About the Mangaka

Sadly no info available on Sakura Ken-ichi, if you have anything please drop me a line through the Contact Me page above.

About the Manga

If you’ve seen the anime, you’ll notice some differences right from the get go, mainly the lack of characters, and some personality changes. Three volumes in and to be honest I’m still drifting between loving the anime more, and then the manga hehe.

One of the other things you’ll notice is the art style is a bit, well, lacking, The basic designs are good, but at times Sakura-sensei has trouble drawing the characters. This is moist pronounced when drawing Chibi from certain angles, it ends up looking like a weird bunch of squiggles.

However that said, the story is enjoyable, if predictable. Following in the same strain as Digimon, Pokemon, and others, it’s a lazy kid gets drawn into saving a world after he’s sucked into a different world. It’s an age old formula, but with nothing added. In the end it’s nothing special, but is a good filler series.

Over the three volumes I have, we get to see Sakura-sensei’s style improve, but he always seems to be lacking skill, I’m hoping that over the fourteen volumes this series runs for he’ll improve more.

The problem I have with this series however is the pacing, to much happens to fast, I felt like I was on a roller coaster that was running out of control. The problem is there’s two parts to series, and only the first part deals with Reiji. So Sakura has to tell a fast story to get all of the story into the given volume numbers. Because of this it feels rushed, and at times excessively so.

Licensed by Viz, they did their usual hatchet job on the series. Why can’t their shonen editorial team do as good a job as their shojo team? Maybe they just don’t give a flying fudgicle, which makes sense give Viz’s attitude in general towards the fans.

However while the usual hatchet job is to be expected, and I can still enjoy some releases despite them, this one has some particularly bad bits.

Firstly, Reiji sounds lime a spaced out surfer brat half the time, this wouldn’t be to bad, if the rest of the characters weren’t just as spacey. I don’t think they sound that bad in the original, it feels like it was Viz’s usual attempt to try and add extra personality to the characters, rather than leaving them alone.

What’s even worse is their patchy use of honorifics makes me even madder. One minute we have them in (L-chan for example) and the next they go back to western styled titles (Miss Maiko). I don’t like it when they don’t use the Japanese honorifics, but I hate a thousand times more when they mix and match, cause they never match

They do the same with the various attacks as well, one minute he’s shouting Light Wave, and the next it’s Gouhadou. Pick one format and stick with it people!! mix and match doesn’t work in manga!!

Will I be buying the rest of the series? Probably, but not any time soon. I’ve to many titles I really want to get my teeth into before I start picking up titles like this, which I consider to be filler titles. However if you have some free cash lying around, it may be worth a read. But only if you like Digimon and Pokemon styled manga. If you don’t like those, then don’t bother with this one.

Finally, this doesn’t make the Essential Read list, to many flaws in Viz’s version, and not strong enough from Sakura-sensei.

Where to Buy

As always the Book Depository is the place to go, they have volumes 1-8 all available.