Manga Adaptation by Bibury Animation Studios
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Young witch Nico was separated from her precious oni childhood friend Morihito when she went off to magic school. Now that they’re teens, they must live together as master and familiar and deal with wacky magic-based hijinks.

Iro’s verdict: You See It Is A Pun Because Witch And Watch Are One Letter Apart

We have spoken before on adaptations, and this is a particularly good example of how an anime mindlessly adhering 1:1 to the manga is a bad idea. Pretty much every single gag – and there are a lot, since this is ostensibly a comedy series – is immediately followed up with a line explaining what the joke was. I might have laughed at some of them! But I sure won’t if they’re going to cut me off by calling attention to it every fucking time!! It sucks!!!

Zigg’s verdict: Which Watch? Not This One

Every season I feel like the by-the-numbers Weekly Shonen Jump adaptation cannot become any more cliched, and every season I’m reliably proved wrong. Witch Watch has it all – a childhood friend who moved away and is coming back, two teens living in a house together, a parade of incredibly unfunny jokes which the show nevertheless laboriously explains, removing any possible amusement, and an insanely powerful protagonist who is nevertheless fettered in some convenient way that also lets him play the lovable underdog. The result is just another interchangeable blob of anime that’s agressively average. You could easily do worse but you could also do a hell of a lot better. Too bad the entire show isn’t styled like the fantastic OP, which has more bounce and joie de vivre in 90 seconds than the other 22 minutes of the episode.