Negima! ~Another World~ OAD/OVA Extra: Magic Girl Yue
魔法先生ネギま！ もうひとつの世界 Extra 魔法少女ユエ
Mahou Sensei Negima! ~Mou Hitotsu no Sekai~ Extra – Mahou Shoujo Yue

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

A girl named Yue has lost her memories after suddenly appearing in front of magic student Collet, who accidentally discharges a memory erase spell at Yue in their collision.  Upon being examined by the school doctor and determined to have nothing physically wrong with her, Yue requests permission to attend school at the prestigious Ariadone Academy to learn magic, history, and more.  She is met with skepticism by the class president Emily Sevensheep but Yue is undeterred and with a passion she feels sure she has never felt before, she is determined to learn and become more powerful.

One day in class, Yue has a reaction to seeing a picture of Nagi Springfield.  After class, she is researching this when Collet proudly reveals that she is in the Nagi-sama fan club.  Emily comes up and shows off her membership card, revealing she is member number 78, one of the earliest fans.  Seeing a clip of Negi as Nagi at the tournament, Yue decides she wants to go to Ostia and the tournament finals as she feels that this “Nagi” everyone is talking about will have some answers for her.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to go with classes until the school announces a contest to select members of the honor guard to be in Ostia for the tournament finals.

Yue and Collet train hard and on the day of the competition, they set out with a plan to win the broom race and competition.  They quickly move into second place behind Emily and Bea, causing Emily to stop and attempt to remove them as a threat.  Though she is able to cause Collet to lose her clothing, Yue gets behind Emily and does the same to her with magic.  With that, Collet and Yue race off in first place.  Emily is humiliated as she and Bea take off in pursuit again.  However, they are far behind and Emily decides they need to take a shortcut through the dangerous woods.

Collet notices the card she has been holding for Yue coming to life when Emily and Bea appear in front of them, pursued by a giant Griffin Dragon.  It is too much for them to handle but despite her memory loss, Yue instinctively grabs the card from Collet and helps Bea with a barrier against the dragon’s wind attack.  Yue activates her card’s artifact and acquires a new clothing set as well as information on how to defeat the beast.   The fact that Yue has not only a pactio card but an artifact card as well stuns Emily.

Yue gets the others to agree to her plan and with Collet and Bea as bait, Yue and Emily set a trap.  With Emily raining ice spears on the beast, Yue is able to get in close and remove its horn, defeating the dragon.  Emily is amazed and impressed with Yue’s abilities and as the foursome return to the academy, they are met with cheers.  The Grand Master decides that special dispensation be granted to the ones who defeated the dragon.  The students assume it is Emily, but she confesses it was Yue.  The Grand Master states that all four girls will attend along with the race winners, thus all girls get their wish to be in Ostia.

Thoughts/Review:

I give credit where credit is due and SHAFT mostly does a decent job here.

For starters, having the various Yue segments from the manga combined into a single episode works quite well.  Indeed, with a small amount of additional work, I can see Yue carrying her own series as she works towards becoming a Magister Magi.  Granted, that’s not in the cards for the Negima! series but I have to say that I liked how SHAFT took Akamatsu-sensei’s stuff and made Yue the star.

Visually, things look pretty good.  The Griffin Dragon looked pretty impressive and SHAFT did a much better job with it than they did with the Black Dragon that Kaede fought in episode 4 of the Another World OAD.  The battle played out quite well and discounting all of the fanservice panty shots, everything from the race to the actual fight with the dragon looked pretty good.  The anime did what it is supposed to do in an action sequence from a manga and really bring it to life.

The only problem I had with the fight with the dragon was when Yue scored her pactio card.  We had to have a tedious, ecchi henshin sequence so that Yue could change clothing which was bad enough.  Then, the dragon takes a smoke break while Yue explains everything.  To be fair to SHAFT, they simply copied what was in the manga but in the manga, it seemed like a much shorter amount of time whereas in the anime, the explanation seemed to take forever.  As such, one wondered what the heck the dragon was waiting for.  ^_^;

I didn’t care for Bea’s character design here.  Akamatsu-sensei drew her with a certain look and attitude which just never really came across in her anime form.  The other characters came through OK.

The anime did have to drop a few little things such as Yue instinctively remembering the first spell she learned, the student commentaries on the competition, and a few extra explanations.  While I would have enjoyed seeing them, they weren’t horrible cuts.

With this final OAD episode, SHAFT wraps things up quite nicely (having only one bad OAD episode in the entire lot thus far) until the movie launches.  It really is a shame that we couldn’t have scored something like this as part of a high quality Negima! TV anime series.