About the Mangaka

Not a lot available on Nanase Aoi sadly, beyond a list of her works. While she has a number of manga available, she has also worked on both anime and games as well, some of them fairly large ones. She has a personal website called Seventh Heaven, though it’s all in Japanese.

About the Manga

the cover art for the release i have has a slightly different cover, the titles is along the bottom of the book rather than the side.

Nanase-sensei’s art and story are awesome in this volume. The cover image says it all really, the stunning art carries on inside, though she does have a few hiccups.

This volume is a clear way of saying people need to move forward and accept themselves. The story Nanase writes has a lot of hidden meanings, that well, aren’t really hidden.

While it progresses well, it suffers from the same problem a lot of short, one volume stories do. The pace is to fast, at times i felt it was too fast, and that i was being swept along out of control, especially towards the end of the story.

To much is introduced to soon, and the characters don’t have the time to really show their stuff. Especially in the case of Yuina, the changes she goes through happen so fast it’s literally a personality change from one page to the next, and at one point from one panel to the next.

This hinders the growth of the characters a great deal, especially between Seraph and Yuina. This relationship should have been allowed time to breath and grow naturally rather than the forced and fast rate it does.

While the story isn’t particularly let down by the speed, even early on it’s clear that this is definitely a story that would of done a thousand times better if she’d been allowed to go over a few volumes, rather than a single volumes.

However what really lets the volume down is ADV’s publishing which is plain awful. We have an oddly sized volume, slightly shorter than the standard oversized, but wider. Making it stand out on the book shelf, and if its anywhere other than on the sides it looks fugly.

Next we have their sloppy translating, some of the words are translated to directly, and don’t take into account context. Also their editing is really bad, several times the panels are cut off, including a couple of sentences being cut through. Sloppy work on the editors side, as well as on the QC’ers side.

Then we have the biggest affront IMO, they removed the colour pages, which is really a shame because those pages are stunningly beautiful and extremely well done. Given the extended cost of the volume, i don’t see a justification for not leaving the colour pages in.

Finally, the paper. I’ve gone on in other posts about how bad the standard paper of manga is, well reduce that quality a dozen notches and you’ll have the quality of the ADV release. It’s so bad that almost all of the panels and art suffer from bleeding, and look like they have fur.

Nanase’s art, which is really beautiful, is butchered by the crappy paper.

I love this story, i ordered the Japanese version i loved it so much, and would love to add it to my Essential Read list, sadly the bad job of ADV means i can’t justify adding it.

Thankfully ADV have allowed the title to lapse into out of print and pulled it from their site. I’m hoping that another company comes along and buys the license from them, and does a proper job of it. Yeah i know, and pigs might fly, but a guy can dream

Where to Buy

Head on over to the Book Depository