December 5th, 2017 
AstroNerdBoy ユーキューホルダー! 魔法先生 ネギま！2 Anime Review
UQ Holder! Mahou Sensei Negima 2
UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 09
UQ Holder Episode 09
SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:
Kirie is unhappy that they let Fate go after going through all that trouble to capture him. Touta confronts Yukihime, who won’t speak to him on the matter of Negi. Outside, an elderly woman in wheelchair (Ayaka) come to the Senkyoukan, assisted by a robot (Chachamaru) and with her young granddaughter Mizore. Mizore introduces herself to Touta, warning Shinobu, Kuroumaru, and Kirie about the dangers of being near him. She bases this on the fact that Touta’s great-grandfather Nagi and grandfather Negi were notorious womanizers with harems who made girls cry. Therefore, Mizore decides to sacrifice herself to become Touta’s wife for all womankind. Touta turns her down.
Inside Yukihime’s office, the elderly Ayaka, Chachamaru, and Yukihime reminisce about an incident in their school days when Negi was their teacher. They then discuss Negi and the Mage of the Beginning. Meanwhile, Mizore dons a Japanese maid outfit and offers Touta a large bento she made by hand. This impresses the others who observe this. Ikkuu suggests to Karin, Kuroumaru, and Kirie that they counter this by scrubbing Touta’s back with 50 strokes at the onsen to evoke the luck of the place.
Ikkuu gets Touta to the onsen, where he talks about his brand of immortality. Since Mizore and Shinobu have been let in on this, the race is on for the girls and Kuroumaru to do their magic. The girls end up battling it out over the right to wash Touta’s back, so Kuroumaru bails Touta out of the situation. Kuroumaru explains the situation, but is soon attacked. Touta ends up getting knocked back to the onsen, where Yukihime asks him about the commotion. When she learns that he has to have his back washed, she does the 50 strokes, taking the time to chat with him a bit.
Mizore makes peace with Shinobu and ends up chatting with her about loving immortals. Touta meets with Yukihime on the docks, where he finds her in her true form as Eva. Touta asks if she’s still in love with Negi, which she confesses to. However, the Negi they saw in the caverns is not the real Negi as far as she’s concerned. She explains how Negi is possessed by the Mage of the Beginning. She also explains the true origins of Touta’s creation, that he’s a clone.
Thoughts/Review:
UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 09 continues the massive sprint to the finish. It is a shame this anime is cut so short ’cause with more time, the anime could have corrected issues with the source manga.
What Was Changed?
With Mizore’s introduction, we’ve obviously skipped all of the Santa story. We’ve also skipped the entire Dana training arc, where Touta learned to use his powers. Of course this means we’ve skipped any and all tournament stuff (which I never believed we’d do in the manga). That also means that Eva’s backstory and her retconned romantic love for Touta is skipped. We skipped were Touta was given the uniform to be a full time employee of the inn.
We got the addition of new Negima! material in the form of a flashback.
Also, we got the addition of Mizore and Shinobu becoming friends and rivals.
What I Didn’t Like
Because of the cuts, all of the progression of Karin, Kuroumaru, and Kirie falling in love with Touta is all but absent. Yes, we got a bit of Kuroumaru’s stuff wedged in, but the stuff where Touta does other things to win Karin’s respect are not there. And while Kirie isn’t my favorite character, it just feels like her interest in Touta is ’cause “reasons”. And we don’t have Kuroumaru’s “become a lovely girl” plot thread where Kuroumaru internally acknowledges feelings Touta.
If I’m honest, my next complaint probably won’t register too much with viewers who’ve never read the manga. That said, when Touta effortlessly countered Mizore’s brilliant attack, my mind thought back to the manga, where Touta actually had earned that moment (unlike his earlier successes, which were all unearned). Touta had gone through all of this hyper-intense training along with Kuroumaru, Kirie, and Santa to really up their game. So I lamented the loss of an actual earned victory.
What I liked
Surprisingly, there were things I did like in UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 09. For starters, we got what I wanted to see in the manga — the meeting between Eva, Ayaka, and Chachamaru. It really frustrated me that the manga never showed this meeting. Instead, Akamatsu-sensei went straight to the harem hijinks and wouldn’t let us see. Now, he shows us this meeting, complete with a flashback to their time at school with Negi as their teacher. I loved it.
I also really like that the Eva x Touta stuff is all excised from the anime. Eva meeting Touta on the dock was another skip of some 10 chapters. The manga had her simply tell Touta he wasn’t #1 on her boink list until the issue with Negi was resolved. In the anime, she still confesses she loves Negi, but without the Eva x Touta stuff. Frankly, I have NEVER liked the notion of Eva becoming mother to a boy she wants to eventually boff. The anime’s version is a simple love of woman and her adopted son. That’s what I wish the manga had done.
