Mahou Sensei Negima!
Negima! Magister Negi Magi

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After 9 years, 38 volumes, and 355 chapters, Mahou Sensei Negima finally ends. Hereafter shortened to Negima!, this series is close to my heart because it's one of the very first titles I've ever read. I spend my first chapters of Negima! figuring out how the heck do non-Japanese readers manage to read from right to left. And now, nine years later, I've read several other titles. Every week or so, I eagerly await the coming of the next chapter of this series. I get impatient when Ken Akamatsu takes "research breaks," or when it's a holiday in Japan (but I don't hold it against ... them, don't worry). To imagine the span of time it took for this series to finish, I was in the middle of first year high school when I started reading Negima!. (The series was just a bit past a hundred chapters back then) Here I am now, finishing my second year in college, and finishing Negima!.

I suppose I'll get to the sentiments later, and I'll start reviewing. Encompassing a series as big as Negima! in a single review will be challenging (it's the first big series I will review), but I will try my best to do it justice.

Story: 9/10

When you're talking about a series spanning 355 chapters, you'd only expect a story as excellent as it is detailed. When the said 355-chapter manga is labeled as a harem manga, you'd expect overextended story arcs with different girls. When it's also labeled as a fantasy manga, you'd expect overextended story arcs with different magical girls. Negima!, however, goes beyond what everyone expects of a harem manga (or a fantasy manga, for that matter). It's one of the best points of Negima!, so allow me to expand.

In a span of 355 chapters, Akamatsu has taken us to worlds we can only start to imagine: form an all-girls school, to areas reminiscent of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber in DragonBall, to flying machines, to magical worlds comparable (or even superior, depends on your opinion) to Hogwarts. The author has taken us all for a ride of epic proportions; while most titles stick to one story in a few fixed areas, Negima! takes us to the edges of reality. With gigantic floating library-chasms and the Red Planet all in the mix, Negima! is an imagination-inspired adventure all in itself. All these we explored because of a boy's undying dream of finding his father.

The story circles around Negi Springfield, a young boy who desires to emulate, and eventually locate, the Thousand Master (who is also his father). Simple as it may sound, the sentence above is the driving force of the entire story. Meeting his students, exploring worlds of magic and beyond--all this was due to his wanting of meeting his dad. It's amazing how such a simple thing can take a story to such great bounds.

It's also amazing how Ken Akamatsu manages to compress so much story details in a single, coherent flow of events. We have robots, mages, ghosts, Mars, teenage romance, and immortality all in one story. Having all this in a single story is already a feat in itself; to have extended it to 355 wonderfully-created chapters is something that so few mangakas have managed to do.

What prevented me from giving a 10 was the ending. Long as it is, the ending feels a little hurried. Don't let this stop you from reading, though: it's apparently designed as an open end. I guess it just happened so fast that I didn't feel enough sense of closure for the series. Either that or I was just rooting for one of the girls too much. I'm still hoping dearly for some sort of epilogue to answer all the hanging questions. For now, I will remain contented for what the ending brought me. After all, I expected ending a series this big to be challenging and hard. Akamatsu manages to do it well enough to give me a fleeting bittersweet aftertaste in my head; I'm both happy and sad that the series has ended.

Art: 9/10

I personally like clean art. Thick outlines, clean expressions and beautiful scenery keep me hooked on a series. Negima! manages to score this as well. Though not perfect, it's certainly enough to be worthy of praise. If you've read his previous work, Love Hina, and liked the art there, then you'll probably like the ones here too. It's nice to see how Akamatsu gives detail to facial expressions concerning blushing and all things related to love (trust me, you'll get it a lot here). His art style is also distinct; you'll spot his work right away. His art brings his characters to life--and seeing that his characters have so much visual detail in them, he certainly doesn't seem to hold back when it comes to making them look good.

Character: 10/10

Here's the other strong point of Negima!. Most mangakas avoid introducing too much characters in a story, so as not to get the readers cluttered in remembering who's who. Akamatsu, however, kickstarts Negima! by introducing a class of girls. Then he takes us to a magical world, and introduces even more. I haven't even mentioned the teachers in Mahora Academy yet.

Instead of being the weakness of Negima!, it is rather the strength of this series. Akamatsu-sensei manages to introduce characters with distinct personalites that characterize each one and each one alone (well, except for the twins in the said class). If you're going to do a harem, you have to give the girls distinction. If you'll do it with a class, you've got a lot of distinction to do. Akamatsu accomplishes this by two ways: personality and power. He gives each character a distinct habit or trait that is his or hers alone. Above that, he also gives them a unique power (this is a fantasy manga with mages, after all). And might I add that this was done excellently.

Enjoyment: 10/10

After everything that's happened, I find it hard to put the story of Negima! down. It's been an long, entertaining ride through the world of Mahora Academy and beyond, and it's been fun seeing a young boy grow up to become the great, respected mage he wanted to become, just like how much of a great mage his father was known to be. I spent a few minutes each week of these past few years reading Negima!, seeing the story progress bit by bit and seeing how Akamatsu gives life to characters both lovable and respectable. He manages to turn mere students of some girls' school to saviors of two worlds--both the human world and the magical world. Akamatsu also manages to make one heck of a good lead character. Negi looks like a boy (well, he is a young boy after all), but certainly acts like he's on a level well beyond himself. I'll be honest with you people, and say that I didn't feel like I was reading a harem manga at all; rather, it was more like reading a story of self-discovery and self-improvement. It's the story of a young Negi Springfield on a quest to find his beloved dad, and in the process he was finding out the good things he can do for the ones close to him. Likewise, his students find out there's much more to their cute little English teacher, and slowly (although Negi barely realizes this) the teacher himself teaches his students lessons well beyond English--in fact, well beyond school at its entirety. He slowly guides his students in find out who they are, and that they can be so much more than what they think themselves of.

