@plastikrappavevo4786

1 year ago

I still think one of my favorite magic systems comes from Black Clover. Not because its something completely unique, but because of how each mage uses their magic and how that avoids definitive powerscaling.

Despite the world being entirely based around magic, the pure power of a person's magic is rarely whats being focused on. Instead, fights usually come down to pure strategy. They're never about magic itself, rather, how each character uses their magic to give themselves the advantage. A character can beat someone who is completely out of their league using superior strategy, even if the power differential is miles away (if you've read the manga you know exactly what I'm talking about.) It makes fights incredibly interesting, because even if one side of a conflict is definitively weaker, they can still gain an upper hand in combat with the tactics they employ. In fact, a vast majority of the time, the protagonists are weaker than the villains they're fighting, and they have to win by using their minds rather than just brute force.

This also allows the series to have some of my favorite team based fights. In a lot of shonen, team battles just kind of turn out as "they're all doing their own thing... but at the same time." Instead, Black Clover uses its style of magic to make incredibly strategic team battles where each player is doing their part to help the others. These battles allow them to feel like real teams because they're actually helping each other, and using each of their abilities where they're most needed. The series is aware of this too, as it consistently mentions compatibility with your enemy as well as your teammates as a major factor to battles. In a lot of situations, this makes the support mages way more important than the actual attack oriented mages, as they sway the tide of battle for the attackers in ways that could never have been done without them. Without proper teamwork, every major character would have been dead by the 4th arc, without a doubt.

Black Clover may be about magic, but it doesn't rely on magic entirely, and instead uses it as a tool to aid in fights. That's what makes it so interesting despite its very basic execution for a magic system.

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