I've been on a magical girl anime binge for the past few days. The most recent one I picked up is Fate/Kaleid liner Prisma Illya, a spin-off from Type-Moon's Fate franchise. I wanted to watch this about a year ago, actually, but I was too lazy to pick up the show. Now that I'm halfway through season one, I wish I picked it up earlier. In short, Prisma Illya has ticked all the boxes on the 'Really Good Magical Girl Anime Checklist': cute girls, great action, and an interesting story that'd even appeal to a Type-Moon newcomer. 

To an extent, you can call Prisma Illya a magical girl parody. The fight scenes are crammed with comedy, the generic magical tropes are everywhere, and Illya even manages to break the fourth wall from time to time. The good thing, however, is that Prisma Illya doesn't go overboard with the parody. While it makes fun of its own genre on occasion, Prisma Illya still is quite 'serious' when it comes to sticking with the magical girl formula - if not with a bit more comedy. Prisma Illya is pretty silly, most of the time...but still delivers the fanservice when it counts.

So far, the show has maintained a decent pacing, although the three-episode fight against Saber is way, way too long. Usually, magical girl series stick very closely to the monster-of-the-week structure, so that particular fight was probably super important in the manga for the adaptation to have devoted three episodes towards. Prisma Illya is doing a reasonable job combining the slice-of-life with action, although as said earlier, a fight that lasts three episode can feel a bit nauseating. What makes Prisma Illya really exceptional, for me, has little to do with pacing or content. It's Illya and Miyu.

Magical girl anime are almost, by nature, character-driven shows. Since a lot of series don't rely on a long, overarching plot to tell its story, the female protagonist (and her rival) becomes the centre of attention. Nanoha has Nanoha x Fate (or Vivid x Einhart, to a lesser degree), Cardcaptor Sakura has Sakura x Syaoran...and Illya has Illya x Miyu. So far, Prisma Illya has done a great job teasing out the dynamics between the two: Illya's is clueless while Miyu's really smart, Illya is really warm and friendly while Miyu's a lot more aloof...and so forth. If Prisma Illya keeps this duo (and to a lesser extent, the Rin/Luvia duo) interesting, this show will have a lot of potential.

The weird thing about Prisma Illya is that as an intended parody, it has become a trope-for-trope rendition of what a decent magical girl anime should look like. I think Prisma Illya is magical girl done right: a good dose of comedy, cute girls, with some senseless violence on the side. I suppose the biggest surprise is that a show this good is actually a spin-off, and spin-offs from an established franchise tend to be pretty bad. Then again, Nanoha too started as a Triangle Heart spin-off. And now, it's turned into something much bigger than anyone imagined. While Prisma Illya probably won't ever eclipse Fate/Zero, it has turned out much, much better than I assumed.