I don't know how may readers managed to reach this part of my review, instead of just going TL;DR. My review is this long because I give Negima! this much praise and thanks as it gives us readers its last chapter. It was nice to see how each student ends up in the future, and it was certainly great to find out what the young mage manages to accomplish in the end. But beyond all awe for the characters, I find myself even more awestruck at how Ken Akamatsu delivers a story of epic proportions and manages to keep it as entertaining as it was when its first chapter was published. Alongside Ichigo 100%, this is one of my first mangas to ever read, and just now surely one of the first big series I managed to finish all the way to the end.

In the end, Mahou Sensei Negima! gives a permanent place for itself in the list of the great mangas of the decade. It's a bittersweet feeling to see it conclude, but all stories do end (even if they are open-ended). To end this review, I quote from the last page of the last chapter:

"True magic results from courage of the heart. Boys and girls, be ambitious. One step can change the world."

Congratulations to Ken Akamatsu for the nine years of success, and a big thank you to him for taking that one step, which in the end gives us a story that spans nine years and several worlds. I can now say that I grew up with Mahou Sensei Negima; even more, I proudly say that I saw it grow to become the great story that I thought it should become back when I read its first chapter.

Mahou Sensei Negima was a decent series. Decent, but with the admonishment that it could of been better. I do adore some characters in this series, including Evangeline, a 600 year old vampire who probably was the strongest character in the entire series (save for ultimate baddie of course). I also think that I would of loved the characters even more if it were not for a few short comings.

The first big problem with it was it did not know what it wanted to be. Starting out as a seemingly harmless harem anime with a dash of magic in it, and then ... it whiplashes you with a drastic turn in direction. Characters that were worrying about school girl crushes were fighting in harrowing battles in the span of a few chapters. While I did enjoy the new flavor of the series, but I couldn't help checking the title now and again to see if I was reading the same manga.

The second problem is the trolling the writer did. While I wont go into details I warn you that their will be times when your staring at the pages/screen saying

"RESOLVE ONE OF THE QUESTIONS I HAVE, JUST ONE!"

Its like I was a donkey and the series held out the eternally unattainable carrot. Just when I think its going to give me something, a long exposition is delivered that reveals a whole knew set of questions that distracts you so much that by the end of the series you look back and realize they never answered the stuff that got you reading in the first place.

The third is what I would like to call "The DBZ complex"
This is when a series starts to do the following things
Transformations involving glowing hair and eyes
long bouts of training and learning new transformations for even longer glowing hair
Dues ex freaking strong character *Eva-chan in this one instead of Goku*
martial arts tournaments
and absolutely no consequences for everything from death and mass destruction

Its not that I don't like DBZ or Negima, its just that without consequences the journey and the fights become meaningless. Why would you worry about someone when the next chapter they are good as new like Wylie after getting smashed with the anvil.


and the fourth, usually a deal breaker for me, is copious amounts of fan service (not even the good kind). One achoo and their is clothes flying, school girls find new reasons to be naked around each other, and a host of other *sometimes very creepy* moments that make you want to turn the page faster




I don't regret reading it, there were laugh out loud moments, shocking plot twists (that at times can give you whip lash), and character development that makes you want to cheer characters on. If they do another series though, I hope they learn to edit and make it an even better read.

It’s amazing how you can tell so little with so much time.

Negima isn’t a story, it’s sequences sewn together to masquerade as a story. One time I’ve accidentally skipped a volume and the story made the same amount of sense it did up until that point. There is simultaneously too much happening and not enough happening at all. There is constantly some random bullshit made up on the spot, but there is barely any resemblance of a true plotline.

Most of the characters are papercuts with their introductions being all of the character arcs they get. There is no reason to do a harem with ... absurd amount of girls if you make them the most generic excuses for characters ever, and majority of them being barely relevant at all.

The protagonist is an awful Mary Sue, not just in that every girl he meets fall for him, but he’s also absurdly overpowered genius with no downside, maybe except that he’s literally 10 years old.

The art is plain and boring as much as the story, and the panelling really loves to use walls of text to say nothing of value at all, making it a painfully slow and boring read. I actually own most of the volumes physically. I got them because the price was really good so I thought I was getting a great deal. Turns out, this manga is barely worth the price of paper it’s printed on.

And finally, If you think you can just turn of your brain and read this for the ecchi, I’ve got bad news – the fanservice is terrible. And I don’t mean that it’s terrible because it’s fanservice, I mean that it does awful job at being a fanservice. It’s the mildest, unamusing and conservative fanservice you can imagine, except maybe if it the fanservice was only about showing ankles.

To summarize: the story is random bullshit all over the place, there is nothing interesting in the story, the art makes even the fights boring, the characters are walking one-off tropes and the fanservice isn’t saving any of that. I can’t think of a single reason to read this manga unless it’s the last manga on Earth.