The third volume of Negima! takes a bit of a dip in quality; sort of the sophomore slump postponed for a volume.  After introducing the main characters and setting up the problems in the earlier installments, this set of four episodes is mainly filler.  The overall story is mostly ignored and these shows are played for laughs, sometimes more successfully than others.  It feels like they are taking a bit of a breather before jumping into the meat of the program.

Series background:

Asuna Kagurazaka is a 14 year old student at Mahora Academy, class 2-A, a private all-girls school in Japan. As the eighth grade is about to start, she really hopes that she'll be assigned to Mr. Takahata's homeroom class since she has a big crush on the hunky instructor. Unfortunately, she's not that lucky. Her homeroom teacher turns out to be not the teacher of her dreams but...a ten year old boy; Negi Springfield. Asuna naturally takes an instant dislike to the young prodigy teacher from Scotland. How dare he take the place of her heart-throb Takahata? Not only that, but all of the other girls think he's cute!

To add insult to injury, Negi doesn't have any place to live, and since Asuna and her roommate are sharing a dorm room built for three, he gets assigned to live with them by the dean of students. Things look like they can't get any worse when Asuna discovers Negi's secret. He's no ordinary teacher, he's actually a magician. As part of his training he's been assigned to teach at Mahora, but no one is to know that he has powers. If the students find out, he'll fail and never obtain his goal of becoming a Magister Magi.

In the first couple of volumes, Negi meets his match when he finds out that one of his students, Evangeline, is some sort of vampire. She has teamed up with a robot posing as a student, Chachamaru, and the two of them really clean Negi's clock.  The only way to defeat this villain is to take a partner himself, and Asuna is happy to become his comrade in arms.

This volume:

The disc starts off with a stand alone episode that reveals a secret about one of Negi's students.  Chisame Hasegawa is a quite, ordinary girl who sits in the back of the class and never draws attention to herself.  When she gets to her dorm room and goes on-line however she changes to Chui-chan, star of her own hot pin-up web site.  Her site gets more hits than any other, and she's quite proud of the following she's attracted.  When Negi gets a new laptop and decides that the class should have a web page, it becomes so popular that Chisame starts to worry about her #1 position.  The girls of class 2-A start dressing up in sexy outfits to get more hits, and as far as Chisame is concerned, that means war.

This was an amusing episode, especially with the way that class 2-A's web page instantly started getting tens of thousands of hits.  I can only assume that the writers threw that in as a joke.

Next we have a two part story that is pretty forgettable.  Standardized testing is coming up, but none of the people in 2-A want to study.  They've always come in last place among their peers, why should it be any different this time?  Well, for one thing if they are the class with the lowest score, Negi will be fired!  When he hears that, the young professor is tempted to use his magic to make them pass, but realizes that would be cheating.  So what does he do?  He casts a spell that will prevent him from using magic for three days.  Yeah, I thought it was a pretty lame plot device too.  Anyway, when the girls find out that their lovable teacher might be fired, they do the one thing that they can...go off to Library Island in search of a magic book that will make them super intelligent.  Negi tags along of course, but since he can't use his magic, he's pretty useless.

This was a rather dub two-episode story.  The idea of firing Negi and the fact that he rids himself of his magic powers is just stupid.  Has he forgotten that there's a vampire in his class?  Even though this was a two parter, it really had the feeling of a filler:  dumb plot and contrived resolution that is telegraphed from a long way off.

The disc wraps up with another rather weak stand alone story.  Konoka and Negi accidentally break Asuna's alarm clock so they go shopping to get her a new one.  Some of the girls from 2-A see the pair together and assume that they are on A DATE!!  They trial them, over hearing suggestive talk and seeing things that reinforce their theory, and a school scandal has started.

This volume comes as a stand alone DVD or as a limited edition set with a small figure from the series imported from Japan. This disc contains four episodes on a single disc. Unfortunately, there is an unskipable trailer that plays before the menu. You can't fast forward or chapter skip past it, which is really a pain.

Audio:

This disc comes with the original Japanese soundtrack and an English dub, both in stereo. There are also optional subtitles in English. I watched episodes in both languages and I really liked the Japanese audio much better. I found the English voice for Negi to be a bit irritating. Greg Ayres provides the voice for the young teacher and tries to make the character sound both Scottish and 10 years old. It doesn't really work. I've enjoyed Ayres work in other series such as Burst Angel, Detective Loki, and D.N.Angel, but this voice sounds a little silly.

Both audio tracks sounded fine with clear music and strong voices. There isn't a lot of separation between the two tracks, but some use is made of the front soundstage. Overall, the disc sounds good.

Video:

The full frame color video looked pretty good. The lines are tight, the blacks are firm, and the colors are solid. On the digital side things also looked good. Aliasing, something that usually plagues animation, is absent from this show. Blocking, cross coloration and other compression artifacts are also missing. A fine looking DVD.

Extras:

The disc doesn't have a commentary track like the previous two did, but you won't hear me complaining about it.  What we do get is a clean opening and closing, a couple of character profiles, and a text piece on Japanese schools.

Final Thoughts:

While this wasn't the best volume of the series, it was still fairly enjoyable.  I wish they had spent a bit more time expanding the over all story, but these light shows aren't bad.  Sometimes the humor didn't work as well as it could have, and the fourth episode has been done many times before, but these silly fillers are fun to watch.  A light recommendation.