In a world where outbreaks of dangerous creatures known as "Kaii" have become commonplace, society has had to adjust. Kaii incidents are now dealt with by companies that deploy Magical Girls— working women equipped with hi-tech brooms to fly around town and spells coming from state-of-the-art software that can be cast by wands. As the number of Kaii incidents have surged, so have the number of magical girl corporations, and the position of "magical girl" is now a highly sought after career.
Kana Sakuragi is a recent college graduate with excellent memory that has been having a hard time job-hunting. When she's caught in the middle of a Kaii incident during an interview, she meets Hitomi Koshigaya, a hot-blooded Magical Girl sent there to neutralize the Kaii. Seeing Kana's immense skill in dealing with the software involved in being a Magical Girl, Kana is immediately recruited to join her in a Magical Girl start-up, Magilumiere. Despite the eccentricity of the company, like the nervous engineer and the cross-dressing Magical Girl fanboy company president, Kana finds herself both intrigued and out of options, prompting her to join the company as a newbie Magical Girl.
Magilumiere Co. Ltd. (株式会社マジルミエ, "Kabushikigaisha Magi-Lumière", lit. "Magi-Lumière Corporation") is a Magical Girl manga with art by Yuu Aoki and story by Sekka Iwata. The manga began serialization in Shonen Jump+ in October 2021. It can be read in English on Mangaplus. An anime adaptation made as a collaboration between Moe and J.C. Staff has been greenlit for October 2024. See the teaser PV here.
Tropes
- The Bad Guy Wins: The first part of the series ends with the Deregulation Faction managing to perform a False Flag Operation on Magilumiere, causing the company to go under and all members scatter to the winds while they get free reign to push for magic deregulation laws.
- Character Catchphrase: Koshigaya tends to hype herself and Sakuragi up with the phrase, "This'll be a clean sweep!" when they have the tools at hand to take down the latest Kaii.
- Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: In addition to exterminating Kaii, the magical girls of the setting are each tied to their respective companies. When they aren't fighting monsters, they can be found making public promotional appearances and sponsoring their company's products. For instance, Miyakado sells makeup for magical girls that won't smudge or smear even when flying at 40 km/h.
- Disastrous Demonstration: One exhibition at EXPO wanted to showcase a new extermination method on a live Kaii. Due to higher presence of magical energy, it mutates on stage and Magilumere get to resolve the emergency.
- Dual Wielding: Makino's "Fallen Petal Flash" allows her to transform the rose-ribbons on her waist into twin swords.
- Everything's Better with Sparkles: Actually invoked: because Transformation Sequences are created and customized by engineers, any sparkles in a transformation sequence are there by the engineer's choice.Nikoyama: [in Tears of Joy at seeing Sakuragi's first transformation] It was worth putting in the elaborate effects...
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: Kaii are masses of dark mass and sometimes other things including concrete, ice, and wood with many eyes sprouting all over their bodies.
- Fantastic Science: Some companies specialize in studying captured Kaii in order to figure out how mutant variants work and develop more effective spells against them. RIMT in particular has discovered a new variant of Kaii that can grow mouths to devour any magic thrown at it.
- Frame-Up: Not long after Magilumiere defeats the mutant Kaii at Tokyo Bay, Kamakura is able to have their entire company shut down by fabricating evidence that falsely accuses them for illegally raising mutant Kaii in order to take credit for exterminating them.
- Gender-Restricted Ability: Played with; Though females are the ones who become magical girls, it is mentioned in chaper 17 that males also can use magic but currently don't because of Power Incontinence where they release too much magical power and there is no tech that can allow them to at the present.
- Geometric Magic: The Magitek of the world of Magilumiere is deployed in "summoning circles", pre-written computer code that manipulates magical energy in preset patterns to attack and destroy Kaii. These naturally take the form of large arrays of Instant Runes each designed for a specific purpose.
- Hero Insurance: Insurance against Kaii is a commonplace for the industry and is meant to cover the damages caused to buildings.
- I Have No Daughter!: Koshigaya's father has cut ties with her and no longer wants to have any connection with her after she entered the magical girl industry.
- Internal Reformist: Shigemoto is trying to change the status quo by proposing the Alice System, as other companies consider the basic concept of minimizing collateral damage a waste of profits and don't care that Kaii get stronger from leftover magic.
- Lensman Arms Race: Kaii are slowly growing stronger over the course of the story because of the increasing proliferation of magical energy. This requires magical girls to use more magical energy to defeat them, which in turn causes the Kaii to mutate and grow even stronger to compensate. Shigemoto explicitly designed the Alice System to exterminate Kaii with the minimum amount of energy required while opposing the deregulation of magical energy out of fear that the Kaii will become too powerful for magical girls to contain.
