Ah My Goddess

Synopsis: Keiichi Morisato is looking forward to university life. But in reality, he has no luck in anything, and he has trouble with clubs, love, etc. The truth is that he has an unlucky star above his head. One day, Keiichi is stuck watching the dorm while his sempai are away, and has a mountain of chores to do to boot. But Keiichi is a good-natured person, and is set about doing his duties. As he is about to finish his final chore, he makes a phone call to his sempai. But the words that came through the receiver are, 'Goddess Help Line.' Shortly afterwards, a beautiful goddess named Belldandy appears in front of him from the mirror of his room.

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I am going to start out by explaining a bit about why this review may be shorter and a little less in depth than my other two. I have heard so much hype about Ah My Goddess over the years, and I was really excited to finally watch this series. However, I was really pretty disappointed, as is the case with most of the anime I have seen that are really hyped up. Usually, while watching an anime to review, I jot down a lot of notes to help me remember everything I want to write about when I review the series. This time, I did not take many notes at all. Part of it was just me being lazy, but part of it was the fact that nothing really struck me as worth writing down most of the time. It seemed like a really mediocre harem anime with very typical characters for the majority of the show. The episodes did finally become much more interesting near the end, however, so I have hope for Ah My Goddess: Everyone Has Wings (technically, this is the second season, not a separate series, but I am reviewing the show in two parts, since it was released with two names).

As far as the art and animation, it was nothing special, but decent. However, we'll keep in mind that this series is fairly old, as it is from the late '90's. I like the character designs of the goddesses. They're actually really interesting. They have facial markings that remind me of tribal tattoos, hairstyles with the cute gravity-defying antennae, and pretty clothing...I can't really place the influence on the the clothes, but I am fairly sure their outfits had some kind of cultural influence.

The music is nothing special, either, but it fits with the series. I do skip these theme songs, that's for sure.

Moving on...

The storyline is not out of the ordinary for this genre of anime, and the characters all annoyed me at first. Yes, every single one of them. When Skuld appeared, she was the only one I remotely liked, though she also annoyed me. (But, hey, I can't completely hate on a kid who builds robots and has crazy schemes, can I?) In the last few episodes, the story gets more interesting, and there is more character development. I really started to like Urd a lot, and I liked Skuld even more, too. The other characters became less annoying.

Voice acting is pretty bad. At first, I thought it was just a bad dub, so I switched to the sub for the next episode. I was wrong, though. Actually, it turns out that it was a great dub, in that the voices were really cast to sound just like the originals. They were pretty much identical. So, I switched back over to the dub for a little while. Then, when Skuld appeared, I started watching the sub again, since her voice is a bit worse in the dub (as are all anime kids' voices). Her voice actress in Japanese is quite talented at crying, I must say, which is a good talent to have when playing Skuld.

I am not sure whether to rate this anime a 5 or 6 overall, so I am going to give it a 5.5. The site I use as reference when trying to decide what to rate shows describes a 5 and a 6 as follows:

"5 - OK.
A production that doesn't stand out besides some of its flaws. It was barely worth your time, and you wouldn't want to watch it again.

6 - Average.
Solid production, but doesn't really stand out. The anime was good to pass time, but isn't memorable in any fashion. Worth watching once, because you didn't have anything else to do."


Next up is Ah My Goddess: Everyone Has Wings!

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