Oh My Goddess!: The Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses

See what goes on in the life of Keiichi Morisoto and the goddess sisters in between their regular adventures. As some of you may know, this was turned into an anime series that spans over four DVDs. There are some simularities and some differences between the anime and the manga "Mini-Goddess" stories. The tone of both versions of Mini-Goddess is solely wacky comedy without the drama. They are a series of very short stories, (the manga stories are about a page long consisting of four panels each, with a few multi-part stories, the anime stories are each five and a half minutes, with a few multi-part stories.) The primary focus of the manga and anime Mini-Goddess is on Urd, much more so than on Skuld or Belldandy, (or Keiichi,) and it has the goddess sisters speaking to and interacting with house hold rodents. A few manga stories made it directly to the anime-Urd baby sits rat children, Urd plays fortune teller to help a rat find his significant other, Urd and Skuld play base ball and each sub-divide herself to form a team, the goddesses and a rat form a rock n' roll band. Now for the differences. In the anime, there is one rat in particular named Gan who is also at the center of things, while in the manga most of the rats don't have a name so we can't tell if it's the same one in most of the stories or not. Keiichi makes an appearence in some of the manga stories, while in the anime he is only heard breifly in about three episodes, and is never actually seen. And except for the specific episodes mentioned earlier, none of the manga stories made it to the anime, all the other anime Mini-Goddess stories were made origonally for the anime. There is alot more breaking of the fourth wall in the anime, and a few Urusei Yatsura-type episodes that end with a major problem that is never resolved, only forgotten. (In the last anime episode with Gabira, the Godzilla-type monster that Gan turns into, he and a mechanized robot rat are drinking sake, and we never see him turn back to normal.) But anyway, this is a good investment if you like OH, MY GODDESS! and you don't mind reading stories where they aren't facing any terrible crisis or going through character-developing experiences, but are good just for light entertainment and some good laughs.

As an earlier reviewer said this is for hardcore goddess fans only, and being one of those thsi book appeals to me. The humor is quite strange. We rarely see Keiichi or Belldandy. Urd and Skuld are the main characters as well as a rat nicknamed Gan-chan. The reader is expoused to goddess volley ball and baseball games. the two teams are made up of divided Skulds and Urds. We also get to see what happens when Urd divides too much. Fun stuff, but only for a mega fan of the series.

This book contains a number of four-panel cartoon strips which feature the cast of the regular Oh My Goddess! series except that the goddess are are now approximatly the same size as rats. They prance through the book in their mini state interacting with crickets, slugs, and rats. While it's all very cute I won't reccomend it to anyone who isn't all ready a pretty big fan of Oh My Goddess! because it doesn't really make sense unless you're all ready familar with the characters. It doesn't really have a plot, but that's the way it's intended to be. Cute, funny, and short. And it has succeeded admirably.