I've been exchanging some email this morning with Pete about the Ah! My Goddess! franchise, because he was a bit confused about just what was related to what, and how much. He was comparing it to the way the Tenchi Muyo franchise had splintered.

Anyway, here's my most recent email to him, trying to sort things out:

The two anime series (both full season) are closely based on the manga. (The first season was released by Media Blasters and the second by ADV. Both were anamorphic, not letterboxed.)

The movie is an entirely new creation, but it is consistent with the manga continuity. It's also placed later in time than the anime, and such continuity changes as are present are reasonable. The most important is that in the movie Skuld has her angel, and Skuld has gained some degree of control over her magic e.g. she can fly.

The movie is my favorite of the releases in the franchise. (And Kawasumi Ayako is in it.)

The OVA isn't exactly a different continuity, but it isn't really the same either. The characterization is a bit different (Beldandy is more of a crybaby, for one thing) and as far as I can tell the events of the OVA don't directly come from the manga. They only tossed in one completely new continuity change, that Bel and Keiichi met as kids, but it can be ignored because Keiichi has no memory of it. So the OVA isn't inconsistent with the manga.

I really hated the OVA. There's nothing to recommend about it. The animation is lousy, the story is sappy, and Bel is intolerable.

I would say that the first anime season is worth watching. It's well done and has a lot of good episodes in it. The "Dark Urd" arc is especially good. It's too bad they didn't end with it. Instead they tossed in two filler episodes afterwards, character explorations respectively of Skuld and Urd. Those were OK but they didn't feel like series wrap-up stories.

By the time the second anime series was released here and I started watching it, my main feeling was "Been there done that". Yeah, it introduces Peorth and Hild, and let's us see Skuld's angel for one episode, but that wasn't really enough to save it. I gave up half way through the fifth DVD. I bought the 6th but I've never even unwrapped it.

The only reason I stuck with it as long as I did was that I hoped that once Hild showed up it would freshen the storytelling, but it didn't. The first episode that Hild is in is outstanding, but after that it fell right back in the same rut. (The second episode that featured Hild utterly stunk.)

I can't blame that on the anime director. The problem of "getting in a rut" was inherited from the manga. The director stuck closely to the manga storyline.

There was plenty more material in the manga to support a third season, but I guess that the Japanese fans had much the same reaction to it that I did, and no third season was made.

Anyway, AMG hasn't suffered from the kind of splintering that the Tenchi franchise has, except maybe for "Adventures of MiniGoddess", which I believe was based on a 4-koma.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 01:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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