Okay real talk: For all you Little Witch Academia fans out there I actually havent watched the TV series for that yet. Ive seen the first OVA but thats about it. Dont worry I plan on remedying that as I just watched the first two episodes of LWA on Netflix with intent to watch the rest. Its kinda surprising I havent gotten around to watching that as Ive seen and read plenty of other cute witch themed media such as The Owl House Flying Witch Mahou Tsukai Precure Kikis Delivery Service Both book and anime Witch Hat Atelier Majo to Neko no Hanashi and as of recently Eden of Witches. Which reminds me I should also finish watching the Netflix version of The Worst Witch. But why are we talking about witches? Well today I finished another witchthemed manga series called A Witchs Love At The End Of The World. How did I like it? Its...alright. I really wish I enjoyed this more which is a shame because it has some neat ideas and a very ambitious story but this is one of those series where its short length and a lack of time to flesh everything out resulted in it being unable to carry the weight of its premise. In a world where sorcery is real witches were persecuted for years by frightened humans until the eighteenth century. In a bid to survive witches pledged themselves to the rulers of their countries and in time all countries would come to have their own witches working in the shadows. Now in the present day when the strength of a witch determines the strength of her country humanity seeks stronger and stronger witches even establishing a school to train aspiring witchesall while oblivious to the seeds of resentment and revenge that lives on in the heart of every single witch. At Sternenlichtl a prestigious school where witches learn their craft Alice Keating is the brightest girl in her year and the descendent of the schools founder. Her world is turned upside down when she is assigned to be the tutor to Mari Muguruma a strange girl who seems out of place among the other witches. As the two grow closer they also begin to learn the secrets of their respective worlds. For the sake of brevity Im just going to shorten its title to Witchs Love. If theres one word I can use to describe Witchs Love its ambitious. Seriously in just three volumes Witchs Love goes from being a sliceoflife yuri series in a magic school to discovering a centuries long elaborate plot to destroy all of humanity and trying to stop it wasting absolutely no time in getting its plot rolling and committing to it. I actually liked the overall story and how the various characters play into it as Witchs Love has a lot of neat ideas like witches raising their pupils to focus only on revenge discarding feelings like love and genuine compassion for their cause and how falling in love causes a witch to lose their magic. Those are really interesting though the series doesnt really flesh them out much other than a few brief reveals at the end. If Witchs Love was longer it would have had much more room to explore those ideas and the history behind why Sternenlitchtl enforces them with an iron fist. Yeah lets not waste any time. Witchs Love could have been something amazing but all of its flaws are due to it being only three volumes long. This results in a lot of things being really rushed such as character development pacing and worldbuilding. A lot of the storys lore is just sort of exposition dumped in sporadic intervals rather than being shown more organically kind of like how The Heike Story as a result of only being 11 episodes long was made to truncate a lot of events from the novel and have a bunch of characters infodump their backstories and activities to get to the important stuff faster. As a result of trying to rush through its story the characters and what development they get feel very halfbaked. Plus a good chunk of the story is supposed to be romance between Alice and Mari but the way the story presents said romance feels extremely shallow in that the scenes that are supposed to establish their budding romance come off less like the characters are genuinely growing closer and more like theyre only interacting because the author made them do so. It doesnt help that for a series that proclaims to be a yuri romance theres nothing to really indicate that theyre even falling in love beyond hand holding and admiration not to mention they dont even kiss or act like a couple so I question why this even needed to be a romance at all. Actually the cast of characters besides one also suffer from the books short length as again even their development is rushed resulting in them coming off as bland and cliche. Alice is the stoic ace who becomes nicer thanks to Mari the clumsy yet bewildered problem child and so on. Alices girl posse is just there to take up space and while I actually do like what they did with Miriam at first she gets a rather unceremonious end and not much beyond her role in the plot. Plus the series makes this huge deal about Maris mother being important to the plot but said character only appears in two scenes and has absolutely no impact on the story itself so why bother making her important if youre not even going to do anything with her? The only character who is actually somewhat interesting is Madam Dolly the headmistress of Sternenlichtl and her spotlight chapter is the only one that doesnt feel like its expected to finish everything under a tight deadline. Its a shame because again had Witchs Love been given more time the author could have fleshed out her characters even more and maybe have them relax a bit rather than have the whole story feel like its being resolved 25 chapters earlier than it should. Which is weird because the author notes in one of the volumes that Witchs Love was originally going to be just two volumes but was expanded to three. Yeah this really should have been way longer. As for the art...its okay. Im not familiar with Kujira as an artist but from what I can see her artwork is serviceable if a tad underwhelming. There arent much in the way of backgrounds but I did like the character designs with the exception of Alices reverse mullet that makes her look like someone chopped the back of her hair off. But having been spoiled by the likes of Witch Hat Atelier and Eden of Witches the lack of attention to detail in everything from the art to the setting is just yet another example of how bumrushed Witchs Love feels. Its a serviceable story and I would very much like to see it be expanded on in every way because there is potential for something great here. Sadly A Witchs Love At The End of the World is both too short to carry the weight of its material and crippled by its own ambition. Seriously it feels like a series that got cancelled even though its technically complete. If you want a short read that you dont need to think too hard about Witchs Love wont be a waste of your time but plenty of other witch series exist that manage to do everything that Witchs Love didnt have the time to do.