The last thing I really liked is the introduction of Mizore. I admit that I’ve always liked Mizore’s character in UQ Holder. A lot of the manga is rather gloomy and depressing. Mizore is like a ray of sunshine and a breath of fresh air. The anime went out of its way to have Mizore and Shinobu become friends, which I liked. I also liked that Mizore is well versed on immortals, which makes sense. I don’t remember the manga really going into Mizore’s thoughts on immortals.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
First, let me apologize for falling behind again. I had tried to get stuff going as I knew I’d be massively busy. Alas, things don’t always go according to plan. 🙁
That said, while I lament the fact that UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 anime has to keep skipping massive swaths of the source manga, I did appreciate some of the additions to UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 09.
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This adaptation really goes back and forth with the laughs and action. It would be so much more tolerable if it wasn’t 12 episodes. I didn’t dislike this episode but I found it fairly weak and was kinda annoyed they used one episode on it. I remember in the manga Karin’s reasoning for “bonding” with Touta was because he met Eva when she was younger. Here she’s doing it because… I don’t really remember.
Sometimes I enjoy this anime and sometimes I find myself irritated because it’s cutting so much to fit such a short timeline, with essentially no hope of any kind of continuation. Akamatsu always sells his series short even when they prove to be popular. And no, I’m not deluding myself into thinking this series is popular, it really isn’t.
Yeah, and this all sucks. All in all, Akamatsu-sensei isn’t that great on anime adaptations, though Love Hina did a TV series, two single episode OVAs, and one 3-episode OVA. But it was never completed. I used to love the Love Hina anime until I read the manga. Then I found I had a hard time watching the anime with all of its mostly pointless changes to the superior manga.
Hah, yeah. I watched the LH anime and its specials and absolutely loved it. …Then I read the manga and realized how much better it was. UQH is probably Akamatsu’s best animated adaptation, which is largely because the ones before it have been disappointing…. And even putting that aside, he doesn’t market his series properly. I don’t think there’s any UQH merchandise and even Negima merch was really, really hard to find.
There’s a fair lot of UQ Holder merchandise, the problem is most of it is only included with limited editions of the manga.
Short term greed, instead of aiming towards a wider audience they keep on banking only on a shrinking hardcore fanbase who are willing to pay ridiculous sums of money for LEs packing all sorts of goods, while forgetting most actual breakout hits appeal to a general audience instead.
I do see Akamatsu tweet his displays of UQ stuff but when compared to most other series it’s pretty lacking. Even for Negima the most I could ever find were keychains and one figurine (thankfully it was the one I really wanted)
I’ve been “ranting” for years about this failed “fleece the otaku” system that the Japanese have founded their entire anime/manga business model on. A few years ago, a Japanese writer on anime/manga wrote me in English to tell me that we Americans were wrong in our desire for lower-priced stuff and that we should be willing to pay what Japanese fans pay, which is an outrageous amount of money.
I have splurged from time to time and imported stuff from Japan. I wanted that pactio deck from Negima!, so I bought the LE manga tankoubon w/ the DVD of the movie. I paid some ridiculous amount of money after shipping charges. Other than some of Kajishima-sensei’s books, I haven’t splurged recently and frankly haven’t felt like doing so. Why support a failed model?
And you are right about the general audiences. The reason none of the Negima! OADs were licensed in America is because those were made only for the Japanese otaku who bought those LE tankoubons. So how much money did the Japanese turn down in order to keep those bloody OADs exclusive? And that’s why I don’t think we’ll see the UQ Holder OADs licensed for America. That is unless Akamatsu-sensei decides otherwise. But I don’t know how much say he’d have in that.
With Negima!, there was merchandise, only almost all of it was tied to the limited edition releases of the tankoubon volumes. And he’s doing the same with UQ Holder.
As an aside, Love Hina manga is getting re-released in Japan in a larger format (wideban Hata called it), which appears to be a bit larger than the standard American release size.
I wonder how much UQH sells in a year. 300,000?
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2017-12-06/top-selling-manga-in-japan-by-series-2017/.124894
Wanted to post this in a manga article, but got it wrong. Meh.
On the anime:
It seems it really went the direction many didn’t want to see, wide swaths of material was cut to basically fit ALL the available material into a single-cour anime. This is like buying a 500 page book, but only reading 30 pages from the beginning, 30 pages in the middle, and the last 30 pages. You kinda get the story, but a lot of important stuff was lost.
My clear MVP’s for this season are Girls’ Last Tour and Land of the Lustrous, with Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond in a somewhat distant 3rd place.
@NullApostle
What would you have done? There were only enough episodes to cover fate, beyond that was santa’s arc, which is too long, they made the best of, a half hearted source material; that rarely managed it’s time well or respected readers time by giving some answers or a meaningful Sub-Arc, EG Free a holder from prision (Say juuzo) Or gain favor of a mysterious patron (Ayaka or konoka or jack), by reclaiming a pactio card, to fix this anime within its one cour boundged, you’d have to ignore the source material(s) entirly.
At least, it fate’s facade and explicitly stated he was lying, like everyone knew, when the chapter came out. Shame about; no Ratien taisó Touta, but at least he didn’t keep getting negi’s power up’s for free.
