Overview

My review of A Certain Magical Index II is here just in time for A Certain Magical Index III… episode 7. So close! However, despite just finishing this season, I still have to watch A Certain Scientific Railgun S before moving on to Index III.

I’ve heard that Railgun S is supposed to be watched before Index II, but Railgun S came out afterwards, so that’s the order I’ll be watching it in. However, I also watched the first season of Railgun before the first season of Index, so I’ve already screwed up the watch order anyway.

As the second season of Index, Index II primarily follows Kamijou Touma and Index, but other characters such as Mikoto Misaka and Accelerator take the lead for some episodes. Generally, the episodes following Kamijou and Index are the worst.

Misaka’s episodes are pretty good, which makes sense because Railgun was better than Index. The episodes following Accelerator, however, are the best of the season. Despite starting off as an antagonist, he becomes a protagonist over the course of this season, and there’s even a season focusing on him coming in the future.

For this season, the first half primarily followed Kamijou, and so was a struggle for me to get through. Without going into too much detail because it bores me, this portion of the season focused on the various churches fighting it out, with Kamijou always in the center of it.

I think there are a few reasons why I don’t like the magic side of the RailDex series, but the main two are the lack of explanations and the character designs. When the magic side of this series is being explored, nothing is actually explained in a way that makes any sense.

Because of this, the magic system isn’t much of a system, and that makes it uninteresting to watch. On the other hand, the science side of the series is flushed out well with different abilities which are fully explained and a power level system from 0 to 6.

For example, we know that the magician Stiyl uses some sort of cards to create various types of fire magic, but other than that we don’t know anything about the scope of his capabilities or how exactly his magic works. On the other hand, we know every little detail about how Accelerator’s vector ability works.

Not only does the science side of this series make more sense, but it also looks better. For some unknown reason, all of the church members in this series look like edgy goth kids or something. They’re covered in crazy piercings, wear completely unreasonable clothing, and commit genocide.

Well, I guess that last thing does make sense for the church.

By comparison, the latter half of the season is almost like a completely different series. Sure, there are still crazy members of the church running around Academy City, such as the woman with the 4-foot long tongue piercing, but for the most part the focus shifts to the science side.

It’s here that the better main character, Accelerator, really shines. Kamijou always wants to save everyone, which is a boring concept in and of itself, but as I mentioned in my review of the first season of Index, his fighting style isn’t entertaining to watch. Accelerator is his foil.

Not only is Accelerator the strongest esper in Academy City, but he also seems to have no issue with killing anyone who gets in his way. Over the course of the series we see him start to value life more after he essentially adopts Mikasa clone No. 20001, but his bloodlust still remains.

The fact that Accelerator has no problem going all out against his opponents makes his fights a lot more interesting to watch. And, due to the time limit on his ability, he’s not able to just spam vectors at people. Sometimes he has to do things a bit differently, like use his enemies’ own weapons against them.

Catching Up With The Characters

Throughout this season, Kamijou is continuing to battle it out with the church’s magicians and mainly stays away from the science side of things just as he did in the first season. While Index is typically somewhere nearby, she plays less of a role with him in this season.

Some of the things Kamijou does are save a church member from warring factions, take down a crystal fleet of battleships in Italy, and fight off multiple church higher-ups who come to destroy Academy city. You know, just the usual stuff.

If Kamijou represents the magic-fighting side of this season, then Misaka represents the neutral territory. She fights some enemies from the science side of things a bit towards the end, but for the most part, the episodes in which she plays major roles are more slice of life.

And, while slice of life may not be action-packed, it’s still better than anything Kamijou gets himself into. I can honestly say I’d rather watch Misaka try to get a new frog keychain for her phone than watch Kamijou punch nuns in the face.

The final side left is the science-fighting side, and this is where Accelerator comes in. We typically see Kamijou as the hero because he’s fighting against the magicians to save Academy City from external threats, but Accelerator is doing just as much work.

However, instead of fighting external threats, Accelerator is fighting to save Academy City from internal threats. These threats come in multiple forms such as the Level 0 terrorist organization, Skill Out, or the organization which controls the city from the shadows and once used Accelerator as a test subject.

By the end of the season, these three characters are all working together whether they know it or not. There appears to be a war coming to academy city, and each of the main characters are fighting to stop it in their own ways. I assume in Index III we’ll see them all working together more.

Conclusion

I know the summary part of this review was fairly vague, but I started watching this season about two months ago and don’t really remember many details from the first half because it bored me so much. The latter half, especially the final five episodes or so, was much better, but unfortunately not good enough to raise my rating.

