Setting

The orphans Mai and Takumi are heading to the island of Fuka, where they will enter the Fuka academy where they just got a scholarship. In the middle of the trip, they see a girl on the water, and all the ship is mobilized to rescue her. Eventually, as Mai is the only one aboard (the crew members fell at the sea while saving the girl), she saves the girl, which is called Mikoto and carries a huge sword from which she refuses to let go. As they continue trip, a huge accident happens, and mystery on top of mystery appears. Everything, however, seams to be related to a strange red star right besides the moon that only Mai can see.

Pacing

Mai hime starts as your usual hero anime. Since we have actually 13 'Himes' (girls with special powers), half the title is devoted to introduce and further develop each character. However, little do they know of their horrible fate, and what was quite a clichéd title, with several predictable moments, ends up becoming a quite dense and dramatic title where A LOT of characters die.

With so many Himes and related characters, even with 26 episodes it's not possible to fully develop all of them, but the main characters are quite well developed and their past and personalities very well explored. The drama starts to get quite involving when you find the small detail behind the Himes, which by the way is quite innovative in my opinion, and this is what makes this title so different: if one of the Hime loose a battle, and for that they don't need to properly die, only their 'child' (a 'biological' mecha that obey to them) must be defeated, their most loved person will die, not them! Thus, if you loose, your beloved one, regardless who or where he/she is, will die.

Conclusion

Mai Hime took a quite common plot and made a few interesting subtle adjustments, making this quite different from the usual. The apparently simple idea behind the fact that not the Hime, but their most loved ones will perish if they loose, makes you start getting into your nerves: If you dislike one Hime and wish her dead, you might find out that you actually like the one she loves. Or, perhaps, you don't know how a given Hime loves and get surprised when someone you didn't expect end up dying out from nowhere. As a extra, the title introduces huge chains of relationships (A loves B who loves C who loves D ...), and from these arches, a lot can happen. What if, for instance, two himes love the same person? Trouble is on the way ...

With a top-notch animation quality, a deep and involving plot and a lot of twists and turns, Mai Hime is certainly something different that is worth to watch even if not only by that. Also, there is another 'detail' I did not mention, and is added in the final part, that makes this even better.

Get ready for some serious roller coaster of emotions.