Mahoutsukai no Yome aka The Ancient Magus' Bride 6/10

 This is the strange love story of Chise Hatori, a 15-year-old Japanese girl, who was sold for five million pounds at an auction to a tall masked creature named Elias Ainsworth, who is looking for a special kind of bride. Of course there is also plenty of action and world building going on in "Mahoutsukai no Yome" aka "The Ancient Magus' Bride", with dragons, alchemists, mages, elves, and a bunch of other magical characters we get to know little by little.

I think it's fair to say, that the art is the most outstanding thing about this anime, since the main love story is highly questionable to me (even though it's all fiction). After Elias buys Chise, he develops a habit of carrying her around like a toddler or making her sit on his lap, which always creeped me out. He bought her, made her his apprentice, then his bride, and still treats her like a little girl. Thankfully things change a bit in season two, when she goes to university for alchemists, of course Elias still follows her around, but there's some much-needed character development for Chise and Elias.

As mentioned, I love the art and animation. The mangaka put in a lot of effort when it comes to creating a peaceful world, that occasionally gets disrupted by monsters/villains, and then needs our main cast to come and safe the day. Chise got some strong plot armor, like pretty much every main character in manga/anime, but for the most part, she's just starting to learn how powerful she can be. I like her familiar Ruth and all the new friends she makes, basically the less dependent she becomes on Elias the better. Elias is a mystery to the audience for a long time as well, no one really knows what he is, but we know he's strong, has sociopathic tendencies, and ate humans before.

 There's some comedic relief scattered throughout the series, for example, when things get too serious, but those jokes NEVER landed. I would say, they are a big flaw when it comes to story telling. Things are getting spicy and the music tenses up - then we get a cartoon scribbling art style signaling us to relax, nothing bad is going to happen. But I wanted something bad to happen! Move the sluggish story forward, please. That's another things that didn't help, the pacing is extremely slow in the anime. Considering that it's filled with mundane scenes like walking around, riding trains, cooking and making potions, that's not very appealing and got boring quick. That's also the main reason why I can't give this anime a higher score, I was simply bored at least 30% of the time. But I also understand, that there are plenty of people, who like slow paced anime with straight forward love stories, hence the popularity of this series. The Ancient Magus' Bride just wasn't for me.