The three sisters, Belldandy, Urd, and Skuld are back. We last saw them starring in their own feature film, Ah! My Goddess the Movie, in which Belldandy met up with a figure from her past that nearly destroyed creation as we know it. That movie seems to have earned Ah! My Goddess the respect it deserves, because wouldn’t you know it? It's been turned into a television show!

Ah! My Goddess (sometimes rendered Oh My Goddess!) follows the adventures of a down-on-his-luck student named Keiichi Morisato. An enthusiastic member of his university's auto club, his membership has been fraught with problems thanks to his overzealous seniors, a pair of musclemen known as Dai and Den. This, combined with his monetary and social problems has given him no end of trouble in his post-secondary life, rendering him a truly miserable young man.

One day, left alone to take care of the auto club's dorm, he decides to order food. Lo and behold, he dials a wrong number and gets the "Goddess Help Line." Not taking things seriously, he asks for help and finds, much to his surprise, a goddess leaping through a mirror in the room. She hands the startled Keiichi a business card, introduces herself as Belldandy, and thus the story begins.

Ah! My Goddess began as a manga, got turned into an OVA, and then spawned the aforementioned movie, and all the while people were waiting for a television adaptation. The OVAs were well made, but they compressed a lot of the plot elements adapted from the manga, leaving viewers with the impression things hadn't developed nearly as well as they should have.

In particular, characters like the goddess Peorth got shifted to the background and only made brief appearances. If a person weren't already up to date with the manga, they would most likely be lost as to who she was, outside of yet another heavenly figure. This is an unfortunate staple of certain manga and anime productions, including another popular series: Sakura Taisen.

This is relevant largely because the two series share the same artist: Kosuke Fujishima. He designed the characters for both and wrote the original Ah! My Goddess manga. Sakura Taisen (Sakura Wars in North America) started as a video game series and was turned into several OVAs, just like Ah! My Goddess. Both series suffered from rushed sequencing, movies which brought in supporting characters with little development, and it wouldn't be until much more recently that either got their own TV adaptations.

It seems Kosuke had a bit of a curse following him around for a time. But enough of the history lesson. The TV adaptation is here and rolling. It begins much the same way the OVAs do, and if one has seen the original productions, they can pretty much skip the first DVD. But then things change, mostly for the better.

For those unfamiliar with the basic character relationships, Belldandy is the goddess assigned to help Keiichi in his life. She is allowed to grant him a wish, and in his disbelief of her powers, he asks for someone to stay with him the rest of his life. Someone very much like Belldandy.

What you hear is in fact the sound of a fan being splattered with something incredibly unpleasant.

Belldandy misinterprets Keiichi's cry for a steady girlfriend and assigns herself to be his constant companion. Oddly enough, the wish is approved by the Heavenly system, a move which will later cause certain problems on a cosmic scale.

It only goes up from there, with Keiichi being thrown out of his dorm for bringing a woman over (the auto club has problems with "women invading their sacred shrine of manliness"), meeting Belldandy's sisters who do little else but cause Keiichi headaches, and of course, the fact that Heaven is frequently interfering with Keiichi's poor mortal life from then on.

With that introduction out of the way, let's look at the positive aspects of the TV series.

One major sigh of relief came to me when they introduced Keiichi's little sister, Megumi. She appears in the movie (and I think in the OVA, but it's been awhile), but never really figures into anything that heavily. Her presence in the movie is supportive, but anyone unfamiliar with her beforehand will probably not appreciate who she is. The TV series remedies this, along with the roles of Den-chan and Dai-chan (I refer to them with the honourifics largely because they’re used all the time), not to mention Peorth and the others.

This expansion alone makes Ah! My Goddess TV a much better product than either the OVAs or the movie. They have their strengths of course, featuring higher quality animation, more elaborate character designs, more special effects, and so on. Still, the series's true strength is its story, something which comes across much more fully in the TV adaptation.

It's not all good however, and minor things began to annoy me as I continued watching the series. One thing was Belldandy's continuous use of "Hai!" in the original Japanese track. I rarely watch anything dubbed and this is no exception, so I can't really comment on if this was continued in English. If it was, God help us all. Its frequent overuse is in keeping with her agreeable, adorable character, but it begins to grate on the ears when she's doing it six or seven times in a row.

There are also places where the animation simply isn't doing its work. With Ah! My Goddess, there's an expectation for the animation to be exceptional, but there are obvious constraints that come with a television budget. Certainly, it does not suffer nearly as much in this field as either Sakura Wars TV did, but it still feels bland every now and again, which is a shame considering how gorgeous the OVAs and movie were.

The bulk of the visuals do their work just fine, however, especially where mechanics are concerned. Kosuke's interest in cars and motorcycles is nothing new, and comes through not only in Ah! My Goddess, but other productions like You're Under Arrest!. The attention to mechanical details is refreshing, and helps justify the flatness of duller sequences where the characters just sit around talking.

The sound is good, save for the occasional overuse of "Hai!" from Belldandy, and the subtitles are quite clear. There's an occasional deviance from the original Japanese, and it is very much an interpreted sub, but it reads quite naturally and still retains the essence of the Japanese recording.

Ah! My Goddess is a great series and well worth investing in -- especially now, when it's still fresh on the market. There's a wealth of Ah! My Goddess fans who have been just waiting for this production, and I'm glad to say it won't let them down. There are minor problems, but that's just it: They're minor. Nothing really gets in the way of enjoying this series, be you a new or old fan.