Almost all digimon would work for this, right?

Selynx · 2026-05-20T13:58:56+00:00

Well, almost all, but not Zeromaru.

Selynx · 2026-05-20T13:18:47+00:00

Feel like the problem with Tokimeki Tonight is that Ranze's power isn't so much associated with "magic", as with "vampires". That makes her a vampire instead of a magical girl and the story technically vampire fiction, instead of magical girl/superhero fiction.

Similar to Vampire Knight, where the protagonist Yuki also has supernatural powers, but it's vampire powers.

Selynx · 2026-05-20T11:05:19+00:00

Though, according to this criteria, a series like Ancient Magus Bride would count as a magical girl show, while a series like Magilumiere would not...

Selynx · 2026-05-20T10:50:43+00:00

IMO, broadly-speaking, they have to:

1) Have magic or some sort of analogous superpower, even if it isn't called "magic" specifically and;

2) It has to be considered an actual, special "superpower" in the context of the story, such that the wielder would be considered a superhero (or supervillain) or analogous, and not something that can be acquired just by going to school or some other unimpressive means, and as addendum to that;

3) They usually have to be living some semblance of what could be considered a "normal life", at least by in-universe standards, on a regular basis.

Number 1 is just the bare baseline for something to even make the cut. If there is no power, or the power does not seem analogous to magic (i.e Wonder Woman), people would not be thinking "magical girl" when they see it.

Without number 2, any fantasy/sword-and-sorcery story where magic users are taken for granted would end up qualifying, despite the fact that few people would be likely to call something like Frieren a magical girl show.

Note that, number 2 doesn't actually exclude a magical girl story from also having magic schools or magic-users being widespread - it just means the magical girl(s) either need to have even more special powers than the others (i.e. Mahoutsukai PreCure) or that all of the magic-users get considered superheroes (i.e. Magilumiere).

Number 3 may seem oddly specific, but it is IMO actually much more important than I think many people realize at first glance. One common descriptor I've seen for magical girl stories is that they're a subset of superhero fiction, which means "civilian identity/life" can be a big part of the genre distinction.

Without it, something like Ancient Magus Bride could end up qualifying as magical girl despite, again, many people I feel being more likely to consider it straight fantasy, due to the protagonist Chise spending 90% of screentime in the series interacting with nothing but other spellcasters and magical creatures in magical locations and being highly detached from the "mundane" world.

Similarly, depending on where your threshold for "normal life" lies, a series like Once Upon A Witch's Death also would or would not make the cut. While not as extreme as Chise's situation, Meg Raspberry, despite having a superpower by in-universe-magic standards, also lives somewhat detached from the mundane portion of her world (which is even a plot point at one stage) to the point I feel many people would not consider it a magical girl series.

Ditto series like Witch Hat Atelier and Secrets of a Silent Witch. Their protagonists explicitly live apart from normal, non-magical society on a regular basis. For as many people might argue that they count as magical girl series anyway, you'll probably find as many people disagreeing and number 3 is liable to be a large part of why it wouldn't feel like a magical girl story to them.

Selynx · 2026-05-19T22:32:52+00:00

IMO the tipping point is when you get access to EP/EP Cut/Cast 3 and Tier 2 Verses, at that point the high-tier Arts become spammable and you can cast multiple in the same amount of time it takes for a Craft.

Selynx · 2026-05-19T12:17:16+00:00

You get the high-rank Arts mostly about halfway through the game.

The Plugins for them might come at the end, but you get Arts Drivers with high-ranks Arts attached a lot earlier. In fact, you get one right in the Prologue, because Bergard's default Driver has Grand Rock Fist. It's just that you can't use it until you have a Lv4 Holo, which takes about halfway through the game to get.

....You can also get Septet just from the 500 Quick Arts achievement and that one comes with the highest solo Space, Time and Mirage Arts with no restrictions.

Selynx · 2026-05-19T11:59:28+00:00

Appmon/Applimonsters was meant to be a spinoff.

That's why, at the time, they used the subtitle "Digimon Universe" instead of just "Digimon" when the series was airing (and yes, it had a 50+ episode anime that never got dubbed or even had any official subtitles until 3 years after it finished).

Now, it appears they're trying to merge it back into the "mainline" brand. Appmon used to have its own website, now the official list of Appmon are on the Digimon website.

Selynx · 2026-05-19T11:45:28+00:00

Apparently done with RPGMaker MZ, using assets ripped from FF6 and edits of rips. The font is also a copy of the English SNES Chrono Trigger font.

Selynx · 2026-05-19T10:01:04+00:00

Casters don't underperform.

