July 10th, 2025 
AstroNerdBoy Back to the Vaults Sneak Peak (July 2005)
Hey gang! Its another of the usual, “Work is insanely busy, so I haven’t had time to do anything proper!” I only have one game video to burn (the others I haven’t had time to work on either), and I didn’t want to burn it yet. As such, I needed something quick and dirty so Google doesn’t punish me. So I figured I’d just provide a sneak peek at what I’m working on for my next Back to the Vaults piece.
Yeah, it is UQ Holder. Well, it only seemed right since my last piece was the Negima! manga. It is going to be weeks at minimum before I’m done as I only read just before bed, assuming I’m not so wasted from the day’s work. But when I had a couple of days off for the 4th, I did read a couple of volumes. So even though I started in may, I’m only up to volume 5. That’s where Santa gets introduced and we get the zombie apocalypse.
As I reread, I cannot help but notice the “what might have been” moments, especially early on when Touta traveled with Yukihime and Kuroumaru. On the other hand, the battles depicted thus far are pretty nice. The downside is that at this time, Akamatsu-sensei made Touta a Mary Sue. I’ve always suspected that’s because he took stories originally set for Negima and turned them into UQ Holder. Just a thought on my part.
Regardless, I’m taking notes and once I finally get through all 28 volumes (π²), that’s when I’ll actually write the piece. But as I said, it will take a while. In the meantime, I’ve got to get back to work. π
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I’m still making my way through Negima again very slowly, but I do want to jump into UQ when it’s all said and done.
From what I remember, there’s a lot that UQ does well, at least early on. The characters I think are quite interesting as is the setting, but it definitely gets aimless after a certain point (where the arcs just sorta go from one into the next less than seamlessly) and the over-reliance on Touta definitely harms the series as he’s probably the least interesting character in the titular organization.
Always found it rather amusing that Negima goes from harem to action and UQ does the opposite.
At the very least it does give us a conclusion to the overall story and closure for… most of the lingering questions from Negima.
I suspect a lot of the issues from late in the series stem from Akamatsu’s future political career, and I wouldn’t be shocked if the series ended somewhat prematurely so it wouldn’t interfere if he was elected (which naturally he was).
Anyway, looking forward to your thoughts.
Yeah, the characters are interesting, and there are things done well. Touta’s not an interesting character, but he doesn’t annoy me on the reread so far.
As to UQ Holder going harem, I think that was a desperate move since the manga wasn’t doing as well as Negima. Just my thoughts.
Agreed on both points, I don’t think I would ever classify Touta as annoying. There are definitely other MCs out there that are actually annoying.
And yeah I think the move to monthly was a bit of a wakeup call for Akamatsu and he tried to ingrain more Negima elements into the story for better and for worse. While Negima needed the action elements in hindsight, UQ definitely didn’t need the harem elements.
Yet it most definitely has the best animated adaptation out of Akamatsu’s three core series. …Which isn’t saying an awful lot.