December 27th, 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 – 12
UQ Holder Episode 12 (Final Episode)
SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:
The members of UQ Holder are holding their own against Negi-MotB and allies. Fate and Yukihime arrive, where Fate pulls Negi’s astral true form out of his body. At the same time, he pulls his own astral true form, Yukihime’s astral true form as Eva, and Touta’s astral body. They talk with Negi, where he tells Fate that he has to die. Touta gives his time to Eva, who embraces Negi. Time for this spell runs out and their astral bodies return to their physical bodies. Fate and Yukihime attempt to seal Negi-MotB, but fail.
With that, the members of Negi-MotB’s team turn the tide on the UQ Holder members, defeating all but Touta. Touta mimics Negi’s lightning form, but Jack Raken puts a stop to Touta. Kirie prevents Touta from being killed, so Cutlass puts her down, forcibly pulling two of her teeth to prevent her from committing suicide. Touta despairs, but Kirie knows they’ve stalled long enough. With that, Negi-MotB and Touta are pulled into a phantasmagoria, where all of Negi’s former students are.
Negi’s former students attempt to convince him, many through attacks, but all fail. These students were formed by the memories of Negi and Asuna. On cue, Asuna shows up, putting them back into reality, where Negi briefly regains control of himself. Asuna thanks Yue and Nodoka as their staying with Negi caused Negi to resist MotB for 20 years. MotB regains control, but with Asuna staying with them, Negi-MotB concedes and retreats with his clan, Asuna in tow.
Jinbee and Gengorou discuss things, where Jinbee brags on saving so many people. Shinobu shows up, having rescued some kids. Mizore laments not being privy to the stuff UQ Holder saw with Negi. Ayaka agrees, saying the same thing often happened in her youth. Fate leaves, shooting a warning to Yukihime. Dana observes all this from a distance. Back at the Senkyoukan, the girls and Kuroumaru discuss Kirie rejecting an earlier love confession for Touta. Touta confesses to Yukihime, but is rejected.
Thoughts/Review:
And so UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 12 brings an end to a poorly done anime adaptation. Though the ending shows the desire to have a second season/series, I just don’t see that happening.
What Changed from the Manga?
While the basics of the episode 12 were taken from the manga, the anime adaptation needed to add a heavy Negima! element though, which reminded me of the first Negima! anime series, which is not a good thing. For those who didn’t watch that travesty, the series ended with all of the girls from Negi’s class gaining a pactio with Negi in order to fight a cliched good vs. evil battle. As I described it at the time,
I think it would have been less painful to eat a bowl full of shredded glass and have that pass through my digestive system than it was to force myself to witness this tripe.
UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 12 doesn’t quite go to that level, but it comes pretty close. This time, all of the girls show up out of Touta’s mind, thanks to the memories of Asuna and Negi. What?! And then all of them need to get lines, some of them attacking Negi, and all of it being equally worthless. Of course, the coup de grâce is to have all these girls have their clothing removed. 🙄
I know that in the manga, I have enjoyed some of the Negima! flashback stuff, but here, I just couldn’t get into it at all. In the manga, the Negima! elements still felt like they had a story purpose. Here, the girls showing up served no purpose because frankly, what could memory fragments do to Negi-MotB? As such, it just felt like Negima! fanservice ’cause “reasons.”
Ramming that Touta x Eva Thing
One story element from the manga that I never cared for was having Touta fall for Eva (and thus his adoptive mother, Yukihime) after meeting her in the past. It just has a strong ick factor because who raises a child to have sex with them? Transversely, what boy, even with an adoptive mother, who’s never been sexually interested in said mother figure, suddenly wants to marry (and thus have sex with) said mother figure because they met her when she was the same age as the boy? It makes no sense.
Until episode 11, this plot thread was not brought up in the anime. However, episode 11 had Eva suddenly weeping about wanting to be with Touta forever ’cause “reasons.” Then for episode 12, the anime brings in the Touta confession to Eva (as Yukihime) from after the Dana arc and inserts it. 🙄 Of all the things to ram in here.
Hoping For Another Season/Series?