There is that for sure. If the anime had been done properly, one of the positive changes I would have made is to force Touta to earn his power ups for those early stories.
Heh! No problem. 🙂
Yeah, and that’s the real problem with the anime for sure.
I’ve seen images for that manga, especially when I’ve looked for spoiler images. And I’ve seen stuff in my Twitter feed. I read up on it and it seemed a little depressing to me. The other two you mentioned are titles I’m not versed in.
Do yourself a favor and watch it. It’s beautiful and meditative, with musings on the human condition. It may be post-apocalypse, but it’s really a slice-of-life show. It’s like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, or sci-fi books like Earth Abides.
The manga is exactly the same story, but I wouldn’t call the art top-notch. The animation makes it better. Studio White Fox sure know their stuff – it’s an adaptation done right in every way. ANN sings its praises with no ratings below B+. As far as I can tell by looking at the critics, it’s in competion with Magus’ Bride for Anime-of-the-Season. (On Magus Bride: I tried reading the manga a long time ago, but just couldn’t get into it. I hear it’s very good, just not for me.)
Blood Blockade Battlefront (Kekkai Sensen) is a high-octane modern fantasy-horror story set in New York after an inter-dimensional incursion. The manga is by Yasuhiro Nightow (Trigun) and is published in English by Dark Horse (of all things). Mostly B ratings as far as I can see.
Land of the Lustrous is in a similar vein as Girls’ Last Tour. It’s set long after humans are gone, and stars gem-people. It’s a pure CGI anime and it’s really beautiful. It will probably set the new standard for CGI anime. The story is hard to describe, but it really drew me in. It helps that I began reading the manga (on a certain site) long before it became licensed. I think Yen Press is releasing the manga in English now? Swings between B and A ratings on ANN.
Current rankings:
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2017-12-08/the-best-and-worst-of-the-season-so-far-week-of-nov-26-dec-2/.124957
Wow. That’s a massive falloff.
I’ll add it to the very long list of anime titles I need to watch.
Thanks for the info! 🙂
It would be nice to know.
Well, mizore is proven best girl, I was quite surprised at her Seiryu, I thought she’d sound fate illya Luvia, but once again JC staff subverts expectations, like with most of Monster Musume,(Notably polt, not being rough and tomboyish like zombina)
At least Kirie’s Seiryu makes 90% less annoying, and no where near resentful, because of panel time.
Haha! I do like her for sure.
Haha! Now that you mention it, you’re right. Kirie isn’t as annoying in the anime.
“A few years ago, a Japanese writer on anime/manga wrote me in English to tell me that we Americans were wrong in our desire for lower-priced stuff and that we should be willing to pay what Japanese fans pay, which is an outrageous amount of money.”
I hope you set that guy right, although I doubt he’d listen anyway. Of course he’d be biased on the subject, he’s on the receiving end of that money.
Also, concerning Kirie, I’m torn. On one hand we’re spared the most annoying part with her ever, that one where she belittles Touta through his depression, but on the other she lost a lot of character development that ultimately made her more likable.
No, he didn’t listen and I think I decided to just let it drop since it wasn’t going to go anywhere.
Yeah, all of the characters lost a lot of character work, which sucks.
I liked that Evangeline, Chachamaru and Ayaka were seen here! (Since in the manga that part wasn’t seen) and the Touta’s back scene was funny, but on the other hand, they put too fast the part that Touta is a clone (In the manga is more dramatic since Cutlass says it and not Evangeline)
Yeah, but the anime doesn’t have time to spare of getting that information out. They way the did it may not be as dramatic, but it does make sense considering the anime’s modifications for the abbreviated structure.
Given now that episode 11 has rolled out and they look like their about catch up with the manga in a hurray. Not liking this.
The next episode is the last one so expect a pretty large deviation.
I hope to get to watch episode 11 tomorrow. Episode 10 review is coming out tomorrow.
My episode 10 review comes out tomorrow.
Actually the Dana training ARC WAS covered… in OAD
I never saw that. I’m going to try to watch it. However, the OAD (did it come with a LE manga volume?) covers the Dana stuff BEFORE the TV series, which actually is nuttier since someone watching TV won’t have bought an OVA/OAD disk.
I’m not surprised ye haven’t seen it, english fansubs of the OAD were VERY late coming out due to its limited avaliability- i only watched it by downloading an indonesian fansub, then pulling off some really complicated video editing to remove and restranslate the subtitles file through google translator… with appropriatly dodgy syntax and very literal translation (Dana is apparently the ‘space witch’ for example…)
SPOILER ALERT- if you actually still care…
[spoiler]The OAD is actually set after the series as it begins with the crew discussing Toutas ‘random’ proposal, the training arc is then told ‘in flashback’ from Evas perspective… [/spoiler]
On a personal note I liked the anime for what it was… (i’ve seen worse/messier attempts to make an anime that has been forced to adapt and cram too many arcs into too short a series
*cough Mahou Sensou*) … but yeah with more episodes/fewer arcs it might’ve been a hell of a lot better…
I’m going to try to watch it.