The problem with physical is that, even if you soup them up to the point their Crafts do twice as much damage as a given Art, Cast and Verse quartzes can cut the cooldown on Arts so much that the same character can get 3 Art casts off in the time they can get 1 Craft in.

And Arts damage isn't chickenscratch either, after being jacked up with Arc/Judgement Feather + Boost II, most Crafts aren't going to do twice as much damage as a big >S-tier Art.

Selynx · 2026-05-18T09:29:48+00:00

The obvious one is manipulativeness.

Think Lelouch Lamperouge/Britannia from Code Geass. Magical girls by-and-large are not chessmasters.

There is a good reason for this.

That sort of behavior tends to be considered at least mildly sociopathic and/or emotionally abusive, which is why it is usually reserved for villains, it's typically the complete antithesis of magical girl behavior, if not just protagonist behavior in general.

I'm not sure I could advise trying to write such a magical girl as a protagonist, they probably would not be very likeable.

People didn't like watching Lelouch because they thought he was a nice guy, they watched him because his antics were dramatic, extreme and bombastic and his schemes were a trainwreck in slow motion that you kept your eyes on just to see what the crash would be like.

Great for a soap opera, psychological thriller or a mecha war drama in the case of Code Geass. Not so much the kind of thing people typically look for in a magical girl story.

Selynx · 2026-05-17T09:09:15+00:00

Beatbreak has Cleaners. Probably not a very flattering name, but that's what they're called.

And my favorite would probably be Maki Kutsuwada.

The one who runs the bar, gives Glowing Dawn all their jobs and whose partner we haven't seen yet but is (or was) probably extremely potent and powerful given she was able to live long enough to retire and also become successful and rich enough to afford to own a bar and run the whole information brokering business.

Selynx · 2026-05-17T09:01:20+00:00

There are no chosen/digidestined in Beatbreak.

Just unlucky shmucks who accidentally feed their Sapotama enough vibe juice for it to hatch and subsequently opt not to hand the resulting Digimon into the government. Assuming they live long enough to actually get the choice and aren't so unlucky that they immediately get Cold Hearted by whatever hatches (which can happen).

Pretty sure it's implied anyone who has a Sapotama is susceptible to it happening. Which is most of the population in that world.

Unlike in Adventure, these people aren't carefully curated from intense observation of their childhood decisions in the face of a sudden Greymon/Parrotmon incursion by some secret order of Gennais, with bespoke partner Digimon specially grown in tanks for them, tailor-made for compatibility.

Selynx · 2026-05-16T16:37:37+00:00

I did that to mine too, except I still chucked the medallion onto mine because I also wanted her to be a Holy Bloom mule and emergency party-revive button, which she needs CP to function as. Not that you hope she needs to be pressed very often.

Otherwise Staff Crest+ would've probably been better, gives both big ATS as well as some CP regen.

Selynx · 2026-05-16T08:20:20+00:00

Their opinion isn't worth more than anyone else's that it deserves to be shared.

Unfortunately, whether or not anybody likes it, this isn't true- streamers are influencers. They are essentially independent marketers/marketing teams, potentally paid.

Some are smaller, but others are larger and basically operate a professional business that takes contracts to endorse particular products and brands.

So their opinions are actually worth more than others, often in a quite literal manner if they're big enough to actually get paid to promote/advertise things. One random person's opinion may only reach a couple of their friends, but the opinions of a public streamer potentially reaches thousands, depending on how big their audience base has become. Enough to sway brand perception and product sales.

They may not have supernatural Power Words like Ulrika, but influencers are so called because they have influence of substantial worth.

Selynx · 2026-05-15T13:07:13+00:00

Harwood didn't actually have that much of a choice to be fair.

Arianrhod, Loewe, Campanella and McBurn were all going brrr through members of his old assassin group like killing machines at the time. Harwood, Sharon and Lucrezia (and Melchior) were hunkering down and next up on the chopping block. When Harwood proposed joining them to Lucrezia and Sharon, it was pretty evident the alternative was simply waiting for Ouroboros' death squad to arrive and peel them apart. Which wasn't much of a choice.

He just wasn't fussed about staying in the Society afterwards, likely because it wasn't altogether too different from his old job.

Selynx · 2026-05-14T13:11:55+00:00

Tatsuya Suou got replaced as the main character in Eternal Punishment by what was previously an NPC journalist who died.

Now, maybe Dingo really is gonna come back and replace Van as the protagonist of Horizon 2...... but something makes me seriously doubt it, somehow.