Because the anime ended with Asuna joining Negi-MotB in order to restrain him further, it felt pretty clear to me that those producing the anime are hoping for the chance of a second season. I doubt they get it, but with UQ Holder now getting a mobile game in Japan, who knows. There is a ton of material still not animated from the manga, which could be reworked I suppose.
Also, I noticed that Dana, the deus ex machina “broken” character, got a cameo in this episode. This suggested to me a desire on the part of the anime folks (and maybe Akamatsu-sensei) that they’d like to get another anime season/series.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
Time to wrap up my review of UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 12 and provide a few thoughts on the series.
Sadly, the series suffers from trying to cram so much source material into 12 episodes. As such, there’s little time to do things properly since Akamatsu-sensei, who was on the anime production team, wanted to make sure the anime touched certain things, such as the harem elements that were added well into the manga’s run. Throw in the Negima! stuff, and the anime becomes a mess.
That’s not to say that there were some OK things in the anime. One thing that springs to my mind is the fact that the manga had skipped showing us a meeting between Eva and the elderly Ayaka after setting that up as an obvious thing. The anime put this in, which was a nice touch.
Finally, Zazie showed up for the class 3-A cameos, but the series didn’t use her earlier when the manga had. Why did they not use her earlier?
In the end, UQ Holder! Magister Negi Magi! 2 – 12 brings to an end a TV series that heavily rushed, leaving casual viewers going, “What?” and long time fans going, “This sucks!” It is a shame the Japanese didn’t want to do this properly.
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Good riddance is all I can say.
A bad adaptation of mediocre source material. I get the feeling that J.C. Staff made this only so that left-over production capacities were not being idle.
Mostly bad animation and some baffling direction choices make this one of those anime that no one will remember the next season.
I’ve kinda given up on Akamatsu as a writer. He fucked up Negima towards the ending (so much that I barely touched the volumes on my shelf after it ended), and bungled UQ Holder soon after it started. His grasp cleary exceeds his talent when it comes towards shonen storytelling.
Well, peace out from me. Hope you can review some better anime next year.
Happy near year.
UQH almost hit rock bottom with its last episode.
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2017-12-28/the-best-and-worst-of-the-season-so-far-week-of-dec-17-23/.125844
These numbers are just for America, not Japan, right? That’s how it seems to me. I’m curious how it did in Japan because UQ Holder is getting a mobile game launch.
Yeah, it’s ANN’s review rankings.
Ranking is middling in Japan. Here’s a link (it’s a pretty small sample number, though):
http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2017/11/02/ntt-docomo-research-fall-2017-tv-anime-popularity-ranking
Yeah, I kinda had a feeling it didn’t do as badly in Japan, otherwise they wouldn’t bother with a game launch.
Hahaha! I didn’t think any of the production houses were idle. 😛 😉
I tend to agree, though on my FB page, someone with limited knowledge of the source manga claims to have liked it fairly well and thinks it should be on Toonami.
Thanks! I have such limited time, I only grab what I can. I tried doing just two series and we see how well that turned out. Though I miss having more free time, I cannot complain.
And to you. Don’t be a stranger. 🙂
Goodbye UQ anime, you were the dumpster fire I always knew you were.
*sigh* I still like Negima, I really do. But honestly, I wish he didn’t pick up the franchise again. At least then I could look back on it fondly without UQ Holder dragging it down constantly.
Hahahahahahahaha! That just cracks me up for some reason. 😆 Thanks for the laugh! 😀
I think he could have done things much better. I’ve long speculated that Akamatsu-sensei wanted to do a manga like Mashima-sensei — just come up with an arc and not worry about anything beyond that, nor worry about continuity. But that’s not what Negima! fans or Love Hina fans wanted from Akamatsu-sensei. (Heck, I’ll even though in A.I. Love You as well.)
Also, UQ Holder suffered from having a Mary Sue MC (who’s a lot better now), which didn’t help the series. Bringing in the strong Negima! elements was (and still is) a desperate move.
If they had made their own story BASED on the manga, it would have come out better i would think. Seriously, they litterly shooved so many plot points into episode 12 that it distorted everything. Dane appearance there made no sense, nether was Touta’s come on to his Momma-figure Yukihime.
