Dennou Kakugi MephistoWaltz

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I'm going to be honest, there is nothing in this manga that is new.

I came across it when I was looking through Okayusan's (the artist for this manga) manga list. For any that don't know them, they're a doujinshi artist that does some really quite exceptional art and so, seeing an actual published manga they had drawn, I decided that I would give it a try.

Short summary of opening story (skip if you want no spoilers):

The story starts with our MC, a talented pianist, performing Franz Liszt's Mephisto Waltz in a piano recital only to find that in the final few bars, he loses all ... movement in his fingers. Distraught by the loss of his primary skill and therefore future goals he despairs. It's a story we have heard before, only not done as well as others did it. Anyway, our MC mopes around for a bit before discovering an arcade fighting game through a video and is surprised to find the character being played, is a mirror image of himself. Intrigued, he sets out to find this game at his local arcade and the story continues from there.

Thoughts:

The art really elevates this work and is in my opinion the only thing that stands out. The characters are fairly bland, the story is very predictable and it's so short that it never really gets anywhere, ending almost abruptly as though there were plans for it to go further but it never did (it may have got cancelled I'm not sure).

But as I say, if you're going to read it for anything, read it for the art. Okayusan adds a great deal of detail to each drawing through prominent shadows. It gives the images much more depth and can make some really quite amazing pages that create a great sense of movement.
To summarise, unless you want to see some pretty eye-catching artwork, I'd give this one a miss.