About the Mangaka
Nothing available on Shinsuke Kurihashi.
About the Manga
I’m a fan of the anime, so I was hoping to enjoy the manga. Sadly that was not to be, the smallest issue being it’s only two volumes long *sigh*
This is one of those titles where I can’t find anything to praise. Though I will admit to one thing, the art is consistent, consistently bad that is.
The character designs are just plain horrid, though they are true to the anime (I didn’t like the char designs in that either). The character designs in the manga are worse than the anime, though that I attribute to the VA’s being missing from the manga.
I also found the interior designs to be seriously lacking. Okay sure it’s taking place on a spaceship so the designs are going to be limited, but I really wish Kurihashi had put more effort into the designs. All to often all we see is white space with a few lines drawn in it to ad a bit of perspective.
Where this series really fails though is in the adaptation. I don’t know who thought up the idea of compressing a twenty six episode series into a two volume series, but they should commit seppuku!!
From the outset the pacing of the story is so fast that the reader has no time to adjust or to get to grips with what’s going on. Given that Ryvius is a psychological series (in every sense of the word) this pace cripples the series.
It’s further hampered by the weird character developments. In the anime the development was more stable, and played out well over the course of the series. However in the manga it’s the reverse. Characters go from strangers to lovers to weirdoes in the space of a few pages. In the case of two characters this ruins one of the more dramatic and hard hitting relationships, reducing it to a confusing mess.
The focus of the story shifts in the manga as well, shifting from the boys to the girls. This could have proven interesting if there had been more volumes. However since the girls who are the focus (Aoi and her room mates), it’s made all the more disjointed by the fact they hardly ever know what’s going on. So as the events of the story unfold we only get a bare part of it.
In theory this is a novel, and possibly interesting approach. However it has to be handled carefully as the story requires a lot more work for it to succeed. An amazing anime series was reduced to a waste of paper.
I ordered the so called “Box Set” which includes the two volumes. However this is a major miss-representation on the part of DrMaster since it’s not a Box Set. Hell I wouldn’t even consider it a set. What they did was took the old ComicsOne version of volume one, and shrink-wrapped it to a copy of the new DrMaster volume two. No box, and definitely not a set. Though given how cheap it sells for, that’s not so bad (£5.49 from Play.com).
However you do get what you pay for, the paper is crappy and has a scummy feel to it. The translation is a bit screwy at times, but most of all the editor seems to forget they’re supposed to be going right to left, As a result several times for no apparent reason, the wording is flipped and reads left to right. They then realised and went back to right to left.
Needless to say this goes on my Junk Pile, hell I’d put it in the incinerator!!
Where to Buy
July 27, 2009 @ 10:15.
Of course – there is pretty much no such thing as a manga that’s based on an anime that’s any good unless it’s an alternate universe retelling. PERIOD. This is just further proving the point. NEVER AGAIN.
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