ll bite him. Index feels sidelined pretty hard ever since she was introduced, and she slow fades more and more into the background these days.
Like in previous seasons, the focus steps away from Toma during periods of time. Instead, we’ll have a look at Accelerator and Misaka. Although Misaka is now regulated to only being one of the love interests of Toma. She is constantly fawing over him which is a sad regression of the character who had so much potential. Accelerator on the other hand is supposedly balanced by having to rely on a device that helps him process his ability as a handicap. This means nothing since the plot will dictate when he is an overpowered character and when it is needed to temporarily curb him back to show how “exposed” he is.
There is the introduction of another viewpoint character, Hamazura. He is effectively a clone of Toma in terms of personality, the situations he finds himself in, and he even physically looks similar. He has a similar thing going on with the female characters in his team. The end result is that he is equally bland to watch due to his one-note personalty and constant righteous drivel. The season opens up with Toma unexpectedly getting involved in the tensions between Academy City and the Roman Church. As a result he is tasked with disrupting an artifact that the church is using to brainwash the masses against the City. In the beginning, you actually have hope that the storytelling would be better, but you’ll soon lose that hope.
After so long, Toma’s amnesia comes back to being slightly relevant as he supposedly had more of an idea of his Imagine Breaker before. There is apparently something more significant about it than being just a unique ability, not that it was teased in the first season or anything. It’s still quite a limited ability in that it’s predictable and Toma only uses it in one way: punching the villains no matter what they throw at him. It’s becoming less effective in the sense that all the villains now know about the ability and aren’t surprised about it at all. They even had preparations beforehand on how they planned to deal with it.
This is seemingly a trademark of the anime but even so, the disjointed storytelling and the transition between each story arc is jarring. The abundance of characters doesn’t help anything as we are bombarded with numerous groups, characters and abilities. Espers with more powerful abilities make frequent appearances and their powers are borderline overpowered, at times defying logic. The season tries to adapt too much into too little episodes and despite the short amount of time, manages to waste that with exposition dialogue that doesn’t help your understanding of what is going on. It expects you to already know some things so that what it then tells you is supposed to make you feel amazed or surprised at its cleverness. Obviously that attempt fails and you’re just left being confused or indifferent about it all.
The various perspectives wouldn’t be a problem if not for the constant and confusing skips. It’s like the anime is trolling you when an episode ends with some supposedly crazy cliffhanger, but it is something you probably don’t know what the big deal is because of half the things the anime had left out. This makes every episode a huge drag and very tasteless to watch.
It does tone down the fan service and harem nature of Toma. Since that was a tedious and repetitive mess in the previous season, it’s not missed. Although this season prefers to waste time on having the girls fawn over Toma, rather than explaining the plot properly and actually telling us in a better fashion on why we should care about things happening, why they are happening, and what the groups are after. Instead, things just happen, either Toma or Accelerator gets involved, which then gets resolved. It’s downright terrible storytelling.
There is forced logic in terms of how some characters uses their abilities or how one overcomes another. The worse cases are where one character has supposedly little or no power, and through sheer coincidence which is near impossible, will manage to manipulate events to their advantage as though they had (and could) planned it all along. “BS main character power” is an apt description for everything that happens. This is because Toma or Hamazura will pull some power out of nowhere to trump over his opponent. Then they will spout some righteous nonsense and it just gets sickenining when it is repeated so often.
Overall, A Certain Magical Index III is an absolutely terrible adaptation. If you thought the earlier seasons were confusing with its rushed nature, then this third season will be near incomprehensible. There are things happening to characters but before it follows that through to its end, it will jump to another scene. The season finale felt just like an ending to a normal episode. You wouldn’t be able to understand why the series has such popularity from just watching the anime, and it’s a shame that it did such a terrible job to allow that thought in the first place.
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