Oh My Goddess! Novel Vol. #01 - First End

By Greg Hackmann     January 29, 2008
Release Date: December 30, 2007



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Yumi Tohma / Kosuke Fujishima and Hidenori Matsubara
Translated by:Camella Nieh
Adapted by:

What They Say


The Review
Each time I find myself enjoying another entry in the Oh My Goddess! canon, I get this feeling in the back of my mind like I ought to know better.

Packaging:

Dark Horse has apparently decided not to make the Oh My Goddess! novels match their manga counterparts in cover design, opting instead for a low-key blue title banner below a pastel-colored illustration of Belldandy. The back cover is similarly subdued, with a simple color drawing of Keiichi alongside a substantial amount of press copy. Inconsistencies within the franchise aside, I think this more-muted look fits in a little better on the bookshelf alongside standard novels than the flashier cover art used by First End's manga relatives would have.

Though Dark Horse's solicitation lists First End as 208 pages long, it's actually almost twice as long at 368 pages. Granted, there's less text packed into those 368 pages than you might expect; the font size and line spacing are larger than a typical paperback novel. (It's a nice gesture to reduce eyestrain, but I'll bet it's no accident that this printing style also pads the page count.) Most of this page count is dedicated to the actual text of the novel, plus a few extra pages containing an illustrated cast of major characters; brief afterwords from Tohma and Fujishima; and short biographies of Tohma, Fujishima, and Matsubara.

Text:

Although First End's length puts it closer to a standard novelette than your typical Japanese light novel, the vocabulary and sentence complexity are aimed at about the same young adult level. It's not Hemingway by any stretch of the imagination, but it gets the job done.

There are a few minor errors in the text here and there, such as missing closing quotes; but the typo count is on par with most professional publications of this length. There's one confusing inconsistency in the script towards the end involving the contents of a handwritten note; without giving too much away about the ending, I'm not sure if this discrepancy is a translation error or a deliberate part of the plot.

Contents: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)

Surprisingly enough for the newest entry in a franchise that's known for maintaining the status quo, First End starts off a on pretty bold note: Tohma kills off the main character in the novel's very first act, triggering a literal reboot of the Oh My Goddess! canon. After a freak motorcycle accident takes Keiichi's life, the goddesses receive a frantic phone call from Peorth warning them of Yggdrasil's imminent collapse. While scrambling about to save what's left of Heaven's infrastructure, Urd determines that these two tragedies couldn't possibly be a coincidence; she suggests to Peorth that Keiichi's constant proximity to Belldandy has caused him to become a pivotal part of Yggdrasil's core. Fortunately for the goddesses, Yggdrasil has a long-forgotten feature designed to fend off these very kinds of disasters. Yggdrasil automatically takes a snapshot of the system state whenever a goddess makes a contract with a human being: in other words, Urd has a system restore point for the whole universe at her disposal. With only minutes left in the current universe's lifespan, Belldandy and Skuld frantically help Urd reset the universe's state to the last safe snapshot, which was taken when Belldandy and Keiichi first met.

When Urd comes to in the newly-rebooted universe, she's surprised to discover a flaw in the reset procedure: she's retained all her memories prior to the reboot, something even her sisters haven't managed to do. Bringing Belldandy and Skuld up to speed on the situation is easy, thanks to the goddess' ability to pool their collective memories. What's less simple is finding a way to leverage these memories in order to prevent the universe from falling into a perpetual loop of destruction and rebooting. Belldandy is horrified when she recalls that her relationship with Keiichi is what ultimately brought down the last universe -- and that saving the current universe would therefore require keeping Keiichi at an emotional distance.

Despite Belldandy's best (and usually failed) efforts to keep her feelings for Keiichi at bay, she soon notices ominous signs that don't bode well for the universe's fate. Natural entities like ancient trees and snowdrifts start rejecting her spells, something that never happened prior to the reset. Even more troubling is the sudden appearance of a ghost in the courtyard of Nekomi Tech, which the goddesses are forced to contain before it manages to engulf Keiichi. It probably shouldn't come as a huge surprise to the reader that these happenings are all connected to Urd's unexplained ability to retain her pre-reset memories; but with the collapse of the universe seemingly accelerating, Urd is left with limited time to track down the connection and rectify it.

Comments
The Oh My Goddess! franchise really has one goal at its core: to give its readers a warm-'n'-fuzzy feeling inside. (Plus, arguably, to give fanboys a chance to ogle their favorite female cast members ... but that's another discussion for another time.) So it's not all that surprising that the first Oh My Goddess! novel is cut from essentially the same cloth, only distilled into a purely text form. The basic cast of characters hasn't really changed at all from the manga or its anime adaptation: Keiichi is still a loveable loser, Belldandy is just as ridiculously patient as always, and her sisters are always building robots or casting spells to get them out of their predicaments. Despite destroying the universe in the novel's opening act, Tohma isn't really trying to break any new dramatic or artistic ground here: First End is very much made to appeal to Oh My Goddess! fans' sense of familiarity, from the saccharine relationship between Keiichi and Belldandy right down to the nonsensical mix of traditional Norse mythology and computer buzzwords.

One of the ways that First End sticks so close to the franchise formula is by literally replaying plot points that have already occurred in the series' canon. This is probably the biggest beef I had with the novel; its middle act often reads a lot like an "Oh My Goddess!'s Greatest Hits" compilation as Keiichi relives pivotal events in his previous life with Belldandy. Granted, it's technically brand-new material here, since the goddesses react to the rebooted Keiichi with their old memories intact. Still, it feels like so much of this repeated material is just there to pad the novel's length; if these recycled scenes were warm-'n'-fuzzy the first time around, they're more room-temperature-'n'-crusty now that we know full well how they're going to turn out. It doesn't help that Belldandy literally thinks over which events are re-runs and which are new material through the course of the storyline, as if to add insult to injury.

But despite all the repetition, First End still has a certain, almost-inexplicable appeal. Though First End doesn't have the luxury of falling back on visual gags when things get slow -- or maybe because it doesn't -- I still found First End to be a generally entertaining read throughout. Some of this can be chalked up to the fact that Tohma rectifies upon one of the things that's kind of annoyed me about most incarnations of Oh My Goddess!: Belldandy's pushover personality. In First End, her characterization is subtly strengthened to the point where she actually stands apart as an interesting character in her own right, not just as a foil for the antics of her sisters and Keiichi. (Portions of this evolution can be explained simply by the plot forcing Belldandy to keep an emotional distance from Keiichi, but I'm guessing that having a female author also played a significant role here.)

In the end, I think most fans will be satisfied with how well Oh My Goddess! has managed the transition to novel form. Even with the visual element almost completely removed from the equation, First End is essentially the same Oh My Goddess! that fans have come to know and love over the years; and any new novel that brings new material will probably be a welcome one, even if it brings a lot of old baggage along with it. For people who aren't really into the franchise, it's a harder sell: after all, when it comes down to it, we're talking about a novel with a plot apparently inspired by a Windows XP feature. And readers like myself, who see Oh My Goddess! as kind of a guilty pleasure, will probably roll their eyes at the sappiness and absurdity of the plot in-between fits of self-consciousness for finding the book so damned entertaining.