Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of Anime of The Week #62! Do you like Tarot Cards? Do you like Magical Girls? Do you like dark anime? Then this anime is for you! The anime is Day Break Illusion.
July 6, 2013 – September 28, 2013
Akari Taiyou is an apprentice fortune teller living with her aunt, uncle, and their daughter Fuyuna. Having lost her mother at a young age, the only thing Akari has left of her is a deck of tarot cards and a dream to follow in her footsteps as a fortune teller.
One night, Akari has a dream of being attacked by a plant monster and witnesses a stronger version of herself defeat it. When she awakens, she discovers to her horror that the monster was actually Fuyuna. But mysteriously, Akari and her relatives soon forget Fuyuna ever existed. After another close encounter with a similar monster, she is rescued by three magical girls: Ginka Shirokane, Seira Hoshikawa, and Luna Tsukuyomi. They explain that they are from the Sefiro Fiore organization, which uses Elemental Tarot power to fight the evil creatures known as “Daemonia.”
Akari discovers she too is a magical girl and has inherited her mother’s power of The Sun card. However, she comes to realize Daemonia are actually people who have been possessed, and she must decide whether to try to save what is left of their humanity or to wipe them from existence. As Akari comes to terms with her grim duty of protecting the world from Daemonia, the bonds of the organization and that of their team will soon be strained when they deal with grave threats from the outside and from within.
There are two things I love in life: Magical Girls and Tarot Cards. So when I looked at the premise of the anime, that being the usage of Tarot Cards and the girls’ powers coming from said cards, I thought that this would be a great anime for me watch! Sadly, I had no idea what I was in store for. The anime itself had, what I personally believe to be, really good ideas. But it’s sadly ruined by what I consider to be bad writing and bad storytelling. I didn’t really find the characters that interesting, but I didn’t really hate them either. The main villain was really boring, if I were to be honest. Honestly, the only character that I remembered the most throughout the entire thing was Luna Tsukuyomi, one of the four main girls in the show. But that was only because there were so many things to her that were related to the moon; to which I decided to call her “Moon Girl”. And some of the things they did add to the show I didn’t think were good to begin with. The animation itself is alright, nothing wrong there. But the artstyle looked off, to say the least. At least for my tastes. The soundtrack isn’t worth writing home about, and neither were the fight scenes. At a certain point in the anime, I come to believe that the studio behind it probably wanted some of that Madoka Magica pie, as the anime itself did the whole “Dark Magical Girl” and “Being a Magical Girl Sucks” idea and was a huge success. (Not saying that it did it first, but I believe it was the first to be very popular.) Overall, while I wouldn’t consider this anime to be “horrible,” I wouldn’t exactly call it “great,” either. Once again, the anime had some really good concepts and ideas, and I wanted it to succeed. I go by the philosophy that any idea can work as long as it’s executed well. Unfortunately, while the concept of Magical Girls + Tarot Cards sounded amazing to me, the execution was done so poorly that it would make Madoka Magica’s own butcher blush.
Seasons and Episodes:
Season(s): 1 Episodes: 13
Trailer:
Thanks for reading, See you on the next anime of the week! 🙂
