The Rental Magica: DVD Collection 2 - Litebox set continues the story of the magic rental company Astral and its rival company, Goetia (well, less of a rival these days, but moving on). The DVD continues the Fehde or magical duel between Judaix and Itsuki, which also holds Honami’s fate in the balance. It’s still cool to see so many different cultures and customs represented through their "magics" in this series, and you get to see even more in this last half of the season. There’s more Solomon magic (Adelicia’s magical school), more Celtic magic lore, and a buddhist Monk named Sekiren, to name a few of things you’ll see. Ok, one more thing, I can’t be all that mad at a series that ends with a magical lesbian wedding. Yes, they even mention a magical society in San Francisco. For real.

Those might be the highlights, but this series doesn’t have too many of them. At this point, you’d expect the characters to deepen a bit, but I’m really not seeing it. All I see are anime tropes and stereotypes that everyone seems to fall into perfectly. Itsuki is the super-sweet, wholesome guy that always does the right thing. Ren is the classic unflappable character that always smiles, never opening his eyes. He’s also covered in cats, which fills the show’s adorable animal quota. You get the idea. Sure, you see more of the background of some characters, and it might just be me, but it never seems to mean anything or change anyone.

I can say in this show’s favor, at least it never veers to the uncomfortable side. There’s no weird sexualization or harem situations. Well, not too much of a harem situation, anyway. Ok, and not too much sexualization (hey, this series does have the requisite beach episode), but at least not the weird kind, you know? It always manages to stay pretty tame and wholesome as far as anime goes. But that’s also its weakness. It just stays on the very predictable, trope-filled path that so many animes before it followed.

At this point, I’ve realized something unfortunate. While this and the previous collection set have claimed to give you 12 episodes each, there is one episode that repeats. I guess this is because the broadcast order and the chronological order make it overlap this way. The episode in question is the trope-filled Christmas episode, so I wasn’t too thrilled to have that on repeat. But yes, there are only 23 episodes in total in this series, so when the two sets claim to have 12 episodes each, something’s got to be up. No biggie when you have these short, single season series, but still something to consider.

Ok, maybe I’m a jaded anime fan. Maybe I just think I’ve seen it all. But you can judge for yourself since the series is on Hulu.com right now. Again, there’s no English dub for this series: it’s Japanese audio with English subtitles only. The special features again are simply commercials, trailers, and clean openings and closings. I don’t count the advertisements as really great special features, if I count them at all, and clean opening and closings probably only concern fans looking for screencaps. Overall, this is a pretty basic offering of the second half of this season on DVD. It’s pretty basic anime too.