About the Mangaka

Iwahara Yuji is the master mind behind Koudelka, which remains unlicensed , and also for Chikyu Misaki, licensed by CMX. He also helped with character designs in the Darker than Black anime.

About the Manga

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Overall I found this volume a bit lacking, though it did have some fun moments.

Yuji’s art this volume isn’t really improved from the previous volume, though it is more polished and has a crisper feel to it. I was also impressed with several of the outside scenes, which I thought were extremely well drawn, and did convey a sense of awe at times.

The colour pages in this volume are a huge disappointment, especially if you  compare them to last volumes. The first one with Yumi and Kansuke is okay, but it feels plain and uninspired. After that it gets decidedly worse, when I first saw the following pages I felt (and still do) that they’d been made with a computer, they have that rigid, un-lifelike feel to them.

I have to admit, I still don’t like the character designs in this series, and I doubt I ever will. As this volume went by I grew all the more certain of my dislike of the character designs. Once again Akifuji just looks evil, and in a way more evil than Kaen the head honcho of the evil guys.

But it’s no just his design in this volume, several of the other characters have weird designs to them that really don’t do them justice, to many of them to list really. Though I will admit that there are several characters that do get some well drawn bits, but mostly I just can’t get into them.

I’m not overly keen on the story either this volume. Not really sure why, but it felt a bit forced, and didn’t really flow very well. There were several times in this volume I really hated Yumi, and frankly would of slapped her one >.<

However it did settle down towards the end, and I liked the final fight, and the bit of comedy towards the end. There was no real character development either, or anything that you can consider development, which I think hinders this volume badly. Fuji set up the previous volume fairly well, but now it seems to have floundered.

Hopefully the next volume will fill the gap left by this one, and give more of an explanation as to what’s really going on. If it ends up being a monster of the week sort of thing, it’ll be very disappointing.

Yen do a fairly decent job all told, however I noticed the cover art seems to be subtly different. For example if you look at the image above it’s bright and vibrant, and IMO not a bad cover. Like the first one it has a bit to much empty space for me, but over all I liked it. However when I actually got the volume the front cover, while the same, is also different. It’s dark, dank, and frankly looks naff.

I also, for the first time, have concerns over the translation of the text. While I’m 99.9% certain that it’s Fuji’s fault for a bit of bad writing, something about the way it reads just feels totally wrong to me.

Sadly it also has some guttering, though not as bad as some I’ve read, there were a few times I was having to bend the spine. Overall this is the first time I’ve had so many cripes with a Yen Press release, took me a bit by surprise to be honest.

As I said though, this volume did have a few good moments towards the end, and my curiosity raised from the first volume  is still there. I still want to see where things are going to go, and how it will play out. However I’m doubtful I’ll ever add it to my Essential Read list.

Where to Buy

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