Ok, just to start off, I've always hated it when people randomly come into a forum or place to talk about a specific anime and just say that they hate it, or list the reasons why it's inferior. You know, those kinds of things where you feel that if someone hates the show that much, why are they talking about it? Why are they in a place to discuss the show they proclaim hatred towards? I'd like to say I'm not one of those people, but I may come off as such in this, so.... Yeah. Just putting that out there.
I cannot speak Japanese, therefore, most of what's happened in the last 10 or so episodes has flown over my head, leaving me with only the basic plot points from the little (and I mean insanely little) bits of speech I can pick up, and of course, the pictures. So maybe this episode's dialogue would've won me over. Maybe these past ten episodes could have completely blown me out of the water. But quite frankly, I seriously, seriously doubt the dialogue could change my opinion of this show now. It's a twenty-six episode series that started off with about 6 episodes of action/comedy/romance that kicked arse. Then it moved almost exclusively to random comedy, with some brief (very brief) exceptions. Episodes 23 and 24, for instance. Those were good, especially 24's ending. To this, I pose one question:
Wtf happened?
This series had all the makings of an epic for me. A class full of hot chicks, a prodigy teacher with magical powers, a little evil vampire girl with a robot hench-person... It could have been amazing! And all this while, I held out hope. I kept on just hoping that they could bring that back for the past 20 or so weeks. That feeling where you go from laughing at the chupacabra club to cheering for the giant sword pactio to wondering who Negi's gonna smooch next. And around 23 and 24, I thought, "they might actually do it." But no. The last two episodes to an anime series that started off so phenomenally seemed to me to be primarily dedicated to minor characters and random, pointless humor.
Don't get me wrong. I love me some random pointless humor (FMP Fummoffu pwns all, just to put that out there.) But there's a time when you want random, pontless humor, and there's a time when you don't. There's a time when you want to see the head of the basket ball club put together a model kit space ship while a ninja mourns her future, and there's a time when you want to see some girls with immensely disproportionate weapons duke it out. Guess which one I wanted in the ending of this series.
I think after episode 25, I knew that all hope for a decently action-ish ending had died. A creeping sensation of inevitable disappointment, that I just shoved to the back of my head thinking "no, they can still pull it off. They can do this." And I was reassured, my confidence was bolstered, when I clicked on this episodes icon and saw that it's animation quality was, at first, almost as good as it had been in the first episodes. That pleased me. But as I watched, I felt the disappointment well up inside me... Where was the action? Where was the coolness? Where were the weapons as disporportionate to the girl's body size as the size of her breasts? I wanted to click to the end, but I kept telling myself, no, no, they can pull it off... They can still put in that one last fight scene... They still have time...
And then it happened! Negi started running, bursting through the foliage in a dramatic dash to find his long lost father... And then I looked at how much time was left in the episode. They couldn't make it. And then I knew, fully and consciously, that this series was doomed to me. I watched as all the pactios disperesed and Negi's father turned out to be some odd sort of illusion created by the frog and the... wtf is that white thing? Those things... Oh, when they came in, that's when everything started to go wrong... So I watched through the last credits, and I saw the ending where all the classmates are in Wales. What they're doing, I dunno, but I like Makie's gymnastics.... And the picture at the end taken almost directly from the first few pages of the Negima manga... And I just felt that I had to go and post my feelings on this.
This series was, at first, my favorite of the new series to come out this Fall. And it has ended as my least favorite. Seldom has an anime disappointed me this much... I feel very very sad right now.
Just for the record: By no means do I have a problem with anyone who liked this. They can probably understand the humor better than I can, or just have a better sense of it than I do, or maybe they just didn't tune into see an action series... Be that the case, then fanaticism about this episode is completely understandable. But for me, who came in looking for a fast paced fight scene with subtle, underlying humor, this episode, this ending, and what happened to this series, is all very, very painful.