Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku Vol 1 - Snow White! Ripple! That was surprising.

Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku (Magical Girl Raising Project) is a light novel written by Asari Endou and illustrated by maruino that is ongoing with 18 volumes released since 2012. I started this novel without any prior knowledge of it (didn't even knew that there was an anime or that this was translated in english too) just today and I was seriously surprised.

The moment the volume started and the premise is explained, I was already doubtful about it. An online mobile game without any sort of pay for win mechanic?! It has to be something developed by someone who want to do some evil through it. It wouldn't make sense otherwise.

Snow white, the least likely girl to participate in a battle royale between magical girls.

Ripple's design was great and I quite liked the story narrated from her point of view too.

The story follows 16 girls as they are transformed into magical girl by a mysterious mascot character called "Fav" and introduced to a world of adventure and magic. They can use their power to help people and get candies. Magical isn't it? Issue is, after the grace period, Fav tells the girls that they need to reduce the number of magical girls to 8 and the other 8 will die one by one every week until the number is reached by selecting the one with the least amount of candies.

This would already raise some eyebrow, but as with all these "battle royale" games, the stakes are increased with each turn. Fav then start introducing helpful functionalities like "you can gift some candies to who you want through your terminal" which then raise the obvious "maybe we should steal the terminal of someone else?" in the girls. 

That then develop into further madness as the girls realize that they can just "kill" the opposition and skip the risk of being selected for being the lowest ranking girl. And yeah, eventually the number dwindle, the rule change again and so on and so on until at the end we're left with just a few girls.

She's kind of gloom looking, but it does give that 'pre-transformation' magical girl look

You wouldn't expect this glamorous girl to be actually that in real life wouldn't you?

The characters are all well defined and unique enough that you won't mistake one girl for another. The costumes have been designed by the girls themselves while playing the mobile game and we have an incredible variety, between knights, ninja, swimsuits, nuns and other completely unique styles.

My favorite is definitely Ripple, aside from her style being great (she's the ninja magical girl), I also liked the whole backstory and the close friendship she got with Top Speed. Apparently she's still present in the future volumes so that's something to look forward to for me.

Overall I think I enjoyed the first volume of Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku, but it was quite an heavy read mentally and I'm not sure I'd be able to read two of them back to back. I'll probably switch to a lighter read before going for another volume in the future.

Going away, but we'll meet again and I wonder what will happen next. I'm curious...

Ruler's character was doomed from the start, those usually don't last long in battle.

Apparently there's an anime coming in Q4 2026 adapting volume 2 and 3 of the light novel and I'm curious if I should wait for that before continuing with the series so that I can cover it week by week with the whole "surprise not knowing what's coming my way". I feel it's the only way I'd enjoy such a series anyway.