But that’s a lie.
The series starts off as a harem manga revolving around a young Welsh boy named Negi Springfield. He’s an apprentice wizard of a mage guild sent on a mission: he is to travel to Japan and become a teacher in an all-girls high school. What all of this has to do with wizardry is never really made clear. Though he is told that he will be punished (by being transformed into a small rodent) if any of his pupils find out he’s a wizard.
(Though the last part isn’t true. He actually gets found out by several of his classmates pretty soon and I have it on good authority that the has yet to face any repercussions for it.)
The series takes a really long time to get going from there on out. The class that our young teacher’s been assigned to has a whoppin’ 31 pupils. While this may seem overwhelming at first it turns out that they all fall under very familiar shounen-archetypes: you have the spunky tsundere who sports twin tails (named Asuna rather than Asuka), a katana-wielding stoic girl who’s actually really shy deep-down, a cripplingly shy girl who can’t speak 2 words without stuttering and a Chinese kung-fu girl who speaks broken English. The series takes its sweet time introducing many of the characters and quickly gets repetitive in that regard. It’s almost as if Akamatsu is worried that the audience won’t understand that a shy girl is shy if she’s not blushing and stuttering in every scene she’s in. This goes for all the girls in Negi’s class. Akamatsu makes laughable attempts at injecting depth into his characters but they remain caricatures in spite of it.
Another big reason why it’s difficult to take these characters seriously is because of the constant nudity. There’s tons of fanservice in this series, usually as a result of Negi’s attempts to use magic backfiring on him. Fanservice isn’t bad in and of itself; but Negima is beyond excessive in this regard. It’s made worse when Akamatsu has it seep into scenes that are supposed to be poignant. It just kills the mood.
Yet another problem with the huge cast of characters is that only a handful of them truly matter. The 3 girls in Negi’s class who are most important to the plot are as follows:
- Asuna Kagurazaka: the aforementioned spunky tsundere with twin tails and an infatuation with an older man (gee that doesn’t sound like a certain Evangelion-character at all).
- Evangeline A.K. McDowell: A loli vampire who is more powerful than all the other students combined but whose power is sealed off for reasons convenient to the plot. She quickly becomes Negi’s (not so) reluctant mentor.
- Nodoka Miyazaki: The aforementioned shy girl who serves mostly as Negi’s primary love interest. She's also really a really powerful mage without knowing it or something.
As far as characters goes, these three are the most important. Characters who are in any way related to either of them get a little bit of screen time every now and then, while characters that aren’t are, for all intents and purposes, background decoration that don’t matter.
The biggest problem with the series, however, is protagonist Negi Springfield himself. He is, to be blunt, a Mary Sue. He is can master techniques that take a lifetime to learn in a matter of days, has a whole lot of raw power and every single character who isn’t a villain either adores him, likes him, is tsundere for him, looks up to him or respects him. Speaking of characters who adore him: virtually every girl in his class loves him in varying degrees. Many a chapter is filled with tons of superfluous dialogue between the girls talking about how cute/awesome/annoying-but-not-really Negi is. Keep in mind: Negi is TEN YEARS OLD.
Visually the series is adequate. Akamatsu deserves props for making the many characters instantly distinctive from each other (aside from twins) and backgrounds are detailed enough without cluttering the page. The downside is that most of the fights scenes look awkward: they mostly boil down to either large beams being shot or having a character wielding a weapon stand around in an awkward position surrounded by ‘’sparks’’ to indicate places where they’ve attacked. Very poor ways to disguise the non-existent choreography.
So Negima fails both at having likable characters and having cool battles. And since these are the two main reasons why people read fighting shounen, there’s not much left to recommend. It’s honestly quite baffling that the series has garnered so much love when it’s nothing but fanservice, overblown archetypes and bad fight scenes all held together by one of the biggest Mary Sues in all of anime/manga. People looking for a good fighting shounen should just stick to Naruto, Psyren or Fullmetal Alchemist. Better yet: switch to seinen series like Battle Angel Alita, Blade of the Immortal and Vagabond all of which deliver both in excellent action and stellar writing. It also helps that these series show nudity in small amounts and on moments when it’s relevant. Ken Akamatsu could learn a thing or two from that.