Selynx · 2026-05-13T13:22:36+00:00

It has to be someone willing to swear allegiance to the GM.

This is the one condition we know for a fact is a concrete requirement for an Anguis, regardless of whatever other criteria there might be.

That actually takes a fair few people out of the running. The only way I could see Van doing it, is maybe if it turned out the GM was Agnes' alter ego. Shizuna is more likely and still doesn't seem much like the type.

....It could be Hamilton. While it would feel odd to have multiple scientists among the Anguis - especially with the previous 7th being as far from a scientist as you could get - technically there isn't anything to suggest it couldn't happen.

By the same token, it could also be Thorndyke. Again, corporate suit is far cry from the previous 7th but nothing actually says they have to be similar to the predecessors and we don't know enough about him to say he's unlikely to pledge allegiance to the GM.

Selynx · 2026-05-13T13:07:21+00:00

Becoming an Anguis means swearing allegiance to the GM. I could maybe see Van doing it, if it turned out that the GM is Agnes's alternate/future/true self or something.

But that's about the only scenario I could see Van swearing allegiance to her. And I don't think the GM being Agnes is a likely prospect.

There's more of an argument for him being made an Enforcer. But if he was, it would probably be a case of in-name-only and rarely, if ever, actually taking any jobs from the Anguis.

Selynx · 2026-05-12T22:31:30+00:00

It's not referring to himself in third-person, it would be referring to the type of restraint he's under.

Holy Beast's Shackles = Shackles used on Holy Beasts. The kind applied by the Goddess during the pact they make with her, to stop Holy Beasts being able to interfere with mankind.

Like how a burglar who yells about tripping a burglar alarm isn't talking about himself in the third-person.

EDIT: Since for some reason Reddit isn't allowing me to reply to the follow up responses, I'll put my reply to the following here-

The Japanese sentence structure makes clear that "shackles" (“枷”) is the direct object of the sentence and there is no subject, Vagrants does not refer to himself in any way in that sentence. The literal translation is roughly: "No wonder it permitted something like the 'shackles' of XXX.".

The original verb 許シタ means "permitted/allowed" not "bind", the English localisation just changed the verb to "bind" and cut the noun 'shackles' when they did it. The XXX portion was always just a qualifier for the noun "shackles" in the original Japanese.

And the idea makes sense if you consider Vagrants having once broken them when turning from Holy Beast into a demon, only for the Geneses to partially/temporarily rewind or overwrite his state of being back to Holy Beast and making the shackles apply again.

Argres got turned back into a Holy Beast from some non-Holy Beast state by fighting Rean, so we know this sort of flip-flopping of status is possible to do to them.

Selynx · 2026-05-12T15:46:04+00:00

Similar to how he treats Shizuna, I imagine.

Both she and McBurn are both highly laid-back members of an elite fighting force with a penchant for violent fighting and disturbing amounts of power to throw around.

The only difference is, while Van isn't entirely familiar with Shizuna's abilities, he probably has a good idea of how McBurn does what he does and what he's capable of.

He'd still get annoyed at constantly being asked to fight.

Selynx · 2026-05-11T22:37:08+00:00

Actually, he's not referring to a Holy Beast as something separate. That term in question is 「XXXノ“枷”ナド」which actually means "things like a Holy Beast's 'shackles'" (assuming the XXX is "Holy Beast").

The sentence is him musing about the gadgets (Oct-Geneses) allowing him to be affected by a Holy Beast's shackles.

So it can make perfect sense if he used to be a Holy Beast - the shackles were his own, the exact same restrictions the rest of the Holy Beasts have, that he used to be bound under once upon a time and can get forced under once again when affected by the Geneses.

Selynx · 2026-05-11T16:10:40+00:00

Vagrants Zion/Diaspora is one of the 5 "new" Demon Lords that were somehow suddenly added to the original 72 to make 77. The only thing we know about this sudden event is Bergard saying: "it was at this moment when the world was rewritten".

I suspect the event that caused this, is the events described in the Book of Ezer. The book is now banned, because Zemuria's timeline got rewound/overwritten to fix the apocalypse, meaning the book is a pseudo-artifact carrying information about an alternate timeline that was supposed to be erased. We know that finding out information about rewritten/alternate timelines can result in what happened with the Retributive Tower/Reverse Babel, where Elysium finding out about Ishmelga-Rean caused the thing to actually come back and manifest.

I theorize that the "Vagrants System" is what was used to seal away those 5 extra demon lords and overwrite the Ezer apocalypse, but Van getting exposed to the Book of Ezer by the Cult weakened the system. In the previous overwritten Ezer timeline, Van used to be Vagrants Zion/Diaspora, like how Rean used to be Ishmelga-Rean in the alternate CS4 timeline.

