Recap:  The party venture forth into the Dungeon and meet its Djinn, Zagan. Unfortunately, he’s not a very good host.

Dragonzigg’s Thoughts: What an incredibly strange episode. Magi has always made a habit of switching rapidly between tones, something that has helped and hindered it on different occasions, but this one really takes the cake.  It can’t decide whether it wants to be serious, silly or surreal and settles for all of them at once, creating severe mood whiplash which impacts its ability to be meaningful when it matters.

The clear focus of the episode is to try and build up both Hakuryu as a character and his relationship to the other memebers of the party. Unfortunately, the way it achieves this is by contrasting how raw and inexperienced he is with how awesome and badass the others are. There’s a noble intent there – to show that Hakuryu has no experience in battles like this and to demonstrate how powerful Aladdin, Alibaba and Morgiana have become over the course of their journey.

The issue is that it just makes him look utterly useless and incompetent instead, constantly having to be bailed out of sticky situations (mostly by Morgiana). The problem is compounded by the decision to reduce his big emotional moment to a dumb punchline instead, a baffling decision that completely fizzles out any chance this character arc had of being effective.  Right after that, they sudden try and swing it back round to being serious again, and the jarring shift in tone just makes it even more difficult to take the whole thing seriously. I do hope this wasn’t meant to be Hakuryu’s big focus episode, because I din’t learn much from it.

Luckily, there’s still a lot to like in this episode, mostly down to the fantastically all over the place art design. If the first dungeon we saw was very much in the classical fantasy mould, this one goes full on Lewis Caroll with talking plants, bizarre creature designs and fantastic colours splashed liberally everywhere.  I’m a big fan of slightly more colourful, surrealistic art and that certainly gets bought out here, adding another new style to Magi‘s growing repertoire.  I’m also intrigued by the presence of Zagan. A malicious djinn is not something we’ve seen before, and his life draining plants add a touch of ghoulish horror which works very well to add a darker edge to the candy coloured playground.  There’s also some decent action in this episode which helps make it watchable – as ever Morgiana provides the highlight with her golem bowling shenanigans.

Ultimately this was a pretty disposable episode of Magi, but like all the best shows there was still enough in there to make it an enjoyable romp, even if it’s definitely a case of style over substance this week. Hopefully Hakuryu will have opportunities in the future to deepen his character and make up for the ground lost here.