About the Mangaka
Tomizawa Hitoshi is a self taught mangaka, as in he hasn’t had any formal training. Alien 9 is his best known work, though he has worked on several others including Battle Royale II.
About the Manga
Emulators, like it’s predecessor, has nice art but sucks at everything else. Or rather it takes the whole suck fest to an entire new low.
Once again we get some sweet art, but I felt it was lacking at times in this volume. Especially when it came to close ups with the faces. Unfortunately this could have had the best art in the world and it wouldn’t have been able to improve it any.
The story is just as out of whack in this volume as it was in the previous three, and things still don’t make sense.
The girls move up to Junior High, and for some reason their stint as the Alien Club continues, what was supposed to be a single year carries on, with no explanation as to why.
We get introduced with a new girl, who seems worse than Otani. What’s more Otani reverts to being useless again. When I saw this I shook me head in disgust, she was made into a new level of alien in the previous series, now we’re back to scratch.
The yuri element is drawn out a bit more in this volume, though it’s still not overly pronounced. In this case it’s used as a story hook for Kasumi flipping out and trying to force Otani and Kumi to blend.
What’s more is that this volume isn’t really a story, it just dumps a load of info, has two of the main characters leave and then starts an entirely new story. I was left with a WTF feeling.
It’s a shame really, since the plot and hooks of the story are pretty interesting and would have been a good story.
On my previous review of the Alien Nine Ultimate Edition, Adam Stephanides commented that an explanation is given in Volume three, in the ‘Story so Far’ section, though disjointed. And he’s right, though it makes the series even more disjointed lol.
Unfortunately that’s the wrong place to have the explanation, it should have been explained within the manga itself, not in a few paragraphs at the beginning of the third volume. What was the point of reading the preceding volumes? may have well as just read the paragraph in volume three and saved time.
I really was looking for something to say was good about the volume, but I honestly can’t say it about anything. I would love to say the art is great, but I found that while at times it was, generally it wasn’t up to the previous volumes standards.
Once again I wondered if a bad translation was responsible and did some digging, but apparently CPM did a fairly decent job on the translations, even if the paper sucks bad.
Sadly, Emulators doesn’t revive the series, and in fact causes it to slip further down my Junk Pile list. Thankfully it’s OOP now and hard to get, I can’t really see people paying $40 for it 
Let it fall into the great garbage scow in the sky never to darken the shelves of stores or fans again.
But, if you really want it….
Where to Buy
May 4, 2009 @ 09:45.
I’m what you would call a fan of the original Alien 9 series, though I have no illusions of its numerous flaws. I haven’t read Emulators, but every review I’ve read says it should stay that way. What I really want is a completion of the anime version of the original manga. I liked a lot of things the anime did, like cranking up the WTF level to 11 (Yuri’s dreams were awesome) and smoothing out pacing (one episode devoted to the summer vacation was well used to established the characters in a “normal” setting and became a benchmark that we could measure their development throughout the series), and generally making more(?) sense. The manga set out with some unique ideas, but the anime took them and executed the game plan to near perfection.