UQ Holder

Well, she has a seiyuu in the credits (…which Santa does not), so I guess she'll be introduced as an employee at the inn right off the batt.

Okay, so she does exist.

...still not sure what direction they're going with this. They're taking some liberties, but its a question of where it all leads to.

Latest episode has massively diverged from the manga; proving that no adaptation of Akamatsu's work can get the source material exactly right. And the CG monsters were more cringe-worthy than anything else.

And another anime adaptation suffers the Akamatsu Curse.

So much for that.

…Eeh, it didn't really "diverge" so much as it took a little shortcut. The basic beats of the story remain the same. The monsters did look awfully bad though. By the way, did we know what Gengoro's immortality was in the manga? I don't remember the "life count" thing…

The episode was still relatively good, although the epic music at the beginning was weirdly jarring.

edited 17th Oct '17 1:20:17 PM by Lyendith

There was a bit in the first coiupla chapters where Eva was listing various forms of immortality and the panel where she mentioned having a stock of lives had a shot of him. Those pages were also where we first saw Kirei and heard about her save point.

Maybe Akamatsu himself asked the studio to change some things from the manga now that all the problems with Negima are done. For instance, Touta's visions of Negi telling him that he is waiting for him at the top of the elevator in the first episode don't happen in the first chapter of the manga.

edited 31st Oct '17 8:41:29 PM by raziel365

All that makes me think of is the later George Lucas updates to Star Wars.

Honestly, I think that's the Studio taking creative liberties. UQ Holder is a disjointed mess of a story, and trying to tie things in together more smoothly is almost a requirement for it, especially with the massive shift to Negima that happens later on.

To be honest, I liked that they added those visions of Negi. It gives Touta a more interesting reason for going to the capital and makes a nice parallel to Negi's goal of reaching his father.

Ah yes, Negi looking for hi father; the plotline that was derailed every five minutes and had to be resolved in a spin off manga

Whether it was Akamatsu's decision to add it in or not, it's almost a little insulting to compare the two so blatantly. Feels like even more of an attempt to dress up the spinoff in the trappings of a better, more well-respected series.

I'll give the adaptation the benefit of the doubt for now and see how they deal with the first chapters of the manga. For instance, Shinobu's introduction in the anime is better paced than her appearence in the original and feels less forced to have her work for UQ Holder before meeting Touta (in which case she could be working there to fund her own dreams of racing) rather than after.

Maybe they will do the same for Mizore and have her introduced to the cast before we get Santa's Arc.

edited 1st Nov '17 10:40:09 AM by raziel365

Seriously, why on gods green earth should we even care about Mizore? She's literally completely irrelevant to everything. Why shill her as opposed to literally anyone else?

I only mentioned her because she appears in the opening and the ending (which makes it likely to happen).

That statement wasn't so much towards you as it was in general. I frankly don't know why she'd get any prioritization over...anyone whose plot relevant.

In my opinion, introducing characters like Mizore or Shinobu early on allows the writers to give them more of a role in the story than being Touta's love interest (maybe world building, who knows) as well as fleshing out their characters in a better way than the manga ever did. Aside from that, there really isn't another point in the story where characters like her or Shinobu can enter without breaking the flow of the story once the plot gets started, either they appear now or are written off from the entire adaptation.

edited 2nd Nov '17 10:47:56 PM by raziel365

Just finished seeing episode 6 and I must admit that I have some mixed feelings about this, though kind of leaning on the positive.

Episode 6 compresses elements of the first chapters (Kuromaru revealing he has no biological sex to Karin) with chapters 101 to 103 (Kuromaru’s indecisión of being male or female, Touta’s date with him to the Space Tower and their attack by Fate’s goons), and as you can imagine, this means some elements are skipped straight up like Kirie’s interactions with Kuromaru (Ikkuu is the one who comes up with the idea of Kuromaru going on a date with Touta) or end in a different way than the manga (Kuromaru’s feelings are left as ambiguous instead of his decision to become Touta’s bash brother).

That being said, this episode doesn’t really break the flow of the story: character interaction remains faithful, it gives Ikkuu some spotlight while revealing his cyborg status, the fight in the tower keeps on building the thread left by the last two episodes and adapting it right now makes it less contrived since Fate is still an antagonist and Kuromaru’s problems in the fight are less jarring than in the original.

edited 7th Nov '17 7:35:45 PM by raziel365

Chapter 142 is now out. It's pretty good.

Spoilers: Dana's little perspective trick has to be my favorite moment from the chapter for sure. She is easily the most entertaining character introduced in UQ Holder.

The edge.

Though at least its doing something with the world in upheaval thing I guess. Too bad its probably going to be heavy handed as humanly possible, because Akamatsu can't seem to do anything else for shock value.

Not to be cruel or anything, but I hope that Akamatsu doesn't pull his punches and has Kirie rewinding time after this, if only to have the story have its own tone in contrast with Negima's.

Shit, somebody watched Gundam 00 and Forward Unto Dawn.

edited 10th Nov '17 7:54:44 PM by Cganale

I can't imagine he'd try that at this point, but I also thought this story would be about immortal doing immortal things and not Negima with a shittier cast.

This franchise is in a very weird place in the context of anime/manga. Hardly worth the attention it gets yet it does

It's almost entirely because of Negima, honestly. It's like how The Cursed Child basically rode name-recognition instead of likeable characters or a coherent plot.

Episode 7 is out. And we are back to schedule this time around and not adapting things out of order.

However, I’m worried about their decision to make a small cameo of Cutlass in this episode.