Wonder Egg Priority

Series Overview

Wonder Egg Priority (ワンダーエッグ・プライオリティ) is a psychological drama anime that’s really just a magical girl series. From the first episode, I saw the beginnings of some magical girl tropes, and a few episodes in, it was confirmed that that’s what the series is.

However, this magical girl series is a bit different from what you might expect when you hear “magical girl.” The girls in Wonder Egg Priority don’t have magical girl transformations they undergo that change their outfits. But, every other trope is there.

So, what’s the series all about? Basically, all of the girls have lost someone close to them to suicide and their goal is to bring them back to life. They do this by protecting “egg girls” (literally girls that hatch from eggs) from the monsters of their nightmares.

That’s a pretty bad explanation, but it’s a weird show. The egg girls are other girls who committed suicide, and the monsters are the manifestations of what led them to suicide. By protecting enough of these egg girls, Ai and her friends hope to bring back their own lost ones.

I know a lot of people think that Madoka Magica invented the psychological drama type of magical girl series. I did too for a time. But, the reality is that psychological drama has been tied to magical girls from almost the start. Even Sailor Moon, the poster child for the genre, is like that.

And unlike some other magical girl anime which I think don’t do the psychological drama thing all that well, Wonder Egg Priority does a great job. It even has some excellent psychological horror elements.

But, if you’ve heard about Wonder Egg Priority before this review, you may have heard that it crashed and burned. I’ll get into that later on.

Magical Girls

There are four main characters in Wonder Egg Priority, and they’re all relatively diverse. I think that’s something that probably attracted a lot of viewers to this series — aside from the art and animation, which are usually top-tier.

Diversity in the cast (characters, not voice actors) isn’t something I particularly look for in anime. If it’s there and done well, great. But I often feel like it’s shoehorned in. Wonder Egg Priority isn’t like that. The diversity of the characters feels natural and they all get some great development that ties to what makes them unique.

Ai Ooto is the protagonist of the series. She rocks the gym shorts and hoodie combo, much like myself. But unlike myself, she has heterochromia, which she’s self-conscious about. The person Ai wants to revive is her best friend Koito. Fun fact: Both Ai and Koi mean love in Japanese.

Neiru Aonuma is the next of the main characters to be introduced. She’s also my least favorite of them. The problems I have with Neiru are that I’m not a huge fan of the kuudere type and she seems to have the least in-depth development of the group.

Rika Kawai, as in kawaii, is the third main character. She’s loud, obnoxious, and would be my least favorite of the group if Neiru had a halfway interesting personality. But, Rika also has some great character moments. The girl she wants to save is her former #1 fan from her idol days.

Lastly, we have Momoe “Momo” Sawaki. Considering her character development came later than the others, I didn’t like her too much at first. But, once we got Momo’s arc, which was all about gender identity, she easily became one of my favorites. I like Ai’s design more, but Momo is the better character.

The “Special”

Here’s the part where I start explaining what went wrong. The first signs of trouble came when the series had an unplanned recap episode. That generally means that the next episode isn’t ready yet, which is never good. Then, we found out the finale would release as an OVA 3 months after the series finished airing.

Just with that information, you should be able to see that the production of the series tanked. The animation suffered some from this, but I’m not really an expert on animation, so I won’t say more about that. All you need to know is that the staff working on the show were overworked and the series suffered as a result.

But, even with the initial recap episode, things weren’t looking bad on the surface. The writing had been really good. The characters were developed well, the plot was moving along, and there were plenty of twists that were being teased.

In the latter half of the series, the psychological horror aspects started appearing as well. We were introduced to the villain of the series, Frill, along with her subordinates. And, honestly, Frill and her subordinates are terrifying in an uncanny way.

But then came the OVA. First, despite being advertised as an hour long (45 minutes, technically), the first half of that was another recap. I didn’t mind this, though. Unlike the first recap episode, I watched this one because it had been 3 months since the previous episode.

Unfortunately, the remaining 22 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time to close out all of the plot points left open. In fact, it seemed to ignore them. Frill and her subordinates were seemingly retconned out, and rather than giving us answers, it opened up more questions.

I think the OVA was a decent episode. But it was a terrible conclusion. If you were to tell me there was another cour of the series after it, I’d have no problem with the OVA. But since it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any more Wonder Egg Priority, that episode has ruined the series for a lot of people.

Conclusion

Overall, I rate Wonder Egg Priority as a 7/10, which is almost a full point below the average score for the series. But I also rated the OVA as a 6/10, which is almost a full point above its average score. Really, what I have to say is that Wonder Egg Priority is a great ride, but you should go into it expecting it to crash at the end.

As for the OP and ED of the series, they’re great. The only OP from the winter season I liked more than this one is Jujutsu Kaisen‘s second OP. And while I do think there are a few EDs better than Wonder Egg Priority’s, it’s still up there thanks to the song.

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