Hot take(?): I prefer RoR over Majo Taisen
WARNING: opinions. This is not a hate post, I just want to be honest. If you think I’m an idiot, vent it out in the comments
I really wanted to love this series, but it never managed to meet any of the expectations I had. Which sucks, because an all-female historical figure tournament sounds amazing (especially because of the male-dominated RoR cast), but it just falls flat.
The characters feel so underutilized and vapid. Cleopatra’s reduced to sexualized beauty, not even hinting at her intelligence and cunning and only focusing on her seductiveness. Marie Curie barely gets anything. Huang is reduced to “the wife of Zhuge Liang.” Lyudmila and Murasaki’s backstories are sorely lacking any real substance, with the former’s especially being geared towards a stereotypical “hype moments and aura I am Lady Death the bloodthirsty reaper” type bs. It speaks volumes how I struggle to recall anything about each of their fighters
RoR has something for everyone: Qin Shi Huang’s undying willpower fueled by his kingly ambition, Simo Hayha’s suffocating wartime PTSD, Apollo’s narcissism that conceals a hard-working man with integrity and principles, Jack’s evil driven by the constant neglect in his life clashing with Heracles’s unbreakable love for humanity. Each round has something unique to offer both for the themes and the individual motivations, and they actually succeed in getting people to root for them. They’re deep, fleshed out, and feel all the more human.
The transformations are also ass. Fanservice is good when done tastefully, which this series does not. They have such good designs established (Mona Lisa, Bonney, Joan of Arc), then more than half transform into basically stripper outfits. Great.
Compare it to RoR designs: most of the humans and gods having amazing and very unique, while also distinguishable designs. The ornate layers of Qin Shi Huang, Beelzebub’s ironic choice of priest clothing accompanied by his staff, the sleek, pure white military gear of Simo Hayha, Jack the Ripper’s gentleman style clothing concealing his sinister personality. And then the valkyries, who while I admit are underdeveloped, also have their own unique designs that tastefully suit each of their characters while also not trying to force sexiness.
And the fights: the only ones I can say I genuinely enjoyed in MT are Marie vs Catherine and Lakshmibai vs Charlotte Corday. The others: I just can get invested or bring myself to care much about their motivations and goals, a disappointing testament to the lack of substance.
The one thing MT does better than RoR are the powers. I like how MT focuses more on unique magical abilities as opposed to RoR’s “punch harder” mentality that the author clings to.
It’s a shame, because a RoR style series with all-female fighters sounds great, but Majo Taisen relies too much on its gimmick of “all-female Record of Ragnarok,” thus neglecting all the parts that actually made it good in the first place, and in the end, comes off as an inferior copy in character writing, designs, and story.