- Magical Girl: Magilumiere presents a unique take on the Magical Girl— the series takes place in a world where outbreaks of dangerous creatures known as Kaii have become a common phenomenon, and companies employ working women as "magical girls" to wield Magitek to take them out. There's plenty of the usual Magical Girl tropes and flashy fights, with the catch that position of "magical girl" is treated mostly like an average career, meaning that it has its own set of workplace politics and conflicts on top of all that.
- Magical Girl Warrior: Kaii incidents are referred to as "exterminations" but are essentially Magical Girl fights.
- Magic Wand: Magical Girls in the world of Magilumiere wield magic through wands. However, they can take the shape of any object to fit with the magical girl's costume. (For example, it can be a sword, or a pen.)
- Magitek: The force that magical girls wield to defeat Kaii is called "magic" and certainly looks like what we would call "magic," but it's actually treated like a science In-Universe, developed by engineers the way any ordinary technology would be. Akasaka explains in Chapter 38 how that technology involves harnessing a nutrient called "magitosin," which in layman's terms is magical power. Most magical girls deploy magic via "spells" that are pre-programmed into their wands, but Magilumiere takes a unique approach by having their magical girls work with engineers in real-time in order to produce spells that are best suited to deal with whatever situation they're currently facing.
- Monster Protection Racket: The main goal of the Deregulation Faction isn't simply to avoid expenses at safety procedures, they have been researching man-controlled Kaii to gain profit from extermination and restoration of the incidents they've created.
- Plot Tailored to the Party: Invoked. The Magilumiere specialty involves being capable of assessing a situation and deploy the exact kind of magic to solve a problem with minimal to no side-effects. For example, they're capable of destroying a breakout of Kaii in an old neighborhood without damaging the buildings the way that another company would with the use of a large scale spell circle.
- Photographic Memory: Main character Kana Sakuragi has an amazing level of recall, demonstrated at the start of the series by repeating the last 3 orders she heard while waiting in line at the coffee shop after the shop's computers went down. When Kana joins Magilumiere Co. Ltd. and becomes a Magical Girl, the inventor who makes her and her partner's brooms creates one with a vast number of features and gives her an enormous manual to read explaining them. Kana does, and almost immediately makes effective use of some of them on her next mission.
- Powers as Programs: The spells generated by the magical girls are programmed in-house by the company before being uploaded into their wands and brooms. Complex spell parameters, such as frequency, power and direction, need to be customized and updated remotely with the help of skilled engineers.
- Putting the Band Back Together: Part 2 opens with the premise of Magilumiere Inc. having forced to close for a while and Kana's determination to get everyone back to work.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Koshigaya's father is one of the heads of the magic deregulation political faction pushing for the removal of limits on magic engineering. While he's a stick in the mud and disowned his own daughter for defying his wishes, he's furious when he realizes that Tsutsumi rigged a test against Magilumiere Co. Ltd.'s demonstration of the Alice System by empowering an already nigh-unkillable Group C Kaii. He then declares that he has a responsibility to be an impartial arbitrator and that his daughter has nothing to do with his work or his judgments. He then sees Tsutsumi removed from his position for his highly dangerous and corrupt actions.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Once a Kaii's health is low enough, a magical girl can use a spell that sucks it inside a small flash drive where it can no longer wreak any havoc.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Magilumiere's idealistic approach to handling Kaii outbreaks involves surveying the area and coming up with an extermination method tailor made to be as magic efficient and inflict as little collateral damage as possible. This clashes with the cynical modus operandi of most corporations in the series, who believe this method is a waste of time and prefer to blast the kaii (and often its surroundings) with as much magic as possible in order to process more requests per day and generate maximum profit. President Shigemoto's goal is to prove to the world that Magilumiere's careful but considerate way of doing things has merit in this industry. Unfortunately, he fails.
- Technobabble: A long string of technical jargon that vaguely describes a spell's specs and function is chanted while setting up and firing each magic circle. The jargon becomes more intense whenever Nikoyama and Shigemoto discuss in-depth magic circle theory and programing, leaving the rest of the cast in a state of confusion.
- Time Skip: There is a one year time skip between Act One and Act Two (chapter 77 and 78).
- Transformation Sequence: Magical Girls change clothes through these. Interestingly, each company has their own method, which often translates to the company's own aesthetic and mission. Magilumiere girls have a simple transformation sequence, Lily recites a few poetic verses to a key to transform, RIMT's Akasaka summons a form she signs to transform, and so on.
- Weak, but Skilled: Most extermination companies work on "bigger Kaii require bigger explosions" principle and are good at what they advertise. Magilumere's magical girls come up with the right approach for each Kaii on case by case basis, and while they are more efficient at it, they are notably slower and struggle to take down a Kaii solo.