However there comments she made that suggests something else i was expecting. Yukihime at the end of the episode had said your 500 years too late to herself when she told Touta to take his proposal and shove it. With Dana appearing in the end of the episode, it suggests a OVA or one-off episode maybe coming with a bundle of the show. 13th Episode as you would think. This would do the training of Kirie, Touta and the others in beefing up their skills. Which was cut out of the show. By doing that, it would fix the why the last episode parts didn’t make sense.
Hope the hell it wasn’t the author’s strong arming the animation house to the plot/story HIS way. Which clearly if that’s the case, he shouldn’t be near a director’s chair at all. He’s clearly lost his touch doing this sort of thing.
Dumpster fire is best way to describe this series, unfortunately.
Has Akamatsu said anything on twitter or other media?
The funny thing is, the first Negima! anime did that to a large extent. In the process, they pissed off a lot of fans by compressing the 3-volume Kyoto Arc to a 2-episode, crappy anime adaptation. They made their own ending, which started out kinda interesting, but then they jacked that up too. 🙄 So I suspect that Akamatsu-sensei wanted to try to touch highlights of the source manga and give it an ending that he hoped wouldn’t piss off fans. Sadly, with only 12 episodes, it didn’t work.
There was an OVA that aired before the anime broadcasted. It showed a brief Dana Cameo and centered mostly on Eva and Touta’s meetings in her castle, though it was watered down and some parts were changed. It’s been on MAL in the ‘Other’ section. I guess most didn’t know about it.
Woah, that’s first time i heard of that. I’ve been pretty steady watching that anime despite it not really doing so well. So there is a special out there aka OVA to explain the weird way they ended….they really didn’t do a good job explaining things.
The OVA came out first, so if you didn’t know the manga, the OVA is even more confusing as it jumps in with an onsen scene, then a Yukihime flashback to when she first met Touta (from what I’ve glimpsed at — I haven’t watched it yet).
I haven’t seen it either. I’ve not found a copy of this anywhere surprisingly.
I hope all this trouble was worth it and manga “saved” by all this effort.
I did find a copy. I’m going to try to watch it when I can.
They didn’t know about it because you shouldn’t need a OVA in the first place, being released before the goddamned anime airs, to try and plug holes into the story. It’d be like trying to make sense of what’s going on in the Negima OVA’s if the only thing you knew about the series came from XEBEC. It makes no sense, and the anime has to be made without the context of someone knowing about either the manga or any other side material, otherwise you get a niche audience…which was basically what was done here.
Let’s face it, this anime was doomed from the get go due to the manga’s terrible pacing, and Akamatsu back flipping back to Negima during the series run. You can’t make magically make something decent if you’re dealt a terrible hand from the start.
Different People, Different Perspectives. Despite the adaptation being as mixed and rushed, That doesn’t stop people from finding out more due to their own curiosity. Regardless of it needing an OVA or not, Its a decision they made, Its over and done. I was just conveying what most had missed.
I don’t really care since If the anime was doomed to be dumpsterfire from the beginning, Many enjoyed it for what it is and got them interested. Again, I’m just conveying what most had missed.
If the entire premise of the anime was to draw attention to the manga to promote it, then it failed pretty markedly then. ‘Different strokes for different folks’ doesn’t mean anything when trying to manage and market a product. Based on UQ Holders subpar sales for Akamatsu, it did not get next to anyone interested enough to support it.
Sadly, this multi-media approach is far too common in Japan. It is part of the “fleece the otaku” marketing strategy. As much as I love the canon Tenchi Muyo! franchise, it is the worst offender when it comes to needing to read novels, watch other series, and even read doujinshi.
@Dargor That was only one of of the many objectives that UQH’s adaptation aimed for. And with how it was badly delivered, despite it being a subpar adaptation at best, It now depends on what the series creator, Akamatsu plans to do now to make the manga as interesting as possible from now on.
I remember hearing about it, but unless it had some kind of English subtitle, most folks wouldn’t watch it.
