A pantsu shot not even 3 minutes in, good stuff

First off, sorry for the 404 on the previous post, I don’t know what happened, the post just disappeared into nothingness. But oh well, I’ll throw together another one, it won’t be nearly as lengthy as the original but I have some time to spare so why not.

Negima!? is the second remake airing this season and while I wasn’t as excited for this as I was for the Kanon remake, I was still pleasantly suprised. There was much speculation as to whether this would be an entirely new, manga-independent, storyline or just a remake of the first. Judging from the content in the the opening episode, I’d say the latter. Sporting new animation and character designs, but bringing back the original seiyuu cast, Negima!? has ton of potential.

Synopsis

The episode starts off with a flashback to 15 years ago. A powerful looking mage, known simply as the 1000 master, takes on a vampire-mage, Evangeline. Without a clear ending to the fight the scene cuts back, to the present, to a grand cathedral. Here we see the son of the 1000 master, Negi Springfield, graduating from the Magic Academy, vowing to become a great mage like his old man.

After a quick cut to a present day Evangeline standing atop a building and foretelling the approach of the 1000 master’s son we’re treated to an artsy pseudo-OP sequence. Afterwards we’re thrown into a conversation between Negi and his two sisters who have diverging opinions on Negi’s post graduate placement to further his mage training. Apparently he is being sent to Mahora Gakuen in Japan, an all girls school, to teach English.

After much deliberation and anxiety Negi arrives at the gates of Mahora Gakuen with his trusty ferret tsukaima, Kamo-kun. After a short dialogue the two are promptly run over by a tsunami of girls rushing into the school, which apparently has a population of over 30,000. Ouch.

The scene then cuts to two roommates, Asuna and Konoka. Asuna seems to be having trouble waking up, much to the dismay of Konoka, who doesn’t want to be late on the first day of class. Enter Set-chan! The katana wielding bishoujo bodyguard offers to wake Asuna up by slicing her to pieces, Konoka thinks it’s better to just leave her to her own pace.

Back at the school we see the aftermath of the stampede as Negi and Kamo recover. Upon closer inspection Kamo notices that he chipped a tooth and goes on some rant about tangerines…or something like that. Thinking quickly, Negi risks blowing his cover and whips out his magic book to fix the tooth. Much to their horror, just as he finishes the spell, a half-asleep Asuna looks on. In a panic, Negi tries to cast a memory erasing spell, only to be interrupted by Konoka and Set-chan who come running to drag the zombified Asuna to school.

Much of the rest of the episode was dedicated to introducing the many, and I mean MANY, bishoujo students who are about to be under a 10 year old’s instruction. The class rants and gossips about a supposed vampire attack on one of their classmates, who even has bite marks to prove the encounter.

Meanwhile Negi is greeted and briefed by Pedo-sensei Takamichi-sensei, who has been teaching magic to Negi since he was a kid…err…more of a kid, and is now a colleague at Mahora. And so the two go to introduce Negi to the class and begin the semester.

Mere seconds after being introduced to their new 10 year old homeroom teacher, a deafening “KYAAAA!” resounds through the campus as all the girls instantly fall in love with their new sensei. Negi, of course, does not deal well with girls and is terrified at the notion of teaching 31 of them. Add the fact that Asuna, the girl who witnessed his magic show earlier, is also in his class and desperately trying to figure out why Negi looks so familiar.

The episode continues with with a brief introduction to the current Evangeline, who is for some reason in the form of a high school student, along with her robot tsukaima. The ep comes to a close with Negi moving in with Konoka and Asuna until he finds a place of his own. Making himself at home while Konoka fetches some tea, Negi hears her voice let out a piercing scream soon after leaving. When he runs outside to see what happened he sees Evangeline suspended in mid-air cradling her unconscious body.

Replace the ED sequence with a power rangers parody, baka-rangers, and we have a winner!

Thoughts

While it didn’t leave me as excited for the next episode as Kanon did, Negima!? looks like it has a lot of potential. The storyline seems to be following the original (and therefore manga) kind of loosely, all the content is there, but there’s just enough randomness so it can’t be called a complete remake.

The pacing seems to be going a lot faster, Kamo-kun is there from the start and we’re thrown into the Evangeline arc right from the beginning this time. Whether this will be a good thing, or lead to unnecessary and crappy fillers, remains to be seen. In terms of action, I thought it was quite good, the EvangelineX1000 master fight was well done with a semi-cliffhanger ending. I also loved the randomness of it all, unrelated and random messages appearing on the blackboard (a la PPD) and I think I saw an azumanga reference in there somewhere, too lazy to rewatch and verify. Tiny, yet hilarious, details are always welcome and seperate the good from the awesome.

Technically, I’m having mixed feelings about Negima!?. Many a blogger has used the original Mahou Sensei Negima as a reference point for poor animation as compared to the other works of 2005. The animation is much MUCH better than the first, but the style is so different, I think it needs a little getting used to. However, technically it is superior, the animation is fluid and sharp, (or at least I think it is, the sub I watched had bad encoding) with specific reference to the eye candy of the campus at the beginning and the magic casting scene a little later on.

With the lack of a proper OP and ED, I can’t say much about the audio. The background tracks during the actual show were not that striking and were mediocre, in my opinion, so much so that I didn’t even notice them (then again, I’m sleep deprived at the moment, so that may just be me XD)

Character designs is a point of conflict for me personally. Certain character designs worked out for the best, Asuna and Set-chan coming to mind immediately. While others were less appealing, Ayaka and Takamichi falling into this category. I think that once I become accustomed to them, I’ll come to love the character designs, as was the case with Honey and Clover. However, at the moment they’re sort of meh-ish to me. In terms of character development and personality, they all seem to be more or less the same as they were in the original, which is mostly a good thing.

All in all it was a fairly well done opener, though my expectations were a tad-bit higher, it certainly did not disappoint. There’s a lot of room to improve on the original, whose animation, character development and (most importantly) ending were rather subpar. So I think once I get used to the animation style and the character designs, I’ll really enjoy this series.

Sorry about the sceenshot quality, the source material was encoded improperly or something, they even apologized for it in the commercial break transition

I thought I had accidentally clicked FMA here

Experts agree: New character designs increase pedo rating by 70%!

If nothing else, these three are more than enough a reason to see Negima!? through. Nanoka got an ahoge!

A bit too much bleach there, ne iincho?

Pure comedic genious

I won’t bother doing my victories/phailures bit since I covered pretty much everything that needed to be said in the rest of the post. This ep didn’t have much new content over the original and there’s only so much I can say about visual superiority.

So while I’m not rocking back and forth in a corner awaiting the next release, I think Negima!? is looking pretty good so far. Here’s hoping that they tap into the vast amount of potential that has been displayed in the opener…or at the very least not royally screw up the ending ^^

~ Shirukii ~