The Essentials
Name: Oh! My Goddess, Ah! My Goddess, Aa! Megami-sama!
Genre: Romance, Comedy, Fantasy
Episodes: 5
Released: 1993, 1994
Based On: Oh! My Goddess manga by Kosuke Fujishima
Director: Hiroaki Gohda
Produced By: AIC
Major Japanese Cast
Belldandy: Kikuko Inoue
Keiichi Morisato: Masami Kikuchi
Urd: Yumi Touma
Skuld: Aya Hisakawa
Megumi Morisato: Yuriko Fuchizaki
Tamiya: Kiyoyuki Yanada
Ootaki: Issei Futamata
Major English Cast
Belldandy: Juliet Cesario
Keiichi Morisato: Scott Simpson
Urd: Lanelle Markgraf
Skuld: Pamela Weidner
Megumi Morisato: Amanda Spivey
Tamiya: Mark Matney
Ootaki: Sean P. O’Connell
Scores
Animation: 9/10 (x 4 = 36 pts)
Story: 7/10 (x 4 = 28 pts)
Music: 9/10 (x 4 = 36 pts)
Coherence/Story Arc: N/A
English Dub: 7/10 (x 1 = 7 pts)
Gut Score: 7/10 (x 5 = 35 pts)
Total: 142/180 (78.9%)
Review
The Oh! My Goddess OVA was the first adaptation of Kosuke Fujishima’s famous manga series into animation, being released in 1993 and 1994 as a 5 episode OVA series. This was one of the first series that I watched, and looking back at it through the lense of a year of anime watching, the series looks a little bit better than I had originally evaluated.
If you are unfamiliar with the premise (and if you have been watching anime for more than 5 seconds, it would be hard not to know what it is), Keiichi is a loser to attends Nakomi Tech. One day when watching over his all-male dorm, he calls a wrong number and dials up the Goddess Help Line. As a result, Belldandy, a goddess, comes down to grant Keiichi’s wish. Beliving it’s a joke, Keiichi wishes for Belldandy to be his girlfriend forever.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) for him, it isn’t a joke, and suddenly Belldandy has to stay with him forever - backup up by the power of Heaven’s system force. After a while, Belldandy’s older sister Urd comes down from Heaven in an attempt to spicen up their relationship while her younger sister Skuld comes down in an attempt to pursuade Belldandy to come back home.
The main weakness of this series may be that it is so short and compact - 5 episodes and about 2 1/2 hours of video time. The first half of the series, consisting of the first three episodes, introduces all of the important cast and is more of a comedy as Belldandy and Keiichi live their lives. The second half of the series - consisting of the last 2 episodes - is more of a drama as a mysterious force created by the interaction of Belldandy and Keiichi starts causing havoc, requiring that they must remain seperated.
The animation and music appears to be pretty good for a series in the early 90s. Unfortunately, due to it’s length, the storyline suffers from being too compact and disjointed. While the story in each individual episode is pretty good, there isn’t really any connection from one episode to the next until the last two episodes. The English Dub is neither bad nor necessarily all that great.
My own personal, totally subjective opinion, is that this series is about average. It isn’t bad by any stretch, and if I saw a good enough price, I’d probably even buy it, but I wouldn’t really consider it one of the top series that I’ve watched.
First Watched: October, 2005
Do I Own: No
Do I Recommend: Yes
2 Trackbacks
[...] it appears that AnimEigo is going to re-release the Oh! My Goddess OVAs sometime in [...]
[...] I have re-reviewed the anime Oh! My Goddess OVA, changing it’s overall score from a 75% to a [...]