Academy City… is a place to be yourself!
— Misaka

Toaru Kagaku no Railgun, also known as A Certain Scientific Railgun is a side-story of the previous series Toaru Majutsu no Index(a.k.a A Certain Magical Index), and focuses on Misaka and Shirai rather than Touma and Index. Anyone who has seen Index knows who these two are. Misaka, the Level 5 Esper with the ability to control electric and magnetic fields, and her roommate Shirai, who is the Lesbian Stalker character of the series. The initial idea is quite good: Take two of the best characters out of Toaru Majutsu no Index, and make a side-story revolving around them. Sadly, the execution isn’t nearly as good as the concept. The animation holds the same high standard as Index, so does the Voice Acting and the Sci-Fi theme. The Scenario doesn’t, however. A lot of the episodes are fillers, and the story progresses too slowly, taking a bit too many side-tracks. Like Ace Detective Conan(a.k.a Case Closed in some localities for seemingly no reason) most of these side-tracks are later reused, but the large amount of fillers makes the story a bit hard to follow. There are two new main characters, Uiharu and Saten, too. Uiharu works as Shirai’s backup/computer support at Judgement, and Saten is Uiharu’s friend who is also a fan of Misaka. While Uiharu is cute and has a lot of character, Saten only seems to cause trouble, get in trouble, stick someone else in trouble and flip Uiharu’s skirt to such an extent that Uiharu actually catches a cold because of it. I’m not sure why Uiharu still counts her as her friend, as Saten never seems to do anything back for Uiharu. The main characters of Toaru Majutsu no Index, Touma and Index, appears, but only briefly, though Touma appears briefly in the first OP theme. Touma saves Uiharu and Misaka from a Graviton explosion in one episode, is in a heavily altered version of the first scene of Index, tries to help Harumi find her car(which she forgot where she parked, and could only remember there was a traffic light nearby…) and almost gets beaten by Misaka with a chair in one scene. Index appears only once, when she almost breaks a cleaning robot that apparently stole her Donut, and appears along with Touma about one second in the final episode.

Oddly for a side-story centering about Misaka, the MISAKA clones and the Level 5 Esper Accelerator never appears. And that’s just one of the unexplained events here. Something that is good is that it gives several other characters(such as Konori in Judgement) gets more backstory, while some other characters gets more personality outside of the story(like Komoe and the Anti-Skill Duo). Misaka also has an obsession with Gekota, a Frog from a kids TV show, and has several keychains with it on, believes the Frogface Doctor is a real Gekota and wants to go to a Gekota festival in one episode. Her eyes also change to frog-eyes whenever she talks about Gekota, which looks really funny.

This could have been good, if it were better done. Sad that it isn’t.

Gallery
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Gallery
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