BTW, I just finished reading up to chapter 65 of the manga so I thought I would share some non-spoilers with those of you watching the anime. First off, the direction of this show is completely different than what I would have expected, and it’s surprisingly unharemesque in spite of all the girls chasing after Negi. I think that the brilliant part of Mahou Sensei Negima is that the male center of affection (Negi) is so young that his indecision in choosing a girl is perfectly normal and acceptable (and doesn’t really hurt anyone). The way the manga mixes the comic and fanservicey elements with the large doses of shounen is pretty exciting as well. In fact, Negima (I refuse to call it “MSN”) contains vast amounts of shounen elements with only an inconsistent smattering of romance. Finally, one thing I look forward to in the anime is the fights. Even though he’s only 10, Negi has some kickass moves and tactics. This totally wasn’t what I expected at all in this series.
The one thing that’s bad about reading the manga is that you start to realize how much worse the art is in the anime T_T…
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Kabitzin – who has written 1940 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.
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Excellent points, Kabitzin, but I have to say that the manga seemed rather misguided.
As an illustration, the manga-ka’s other work (Love Hina) has a specific objective — Urashima Keitaru has to get into Tokyo University, and, the whole story is wrapped around this central motif.
On the other hand, Negima seems to follow more of a ‘slice-of-life’ plot thread that merely follows the misadventures of a child teacher. Sure, there are various side quests (i.e. delivering a message to Kyoto, learning from Eva, finding clues about Negi’s father), but there doesn’t seem to be a driving impetus to the whole title. Conceivably, one could see this series going on *forever* without a proper conclusion.
I rather liked LH, so I was really looking forward to Negima, but I don’t seem any way that this series can really have a proper goal/resolution. Part of the novelty value is stripped away by the fact that Negi seems to be fixed at 10 years throughout the series (despite the passing of 2 grades by his students), the fact that many of his students seem to have innate magic talents (Secchan), and nearly *everyone* now knows that Negi is a mage.
To be sure, Negima is quite a fun read, but I don’t think it can really compare to it’s predecessor.
Sheesh, pressed the send button too soon — the last comment is rife with spoilers, so feel free to delete it — but quite interesting topic nonetheless (>_<)
Haha, I’ll leave it since it’s not _really_ that spoilerish actually. I dunno, I thought the big major point of the whole manga was to find the Thousand Mage. That seems to be what Negi is really working towards. As to what will happen after he finally meets the Thousand Mage again, I’m not sure.
I just finished reading up to 64 of MSN, and I agree that it’s a totally fun read. However, the anime starts looking less and less attractive after having read the source material.
How long would we have to wait for the anime to get to fighting and stuff? (I sound like a ten year old…) Harem crap is dull and having skimmed through the second episode Negima is totally off my watch list, but if I wouldn’t have to suffer through too much boredom I could hang on a bit…
It’s always hard to make a manga-to-anime conversion, but here are my predicted best and worse case scenarios:
Best Case: 3 more episodes of fluff with Evangeline appearing as soon as possible to kick the series into high gear. Then everyone suddenly realizes that the reason the production quality was so mediocre was that they were saving all their money for the sweet fight scenes.
Worst Case: 6 more fluff episodes with the anime following a different order than the anime. Then it turns out that the fight scenes are even uglier than the normal scenes and they use stock footage and other cheap tricks during the battles.
Even with poor production quality, however, I think the series can be rewarding to those who tough it out through the initial “boring harem be the best teacher you can be” arc and make it to the “whoa I need to gather my hot RPG allies and be like totally awesome like the Thousand Mage” arc.
Hot RPG allies, eh? That reminds me of that great “strategic formation” diagram from the manga. Oh yeah, and the whole “choose your fighting style!” thing smacked of video game!
Yeah, I can’t wait for Negi to “class change” and “level up”. BTW, the real reason the animation is bad is because they were rendered with the in-game engine. Wait till the FMV sequences!
I would TOTALLY play a Negima RPG even if it has SNES type graphics.