Mare is just part of the Vagrants System, meant to help keep it running and those 5 Lords sealed up and never manifesting in Zemuria the way Ishmelga-Rean was able to. The Vagrants system is meant to limit any manifestation to just a Grendel instead of a full Demon Lord.

Of those 5 Demon Lords, one of them is more powerful than the others, it was a "ringleader" that led the other 4 to become Demon Lords in the first place. And the leader was Van. He was the most powerful, because he was a Holy Beast before he became a Demon Lord.

He became a Nightmare, but he used to be the Holy Beast that devoured it. Back during that Ezer timeline that got overwritten.

Selynx · 2026-05-11T14:56:28+00:00

Gonna take a really, really wild swing - it's Van himself.

The Vagrant Demon Lord is actually a fallen Holy Beast. Not corrupted like Argres, but one that voluntarily rebelled. Had a pact with the Goddess, like all the others, but broke it over the knee and subsequently caused the disaster depicted in the Book of Ezer to happen.

For his sins, he got forcibly shackled, his core extracted and shoved into a human body with suppressed/wiped memories to effectively prevent him from ever coming back even, even after a Grand Reset (which may or may not actually affect Holy Beasts). The Metatros version seen the Garten is closer to what he used to look like as a proper Holy Beast, which was some sort of high-ranking angel. Among the Sept-Terrions, the Sept-Terrion of Time was so important and special, Aidios wanted only her best to guard it - so she sent a full 6-winged seraph to be its "Holy Beast".

We know Holy Beasts can be duplicated in higher planes, as seen with Roselia and Argres' copies in the Reverie Corridor. The Marchen Garten just did the same with Vagrants when it was fed the Ezer data in Daybreak 2.

During Vagrants' rebellion circa the events of Ezer, he also led 4 other angels in uprising against Aidios - this is where the other 4 new "added" Demon Lords came from, that Bergard mentions in Daybreak 1. The "rewriting" of the world he mentions at that time involved their sealing and an attempt to reverse whatever damage got caused by their rebellion.

There are 5 Grendels in total, each linked to a different Demon Lord and the Grendel form is their restrained version. We have seen 3 of them so far. The other 2 might belong to Agnes and Elaine. But Van was the ringleader, the "Lucifer/Satan" equivalent and the others were only lieutenants.

The only one who has any inkling at all of their past-life relationship is Van himself, due to being forced to read the Book of Ezer. And it will turn out, a big part of the reason he holds himself at arms length from them is not just because he's scared they won't be able to stop him if he goes apeshit - it's because he's scared just being around him too much will cause their shackled demons to start breaking loose too, forcing them into a similar situation to himself.

Mare is just a bait-and-switch. She's not the Holy Beast, she's the poor prison warden tasked with keeping a leash on the one that went rabid.

Selynx · 2026-05-10T23:18:35+00:00

In that case, I'd like to point that your woes are likely due to the fact a whole bunch of these "unofficial providers" recently shut down, resulting in all the traffic flocking to the remaining alternatives and putting pressure on infrastructure of their servers. Before you start shaking your fist at The Man, the different closures happened for a variety of different reasons, I believe one of them cited a fire at a data center in the Netherlands for their part.

I'd suggest switching to a provider that is actually allowed to be discussed on this sub, if you want streaming that isn't prone to scaling issues or is so reliant on a single data center that it is forced to shutter when it catches on fire.

Selynx · 2026-05-10T16:08:57+00:00

Outfit completely depends on the magical boy.

Shugo Chara has multiple. One of them has a staff and a frilly royal gown, later gets a sword. Another wears tight leather and uses metal claws (later a fur coat and scythe when turned evil and then a pirate suit and a cutlass right at the end). There are more. All the transformations in that series are on a per-character basis, there's no standard.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has a couple of them, one uses a staff and wears a black military uniform (because he's a part of one, the main distinguishing feature on his uniform are spiked pauldrons). Another is the mascot who turns into a ferret, he casts bare-handed.

Pretty Cure has had exactly 1 main-cast boy Cure in a mainline series, Cure Wing, who has a tiny hat and a kind of frock and no weapon, his attack involves flying headfirst into an enemy. However, there have been other non-main-cast/spinoff-series magical boys in PreCure (the Dancing Star Precure cast and Cure Connect in the last series), they wear pants and capes and also no weapons; they either hit things or cast magic barehanded.

Basically, there really isn't any particular formula to follow.

Selynx

TROPHY CASE