UQ Holder! Mahou Sensei Negima! 2

tl;dr: A Negima sequel that leans too heavily on it’s connections to Negima while not really playing into Negima’s strength’s.

UQ Holder is centered around Touta, a fourteen year old boy with a complicated past whom Evangeline A.K. McDowell, now known as Yukihime, essentially adopts. While originally living in the Japanese countryside, various circumstances occur that result in Yukihime having to make Touta immortal. Furthermore, it turns out that Yukihime is actually the leader of what is essentially a union for immortals known as UQ Holder, who own and operate out of a hot spring known as Senkyoukan. Thus, Touta too begins working there while getting ... used to his new abilities and making friends with the other immortals. However, the past quickly catches up to Touta and it turns out there are a lot of important and powerful people interested in him.

UQ Holder is the sequel to Negima, Ken Akumetsu’s previous manga series which had somewhat of a difficult history, especially in terms of it’s anime adaptations. The anime for UQ Holder makes that it is a Negima sequel quite clear in that it literally includes “Mahou Sensei Negima! 2” in the title. The manga however does not. I haven’t yet read the UQ Holder manga, so I originally thought that this was just a marketing stunt and that the anime production committee wanted to leverage the Negima brand for marketing. I was incorrect however.

This isn’t just a loose sequel set in the same, but a sequel that very heavily draws on the plot and characters of it’s predecessor. This isn’t really apparent in the first half where you’re not missing too much if you haven’t read Negima. However, I’m willing to go as far as saying the second half will make essentially no sense if you haven’t read Negima all the way through, and thus reading Negima is absolutely a prerequisite before watching UQ Holder. I would also like to emphasize the ‘reading’ aspect in the previous sentence, because watching the anime adaptations for Negima definitely isn’t enough.

UQ Holder is pretty similar to Negima, but overall it’s much closer to the final arcs after they’ve gone to the Magic World than it is to the earlier arcs in Japan. Overall, it’s much more serious and plot oriented, and ultimately I don’t think that’s for the best right off the bat. I think Negima was amazing for how it was both a good light hearted character focused ecchi/harem series and a good serious plot focused battle manga. UQ Holder feels like it’s also trying to do both, but it’s not really able to do either quite well.

The light hearted character focused ecchi/harem aspect is especially weak. It doesn’t really flesh out any of the main characters other than Touta, and there really isn’t the level of ecchi you would expect with there being nothing like Negi’s sneeze gimmick. The OVAs, which are a sequel to the main anime actually handle the ecchi/harem aspect really well so I’m very much looking forward to how things progress in in this regard in the manga. But that doesn’t diminish my disappointment in the main anime.

I also found Touta’s relationship with Yukihime strange. I don’t have a problem with it in and of itself, but the way the writing seems to be emphasizing her also loving Negi and Nagi just makes things awkward. Rather than taking it seriously and further convoluting things with what seems to be some sort of time travel, I feel it would have been better to just gloss over things.

As for the plot focused and battle focused aspect, it does well to an extent, but I kind of feel like it started falling apart completely towards the end of the season. The biggest reason is that it seems to be drawing way too much from Negima. Touta’s abilities are very heavily rooted in his connections to elements from Negima. Though he gets an original weapon and it seems like that’ll be the core of his ability set, it completely takes a back seat and isn’t developed at all. The plot is fine when it’s focused on UQ Holder and it’s members, but once it starts focusing on Touta and his past it starts getting really convoluted. The final battle was just absurd. It felt like it was just trying to hit as many Negima related beats as it could. I admit the nostalgia did get me emotional, especially the part with Happy Material playing, but I will admit I have very little idea what was actually going on half the time. Overall, I found it completely nonsensical but I did enjoy it.

The art and animation are solid enough. The only thing that stood out was that the CG monsters were terrible, though they had very low presence. The OP has pretty good visuals, and uses a new version of Happy Material, an iconic Negima OP song. The EDs of the OVAs also use new versions of Negima EDs, though the visuals were essentially recaps of the episode which I thought was kind of weak. The visuals on the main anime ED is also pretty solid and the song I think is pretty solid too. As far as I know it doesn’t use an old Negima ED though, so I kind of think they should have just for consistency’s sake.

I'm not going to get into too much details as I'm not the only one who has written a review for this series so please read someone elses for further details.

Anyway when I first watched the Negima series I fell in love with it and even through the following series but that's where it ends.

In this series there is a massive time gap between this and the last Negima series and I just feel as tho there could have been more to show off between those times, so much in 80 years has been gone, from a teacher teaching in a all girls school to ... futuristic plains of 2065 there is just too much missing information for me to really enjoy UQ Holder.

While the old characters to make a showing it's far from in between.

Overall I give this a 5 out of 10. If you've seen the original Negima series then you might enjoy it but to someone who hasn't then don't bother.

I do not know why this anime has a 7+ rating considering the main character won't react in any rational way. I forget which episode it was but when he is allow to ask "one question" he learns some stuff of his past but he is at no point upset, and when that one character broke the thing on his back and getting rid of the hologram, he acts so calm when he should have been angry cause he was going to learn something of his past that people were hiding. The main reason I hate the anime was cause I put some time aside ... to watch this only to feel that it was a complete waste when I watched this scene. It would not be so bad if it was just boring and I wanted to see something, but when they play such a BS scene I feel betrayed. I normally do not get this mad at anime but I decided that I needed to make a account on this website to alert people that this series is trash and ruines itself.