Most of the problems with this show’s writing came from taking bits from all over the manga and then throwing them together without the original context, to the point they don’t make any sense anymore. It’s a horrible Frankenstein Monster of rotting body parts stitched together from the bodies of a manga that was ‘ill’ in the first place and its murdered and mangled prequel.
In this episode the biggest example is what was supposed to be the plan with the satellite. In the manga, as bad as that arc was, that situation was relatively simple and logical; in the course of a struggle between friends that never meant to be deadly, one of them accidentally shoots the other’s weapon of mass destruction, then she (or her sprites, whatever) switch the weapon to non lethal mode, stripping ensues. Fair enough.
Here… the motions are copied but in a way that makes no sense at all. The intent *is* attacking Negi, who is so powerful only subduing him requires amounts of violence that would be lethal to anyone else. Now, the plan is flawed in the first place because Chachamaru’s satellite shouldn’t be able to hurt Negi (it barely worked against a much weaker Fate eighty years ago, current Fate no-sold it easily, and current Fate is much weaker than Negi) but even so, Chisame’s sprites for no reason sabotage it so it hits the girls instead of Negi… why? To add insult to injury, the plan is supposed to come from Chao, the smartest person in the class, but it’s so stupid in the manga even Makie would have called it out on being moronic.
Also, repeating the strategy to inject Negi from the manga just makes one wonder, in this universe, did the Sports Festival arc never happen, or was Negi just stupid enough as to fall for the exact same trick twice?
The only bit in this episode where an improvement over the manga happens is having Jinbei rescue the audience instead of Mana and Zazie. It’s still lame it all happened off screen, but at the very least Switcheroo makes for a far better excuse than Mana and Zazie… um, doing whatever they were supposed to do while we weren’t looking in the manga.
I don’t disagree with anything here.
Hahahaha! That’s funny. Thanks! 😆
To be Fair, An OVA showing a watered down version of Touta’s meetings with Eva in Dana’s castle was aired a few weeks before the anime broadcasted. I guess the majority of the anime only didn’t watch it and some of the manga readers picked up on it. So reminding those who had watched the OVA early on before the anime aired episode 11 that those ‘reasons’ you speak of are evidently shown and connected in the OVA that had aired before the anime.
I never watched the OAD. I guess I should try to.
That said, for those just watching the TV series and didn’t buy the OAD, the arc is MIA. And it is out of place as a prequel to the TV series.
Actually the OAD is sort of a sequal to the series…
Sort of… 😉 But in all seriousness, they put out an OAD which is technically a sequel to a TV series that hadn’t even aired at the time. ^_^;;;
If the manga benefits at all from the anime then fine, I can accept the anime as having some tangible worth to justify its existence. Aside from that though, this may be the 2nd-worst adaptation of a manga I have ever witnessed. In a perfect world the anime would be ending after they got an exposition-dump from Fate in the cave and they set up a future Season 2 after the big battle against Fate and company.
This abomination of an adaptation though… it’s disappointing on so many levels.
If insanity does hit the people who funded this horrible adaption for a sequel it will like be done after the manga has ended (one way or another…)
Reality Check – I am no expert, but i honestly don’t seeing the Manga surviving beyond this point unless there shift in quality of story writing (like keeping focus on the plot!!!) or they’ll end this within 3 – 6 months at most.
I love this book, no matter how badly it’s been managed. It was setup to give us great stories, but it hasn’t delivered.
Subpar adaptations never killed any of Akamatsu’s works before, so I don’t see why this would be any different. Now granted, UQ Holder doesn’t sell like LH or Negima did either, so there’s that.
I need to reread the UQ Holder manga from scratch. I know for Negima!, the long Magic World arc didn’t feel so long when read volume to volume without delays.
What was the first-worst?
Berserk 2016.
Haha! I didn’t see that one.
I do wonder though, in artificial reality Asuna created to confront Negima with A3 Class. Chaos was there, does that mean this version of the universe Chaos was in the past and stayed there?
The way I interpreted things, Chao and the others were representations based on Asuna’s and Negi’s memories of those characters. So Chao could have left as normal, but the memory representation would have been seen as shown.