Wow...this episode sucks on too many levels.

1) Animation is beyond horrible. They appear to have used approximately 600 yen on this episode.
2) The storyboarding was done severely intoxicated. There was absolutely no flow, none of it made any sense unless you had read the manga.
3) I believe it was at least 4 chapters of the manga. Now, that's not bad for a series like...Bleach or Naruto, where most of the panels are taken up by action and it's 10+ chapters to a volume. R+V has only four chapter to a volume.

That's right, this was vaguely an entire volume of manga crammed into a single episode.

This arc of the manga was pretty good, one of the better ones the series had to offer, but they really turned it to shit. It's not enough to make me drop the series, because I still have a lot of hope it can turn around with the number of episodes they have left, but don't let this abomination of an episode turn you away from this series too quickly. (Unless...I won't spoil, but it would be pretty easy for them to compound this fuckup, I hope they don't utterly bastardize the storyline to do it.)


Now, I can honestly say that this has been one of the worst adaptations of a pretty decent manga. Still, it's certainly not Negima! (or Negima? or Negima Live Action). So far, it's probably been around the levels of Black Cat. Badly done and ruins a good storyline by adding in crap with the bat (in the manga simple narration) or cutting out decent storylines to fill the harem as quickly and pointlessly as possible. But they could have still saved it if this series was 24 or 26 instead of 13. There probably isn't too much hope for it now, but I might as well see it through.