"Ayu Tetsushi is in her second year of junior high school and is known as the cool popular tennis club girl that all the other girls idolize. To tell the truth, Ayu only acts cool in order to impress Tetsushi Kaji of the school baseball club. Then, one day, Ayu meets Nina Sakura, a transfer student who had found Ayu's missing purse. Nina's strange personality had left Ayu a little perplexed. Furthermore, Ayu finds out that Nina is a witch that came from the kingdom of magic to study abroad. This is a story of one girl's hope of love and another girl's study of magic and their friendship to overcome the challenges set before them. Get ready for the Ultra-Cool, Ultra-Funny, Ultra-Romantic Ultramaniac!"

Okay, that set up the premise fairly well and if you've somehow become a fan of the series, you'll know that it had some soap opera aspects to it where the characters (slightly) evolve over time, as do their goals. The back cover said this about this second to last volume of the show: "Ayu's love for Kaji is tested time and time again as she faces the possibility that her best friend is in love with Kaji and Maya doesn't help by taking the pure love from all the girls in the school. How can things be set up to end happily ever after? Does Yuta actually have an answer? And how will Nina gather the rest of the Holy Stones?"

So, the basic premise hasn't changed that much and the continuing plots of Maya doing evil deeds to further her schemes is the same but you'll want to check out the volumes in order to truly grasp what's going on. The episodes this time were 21) Untangle, 22) Virgin Love, and 23) Wonderful Night. Some of the couple's get together here and the defeat of Maya's plot only serves to set up the coming showdown between the characters in the next (and last) volume. The chronic misunderstandings of Ayu and Nina continued to the point where one got hurt physically as well as emotionally but with the school year winding down, Nina is under a lot of pressure to tend to her magic studies as well as her human schooling. The last episode of the pack was kind of interesting in that the drama came from the date that gals went on, revealing Nina's magic more openly now but still finding it difficult to properly control. If Harry Potter had this much trouble, he'd of died in the first book/movie.

For the last three volumes of the series I got, I've felt obligated to rate the show as a Rent It and that hasn't changed. The premise borrows so heavily from other source material and then does little unique about it, that I feel as if it was almost like watching a rerun of a show having limited worth. I'm sure younger girls would like it more than I did (this is probably true of any romance anime) but the series started out with such promise and soon fell victim to retreading old territory far too early into the series. In short, it relied too heavily on a formulaic process where the stories were almost interchangeable cogs in a vast machine. As long as you like seeing the same old thing each time, this isn't a bad idea but all too often, the lack of humor, lack of subtlety, and even lack of relative creativity wears thin. There was still enough to like for me to rate it as a rental but with a mere three episodes and a full MSRP, it wasn't the easiest level of bang for the buck to swallow.

Picture: Ultra Maniac 6: Magical Love was presented in the original 1.33:1 ratio full frame color it was shot in for Japanese television. The colors were bright and accurate, the dreamy quality used on such shows wasn't overdone, and I saw no compression artifacts when I watched this one. The style of animation employed was a mix of the more traditional and the CGI but aside from a lower budget look, it wasn't hard on the eyes at all.

Sound: The audio was presented with the usual choice of a 2.0 Dolby Digital original Japanese track or a similar English dub, each with a subtitle stream offered (actually two subtitles streams, one with the vocals and the other with music and signs). I admit to liking the dubbed track on this one a bit more than usual and it compared well to the original in terms of separation between the channels, a decent dynamic range and a catchy music track that stuck in my head for far too long.

Extras: The only extras offered this time were some trailers and a paper insert that mimicked the front DVD cover on one side and offered up the release schedule for the rest of the series on the other.

Final Thoughts: Ultra Maniac 6: Magical Love may provide the younger female audience with enough thrills and spills concerning the idea of idealized romantic love & magic to appease them but there are numerous other series on the market that do it so much better that it begets the point. I suppose fans of director Shin-Ichi Masaki will look at the show through rose colored glasses and appreciate it as a lesser effort to some of his better works but the lack of budget and the pacing of the events in the show seemed to bear little worth repeated play. The fact that there were a mere three episodes didn't help any either and I'm sure that missing every other volume of the series prevented me from liking the show that I originally found to have some spark to it last year. In short, if you haven't seen the show yet, check out Ultra Maniac 1 first to get an idea of what's going on and then proceed with caution as your mileage may vary from mine from volume to volume.

If you enjoy anime, take a look at some of the recommendations by DVD Talk's twisted cast of reviewers in their Best Of Anime 2003, Best Of Anime 2004, and Best of Anime 2005 articles or their regular column Anime Talk.