Personally, I'd give Season One 8 *
and Season Two 3 *
After reading some reviews, it seems like anime watchers today fall into 2 different camps: people that enjoy novels, and people that enjoy mindless action flicks. I fall into the first category. I loved season 1, for it gave the world and characters depth, while season 2 opted to skip details and give you plenty of scenery.
Season 1:
This series is filled with what someone else has described as "technobabble". In a magical society, care has been taken to explain the science behind the mystery, so that things don't just "magically" happen. For a work where everything is magic, the scientific logic is well conceived. Since a lot of what happens onscreen is related to how magic actually works in this world, these explanations are necessary, and I find it quite enjoyable.
The story follows Tatsuya Shiba, who is the polar opposite of Naruto. Ironically, people who dislike Naruto probably also dislike Tatsuya, but I liked them both. The general audience seem to conceive him as "perfect", however, that he certainly is not. The anime hints at this, but you'd have to look up the novel it's based off of to actually find out that he has a major personality problem. Tatsuya ends up resolving a lot of major crisis that occur around the school, a lot of which actually happen because of him. In fact, because of who he is, Tatsuya invites trouble. Through the story, his capability does not change, but as the events become bigger and bigger, in the end you find out just powerful he really is. Again, ironically, this one-man-army concept is also something action flicks enthusiasts have no problem with when it's in an action flick. While Tatsuya is certainly a powerhouse. His problems are personal and political in nature, and cannot be solved with just that. However, at the end of season 1, all we had was a brief journey, and Tatsuya's problems were not really revealed or resolved.
Season 2:
This series was designed to cater to the action flick crowd. Almost nothing is explained and scenes consist of Tatsuya shooting his CAD at things just to shoot at them. Most of the show revolves around giving you action scenes, or giving you low level fan service. Almost every episode manages to squeeze in fan service in some shape or form.
In its effort to provide gratification, very little background is given to the story. They're in such a rush that they do not bother to set the mood, and you're thrust from scene to scene with little or no explanation. A lot of the times, they even offhandly give you a 1 or 2 liner about what happened offscreen to get to the current point in time. Details are just non-existent, so that the audience can try to figure it out themselves, or don't, since we're only actually interested in people trying to kill each other. I can only hope that this was done in an attempt to squeeze 20 episodes of content into 13, but based on reception, maybe this was intentional.
Many new characters are thrown into this season, none of which are given any introduction. There's plenty of character development, all of which was done off screen, so you don't actually see any. Now that I think about it, this is just like those flashback episodes you get in the middle of long shows telling you what happened through 50 episodes in the timespan of 2.
