How Was It?

I tend to go into light novels about magic-powered students with a healthy degree of skepticism, and the plot description for The Asterisk WarVol. 1 certainly had me a little bit concerned going into this volume. The book seemed to confirm my suspicions when the very first scene concerned our main character Ayato happening upon Julis in the midst of her changing, so it was to my surprise that this volume actually turned out to be a fairly enjoyable read as a straight-forward and competently executed take on this particular genre. It’s not original by any stretch of the imagination - its setting, its characters, and its overall structure are all combinations of something that you’ve probably seen before if you’ve watched or read the deluge of magical-school battle stories that have come out in recent years, but what made Asterisk a surprisingly enjoyable read was the way that it provided a solid and uncluttered story with some good action and interesting character development to boot.

I can think of a few light novel series that can be accused having an unfortunately slow start or delaying the action in favour of an early exposition dump, and I was pleased that Asterisk bucked this trend by jumping straight to the action early on as Ayato faced off against Julis in a magical duel as a result of their awkward first meeting. I thought pitting our protagonists against each other in a super-powered action scene was actually a pretty cool way to kick off this story, and I thought this segment succeeded because of the way that it managed to establish their respective characters in the context of this battle while keeping me engaged. That isn’t to say that the character development was particularly nuanced here, but I enjoyed that I quickly had a sense of what the primary personality traits and motivations of each of these characters in a little more of an interesting way than through a simple dump of exposition. This also helped to establish the general mechanics of this magical world in an unobtrusive manner, and in hindsight I’d say that these first 25 or so pages accomplished more than a few other comparable series accomplished in their first 60 in providing with a solid grasp of the world, its characters, and an entertaining battle scene.

After a fast-paced start that got the story going in an enjoyable way, we get a stronger look into the setting of Asterisk in Ayato finding his way through campus as he meets with the student-council president and attends class in scenes interspersed with his interactions with Julis. We get a bit of exposition on the state of the world and the makeup of the island, but this was relatively short and I was pleased that it didn’t feel overly convoluted or forced. The basics gist of it is that there was a cataclysmic global event which gave some of the population super-powers, and Asterisk exists as a place for these students to duke it out for personal and school glory. There’s just enough here to raise some interesting future questions about political makeup of the island, and this complemented the main story effectively as it proceeded. While we do get some of the usual light-novelesque pandering in the context of a few scenes such as those between the student-council president and Ayato, this was generally less present that other light novel series and thankfully didn’t do too much to distract from the main plot.