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ファイト／ステイナイト 
Well, here are the last two episodes of Ultra Maniac. It looks like the series tries its best to make up for all of those useless fillers by going all out on the ending. And it certainly doesn't disappoint in this regard. In fact, I'll probably remember the series in a better light thanks to the ending, which somehow manages to surprise me a little bit with a neat little revelation. And as I thought, the ending does end up focusing more on Nina and Tsujiai's relationship, leaving Ayu and Kaji as supporting background characters. On the positive side, this allows for some good interaction between the two. Unfortunately, this seems to give the writer the chance to pull a rather Deux Ex Machina solution for one of the sub-plots.
For those of you who are wondering "What kind of anime blog is this? I haven't seen any anime recaps/review lately", please accept my apologies. Work, classes, and social interactions have taken away most of the time that I normally have to watch anime. And when I do have the time to watch some anime, I often have no desire to blog them. Or alternatively when I do feel like blogging, I haven't seen any anime so I ended up blogging something else. Anyway, enough with the excuses. As I promised early in the month, here is the Ultra Maniac recap. There is one more to go before the whole thing wraps up. As expected, since the series is about to end, the plot finally kicks into high gear and presents some neat revelations and a cliffhanger. Unfortunately, some of the animations in these episodes look quite bad. Some of them are inconsistent and appear as if they've been drawn by amateurs.
I've been a bit lazy to complete this series lately because there are other interesting series that I would rather watch/read. But I'll try to complete this sometimes before the end of this month. Anyway, after a mixture of plot and fillers, this series finally decide to completely ditch the filler elements and go for the main story of the series. I think this also has a lot to do with the fact during the production of these episodes, the manga finally came up with several important plots that the anime can use. Having said that there are certainly certain deviations that the anime decided to take. This is necessary mostly because the anime gives Nina a whole different reason for being in the human world to begin with.
Well, after almost half a season full of fillers, the main stories start coming out thick and fast in these four episodes. That does not mean that there are no more filler in these episodes. The difference is that the filler is actually used to advance the main plot of the series. I think this is what this series should have done right from the start. Especially since by the look of things, the anime version seems to take a rather different route from the manga. At any rate, these episodes give a rather heavy focus on the relationship between the characters. The writers have also wisely decided to shift all focus of the story into Nina, who becomes more and more interesting with each episode. Unfortunately, this does leave Ayu with not much of a story apart from her relationship with Kaji.
I've been watching too many new anime lately that I start to neglect the old ones that I haven't finished. But I finally managed to marathon 4 episodes of Ultra Maniac last night. It looks like the plot starts to advance in these episodes and the show also seems to know which character they want to pair off with the other at this point in time. In addition to this, it's good to see that Nina and Tsujiai start to get some much needed character development and focus in this series, especially since I feel that they are far more interesting than Ayu and Kaji. Hmm, maybe I'll get my wish that somehow Nina and Tsujiai will take over as the two main leads of this series.
I'm glad to know that after spending a lot of times featuring filler episodes after filler episodes, this series has finally introduced the viewers to the actual plot and character development in these episodes. To begin with, we get to know Nina's reason for living in the human world as well as her intention in obtaining the lost magic orbs from her kingdom. We also starting to see possible romantic development emerging between her and at least two boys from the series.
February 14, 2004 | 
5 Comments
Okay, I think I'm starting to really like this anime despite the fact that all of the episodes that I've watched thus far consists of mainly fillers and more fillers. I think this mostly because I find Nina to be a sympathetic characters and I want to see what's in store for her. I even managed to tolerate the opening song, 'Kagami no Naka' which at first pissed me off to no end because it reminded me of one of those US teenage shows theme songs. I do hope that the plot is going somewhere very soon though because I don't know how many more filler episodes I can watch.
January 22, 2004 | 46 Comments
I finally decided to watch this show after some recommendations from a friend. Created by Wataru Yoshizumi (Marmalade Boy), Ultra Maniac tells the story of a 2nd grade high school student called Ayu Tateishi, who befriends a young witch named Nina Sakura. Now, before you run in panic or rolled your eyes out after reading that description, I will say that I also had the same reaction at first. But I kind of liked Marmalade Boy so I figure it won't hurt to give this a try and I'm glad that I did since the show turns out to be quite entertaining and funny even though it doesn't break any new ground.
