Lured by Railgun-chan, I ended up reading the 13 chapters out (orz)...
I change my mind for now, and shall follow the manga for a while and see where it goes.
It seems they stuffed the first volume of the novel into the first 10 chapters.
Then, they skipped the entire volume 2! Which I don't mind, since it seems that the volume was a pretty big fail. Amazon (jp)
reviews
That's what you get for writing a book in 17 days...
Anyways, and best of all, they skip to volume 3 of the novels, which has focus on railgun-chan and... a certain someone else.
As a whole, it has been pretty decent so far.
A lot of powers are destructive and are very showy, but the thing is, that when every single character just seems to have the power to level a building or two, the impact really decreases... ( -_-)
That, and plus the fact the anime website already gave away the characters in the first arc and their powers.
Spoiler for thoughts on the first arc (chp1-10):
The "bad guys" proved to be rather boring. Go figure, they were actually Index's friends and are doing what they think is best and they aren't really bad guys.
Index herself is still pretty boring, besides being a moeblob. She has a bad past thanks to her "Complete Memory Ability", where people forced her to learn many grimoires and such, but bad pasts are everywhere these days, you know. Her trance mode was a bit interesting though.
Touma proved to be pretty manly this arc. I guess he's the hot-blooded type of protagonist with lots of justice (suddenly reminded of Kazuki from Buso Renkin).
Pretty impressive, and he did pretty well fighting Stiyl and Kaori.
The stupid idiot... He tried so hard that during the fight against Index, he lost his memories. Actually, not "lost", but "killed". Za end gone, it seems...
Have to give Komoe (the loli teacher) some points for helping Touma figure out that the Church had put a "leash" on Index...
Kaori and Stiyl both prove to be destructive, with swords and runes. Nothing else to say.
I didn't feel much for their past story with Index, how they were once friends but her memories were erased and how Archbishop tricked them and everything. Kind of sad, yeah.
And now,