The Adventures of the Mini Goddesses doesn’t really have a over-arcing story to it. Actually, that’s not completely true. The basic premise of the show is that the main characters of Ah My Goddess (Urd, Belldandy, Skuld) are shrunk down to chibi-size, and have fun around the house with their rat friend, Gan-Chan. However, this leads to the first positive of the show.
Yes, I said positive. The show is pretty much a cutesy comedy, and generally cutesy comedies don’t have much in the way of a story structure (Lucky Star comes to mind when I think about this). Because of this lack of structure, it’s very loose & free forming, and isn’t all that taxing on the brain. The only time that there is any structure is when the episodes connect with one another (This doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s still frequent, and they’re to be watched in the order they’re presented).
This also goes into the 2nd positive of the show. Each of the episodes are just 5 minutes in length. They go by rather quickly (More on this later), but at the same time the 5 minute length means that they really don’t require you to think about the overarching story (What little story there is, anyway). None of the episodes aren’t really deep (Save for episode 28, but I won’t ruin that for you), but since the show is a cutesy comedy, deep episodes counteract the cuteness, except for episode 28.
The show’s 3rd positive is the cast. Almost like the main show, Adventures of the Mini Goddesses has a small but tightly focused cast. The characters that exist in the show are Urd, Belldandy, Skuld, Gan-Chan, and a fair selection of secondary characters (The biggest secondary character, Marla, almost becomes a main character in many of the episodes about halfway through the show). Given the context of this show, a large cast of characters would spoil the soup so to speak. With this cast, we still have entertaining characters, but we don’t have so many that some get overlooked.
The Adventures of the Mini Goddesses’s 4th positive is the animation quality, despite coming out in the late 90s, things look surprisingly good. The backgrounds sometimes looks like something from the mid-90s, but the characters move around really well, and they look good also. Perhaps the one thing about the characters in the show are the rats. They get a laugh from me, because while they look like a fair representation of the rodent in question, they act more like humans rather than rats, and sometimes their faces are more human than rat. The two episodes that really show this & make me laugh is when there’s an election at the temple for a rat that manages all the other rats, and this all culminates in Belldandy somehow getting elected (Spoilers, I know).
The last positive of this show is the voice acting. By the early 2000s, voice acting was much better than it was in the early to mid-90s (Sometimes voice acting in the late 90s wasn’t that good either), and The Adventures of the Mini Goddesses has some of the best voice acting I’ve ever heard. Even the secondary characters have some great voices, which is something I haven’t come across often in my anime collection. There’s rarely any crackles or boring voices, and even on the off chance when you hear something out of the ordinary, you’ll only hear it for a second or two.
Unfortunately, Adventures of the Mini Goddesses has some big problems. Luckily, there’s really only 3 problems, but they’re big like I said. For starters, this series is incredibly difficult to find. I bought the boxed set (used) back in early November last year, and even then there weren’t that many copies. The individual DVD boxes are only slightly more available, both in new & used copies.
Pricing is the show’s second negative. When I bought my used copy back in November, I managed to get it for $28 dollars, and considering the condition it was in (It looked practically brand new), that’s a steal! At the time of this writing, there are only 4 new box sets available (Prices start at $106 dollars...oh hell no!), and 1 used box set is left for purchase (The last one is currently priced at $98.01. To anyone who to manages to acquire it, congratulations!). Pricing for the individual DVDs is much more fair, with prices going from $7 dollars to $35 dollars for new copies (The copies going for $35 dollars is a little excessive), and used copies go from $2 dollars to $5 dollars.
The last negative of Adventures of the Mini Goddesses is how fast the show goes by. Despite the fact that there’s 48 episodes, the show can pretty much be watched in four hours. Hell, I watched 1 DVD per hour, and things move so fast, it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of what is going on. Anyone who doesn’t like fast shows will be turned off by this fact.
The Adventures of the Mini Goddesses gets a 7.5 to 8 out of 10. The story is easy & cute, the episodes are nice & short, there’s a great cast, it’s got decent animation, and the voice acting is also decent, but the show is hard to find, it’s a bit expensive, and it goes by quickly.
See you all next week, when the future will turn black. Until then, stay Otaku!
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