'Muhyo & Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation' Is Most Enjoyable in a Case-of-the-Week Format

Muhyo & Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation is an anime about a “genius superior and his cowardly sidekick”-type duo who uses magic to send ghosts to hell.

The pint-sized Tori Muhyo is the “genius superior”, being the youngest Magical Law Executor and all.  With the help of a Magical Law Book, he invokes Magical Law to cast spells or summon specific agents of hell in order to pass judgment on ghosts and other evil spirits.  He’s rude, unsympathetic, and by-the-book, but in the inside, he really cares for his comrades – especially Roji.

Meanwhile, the “cowardly sidekick” is Jiro “Roji” Kusano, Muhyo’s assistant.  He’s kind-hearted, but is also a bit of a crybaby scaredy-cat.  Despite the availability of more competent options – like the judge Yoichi Himukai – Muhyo instead chose Roji to be his apprentice.  It’s Roji’s job to use seals and talismans to hold back ghosts while Muhyo is sentencing them.  However, because of his ineptitude and lack of confidence, his spells often fail.  Nevertheless, Muhyo’s faith in him and his loyalty to Muhyo would stir him to overcome his weaknesses during critical situations, enabling him to cast effective spells and be useful.

Together, they maintain a detective agency, and take up cases from clients dealing with supernatural troubles.

Muhyo & Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation definitely has an interesting, adequately original premise.  It succeeds in building a mostly unique magical world with fascinating rules and conveniences in place.  Muhyo conjuring up different magical sentences to hell that are specific to respective ghostly crimes is the highlight of this show.

Moreover,  it has a good dose of humor and light-hearted moments.  But I like that it’s also ready to go to dark places, not only in terms of its monsters-of-the-week but also narratively speaking.

However, despite all the good things going for it, it didn’t get as big as I thought it was going to be.  Yes, it entertained  nicely.  But something about it from the start made me expect I would be blown away – which didn’t happen.

I think it’s because the show didn’t gel as well as it could have gelled.  Twelve episodes for a debut season were not enough for that.  It had to resort to both doing too little at parts and doing too much at parts.  Specifically, it wanted to introduce quickly its main overarching storyline that the number of stand-alone monster/case-of-the-week episodes was cut short.  As a result, it felt like the flow of the narrative didn’t have the appropriate momentum.  In addition, for me, the stand-alone episodes at the beginning of the season were more engrossing than the latter serialized episodes focused on the main storyline, for it was in the monster/case-of-the-week format where its concept got to shine the most.  Also, I found the main storyline’s villain  – Enchu – a bit boring.

That being said, the first season of Muhyo & Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation has been a solid, fun watch all in all.  Though, in a sense, I was underwhelmed, it nonetheless presented an ample amount of appealing, off-the-wall stuff to make me look forward to the next season.