With that said, A Certain Magical Index II is a 5/10. Those final episodes may have been 7s, but there were 24 episodes total, so they don’t really have much weight when it comes to the overall score.

This is lower than my rating for the first season, and part of the explanation for that may be that I watched these two seasons back to back. By the time I was done with the first season, I was tired of the series, and this may have skewed my view of the first half of this season.

But, what did you think of this season of Index? And, are you currently watching Index III? I probably won’t be getting to that until long after it’s over, so let me know what you think of it so far in the comments.

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Overview

A Certain Magical Index is the primary story in the franchise known as RailDex which also includes the side story, A Certain Scientific Railgun. I believe the watch order for these series is Index, Railgun, Index II, Railgun S, then whatever Index season 3 is going to be called, but I watched Railgun first. Whoops.

Index takes place in the same Academy City as Railgun, and features many of the same characters, except this time Kamijō is the protagonist instead of Misaka. It also focuses more on magic than science, as the title implies.

The first arc in the series annoyed me a lot. Index, the female lead, is named such because she functions as an index for 103,000 volumes of magical text. Now, this alone isn’t annoying, but just about every other sentence in the first arc is reminding us of these 103,000 volumes.

Just typing out those sentences about the 103,000 volumes of magical data is triggering flashbacks, so that’s the last you’ll hear about them from me. After that beginning arc, the series does get better, but it still has its issues.

The main issue I think I had with the series was the over-saturation of religious references. Sometimes I found them to be fine such as the use of golems by one of the mages, and other times I found them interesting such as how different religions can be used to counter each other, but most of the time that wasn’t the case.

Typically the characters would just ramble on about something while throwing in religious terms or phrases without making any real sense. I think these scenes were supposed to be confusing because we’re understanding everything from Kamijō’s perspective, but it was a bit much.

This is the type of gag I expect the show to pull once or twice, but it became less of a gag and more just a part of the show. Every episode has this kind of thing happen multiple times; more times than is acceptable for a running gag.

Characters

Tōma Kamijō is the protagonist for this series. He’s a student in Academy City, but doesn’t appear to have any psychic powers like most of the other students in the city. On the other hand, he also doesn’t appear to have any magical ability like the sorcerers he meets during the series.

Instead, Kamijō has an ability which seems to fall into neither of these categories. His (right?) hand is able to completely stop both magic and psychic powers simply by touching the power, or the person using the power.

I recently saw a video which mentioned him and said that his power was boring because having a power that cancels out the powers of others is overdone for anime protagonists. However, I can’t think of another protagonist with this ability, so I wasn’t bothered by it in that sense.

That said, I do think that the ability to nullify the abilities of others simply leads to uninteresting fights.

Think of it like this, we all know that Naruto is going to resort to using the shadow clone jutsu, but at least he can use that in conjunction with other jutsu or strategies. Kamijō on the other hand just has to touch his opponent or whatever ability they throw at him, and the battle is essentially over.

Index is the female lead of the series, not Misaka from Railgun. She’s a member of the English Puritan Church and is in possession of a large number of grimoires (see how I didn’t say the number?) which are stored as memories in her head.

Misaka is still in this series, however, but plays a more supporting role. She also had 20,001 clones of herself running around Academy City, but I don’t even want to get into that.

This may be an issue I have simply because I watched Railgun first, but I felt that Misaka wasn’t the same character who I was used to seeing in Railgun. I can’t pinpoint what was different about her exactly, but her personality wasn’t the same.

Komoe Tsukuyomi is one of Kamijō’s teachers who is neither an esper or a magician. Her role in the series is mainly to be the stable adult figure since most of the other characters are teenagers. However, her appearance is that of a small child for whatever reason.

The final character I’ll mention is one of the antagonists for the series, an esper known as Accelerator. His psychic ability allows him to freely control any vectors, which he typically uses to reflect any attack that comes at him back towards the user.

Accelerator is the strongest of the seven level 5 espers in Academy City and is part of an experiment to make him the first level 6 esper.

Conclusion

At first I didn’t like A Certain Magical Index as much as I liked A Certain Scientific Railgun, but by the end of the season I’d have to say they’re about the same. Because of that, I rated A Certain Magical Index at 6/10.

I’ll have to watch the second seasons of both shows before I can really decide which one I liked more, but for now I’ll say I’m leaning slightly more toward Railgun because it made more sense.

The first OP for A Certain Magical Index is available here.

My review of A Certain Magical Index II is available here.