Defense Devil

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We all know that we have a “Butler from Hell”- Kuroshitsuji. Now what do we have? – “Lawyer from Hell” – Defense Devil.

Meet Mephisto Bart Kucabara. He was a prince from the Demon world but was banished due to some reasons ( I don’t wanna spoil here), and now he lives in Event Horizon. A place between heaven and hell. In order to get back to his home, he must collect this so called “Dark Matter” from souls who were casts to hell.. He then decided to become a defense lawyer. They let their client(the dead) sign a contract, prove their innocence and claim the ... Dark Matter within them after the case is solved.

At first glace, this manga is just about solving cases. Kucabara meets a soul, lets them sign a contract, finds out the cause of death and the offense they’ve committed before they died, prove their innocence and collect dark matter afterwards. It goes for about 4-5 chapters, but I must say the cases are all interesting – detective stories that have supernatural events. That’s for the introductory part. The story starts to pick up when he meets Sister Idamaria. As the story progresses, it reveals more mysteries, and the questions are slowly answered. The plot would make you say “What!?” or “Holy!?”. It reveals answers slowly but surely. It doesn’t give readers a full blown answer at once that would make them hard to understand or something like introducing many characters at once. As for the art, it is nicely done. Kinda reminds me of Air gear when I first read it.

Overall Defense Devil is a nice action packed manga with a dash of comedy that will make you ask for more. You guys have to read it while it’s still less than 100 chapters. As for the number of pages, it spans just like your regular shounen jump manga (18-20 pages except for the first few chapters). Trust me, this manga won’t let you down.

A very big thanks to YoruAngel866 for recommending me this manga or else I would have missed one of the most epic manga of this time.

PS. I would still like to write more but I think I might spoil you guys so there just read and see for yourself.

This manga is one that sets up an interesting premise, story and tone. In order to throw it out the window when it thought it had your attention. To be honest I feel a little betrayed by the direction of this work, as I really enjoyed the opening few chapters.

Story - 4
The story is windy and twisty in that terrible kind of way where you get the feeling things change because the author woke up feeling like that one day. Entire ideas are thrown out at the drop of the hat. The first chapters are the best because not only do characters have a ... clear goal, but there are also clear consequences for failure. You feel invested. But then it just goes off in another direction with very little connection the previous chapters. I don't think this was intentional and the whole story suffers for it.

Art - 8
What saves this from being a 5 or even a 4 is it's art. While the panels can be uninspired and the direction can be a little cloudy at times. Overall it is detailed, on model, dramatic and intense. The heavy shading lends itself to scenes and the posing is top notch. I never felt like I was struggling to make out detail and your eyes moved in a very intentional way across images and pages. It's not as spectacular as say, Made in Abyss, but it is pretty great.

Character - 6
What can I say? None of the characters are bad per say, but they do get weaker as the manga goes on and has less time to spend on introduced characters as it tries to explain it's convoluted plot and who knew what at which time. Bichura is probably the most fleshed out and he's my favorite. Strangely, we find out much about our main - Kucabara - through the perspective of others (inspections and inner voices), and it makes him feel disconnected from the story.

Enjoyment - 4
As I said, I feel betrayed, the story the manga gets around to telling after 30 chapters does have a... conclusion? Would have been better without that final chapter wrapping everything up. I did enjoy the first couple chapters, and I enjoyed the art, but I just wish I could care about anything in the story - I didn't because nothing seemed to matter later on. Infuriating, dragged out and fickle.

Overall - 6
The Art elevates this series higher than average, and I do think Some good ideas are tossed around, the means to execute on them even. It just seemed like 'Defense Devil' isn't and never was the story the author wanted to tell.

Defense Devil

If anyone should ever ask me which work I see as the greatest waste of potential, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to name "Defense Devil".
This work has an excellent style and a very good presentation. I have to give him this at least. I also found some of the beginnings of the plot to be okay. I still have to pat myself on the back and praise myself for getting these 100 chapters over with.

Plotholes like no other title. Not even the writer himself apparently had any interest in explaining something and simply threw something down so that it somehow fits the situation ... but fundamentally contradicts everything else that was previously. And this on a continuous loop.

Implementation was purely amateur work. I can hardly believe that there is such an elaborate and detailed style, but the actual implementation of the scenes, dialogues and story is purely amateur work. It is definitely one of the top 10 works I've seen in 20 years that have achieved such a result.

Clichés beyond my imagination. This work used more clichés than I could spontaneously list. Half of the chapters were horribly monotonous and practically repeated in terms of content. Each character had almost only 10 sentences that he played like a recording device. Especially the female protagonist. And especially the fact that the characters constantly look so surprised with sparkling eyes. Well and good, one is just surprised by something. But whenever the protagonist says something, his counterpart looks at him with googly eyes as if their worldview has changed. No lie, in some chapters this happened up to 10x and in the whole manga probably around 200x and I would probably make the effort to list it again.

Fan service, if nothing helps and you fail everywhere, why not insert 5 nude scenes, 300x panty shots. And bathing scenes in between. This should make up for the lack of quality, right?


These 4 would be the apocalyptic horsemen of pain that I met. But no, it couldn't stay that way. The actual main story and the characters gave me one chop after the other on a loop.

Story

The story is quite promising at first. One wonders first and foremost what the background of the protagonist is and how his work as a lawyer will be shaped. Well, his work as a lawyer is completely meaningless and irrelevant to the plot. So irrelevant that you could almost skip Chapters 1-15, there wouldn't be a few characters introduced.

Around Chapter 30, the Hell Arc begins, which literally stretches to the end. In other words, only chapters 1-15 are associated with the work of unworldly. The rest is endless fights and fan service.

The background stories were at least subtle, so at least I wasn't disappointed. As for the main story itself and the twists and turns later, that's a whole different story. That the story was immensely transparent is not necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is that the story had a bottomless number of plotholes, a bad narrative, bad twists and turns and an extremely poor conclusion.

The power system in the factory was also completely defaced, almost reminding me of the good times in Dragon Ball Z - Namek Arc.

Drawing/illustration

The drawings were visually very attractive, as was the design. Particularly with the weapons and characters, immense effort had been made. Backgrounds were also optically pleasant at the beginning, but rather poor towards the end. The detailed physique of the women was not held back either.

Characters

Where should I start? The protagonist, he is not hateful, but he is also not likeable. He is a common good guy hypocrite and has a caliber of about 30 different words in his vocabulary. And somehow it ends in one fan service scene after the other with the protagonist. He also has no depth or character development.

The protagonist is by far one of the worst female protagonists you can imagine. Has hardly any dialogues, rattles the same about demons without end and is abused at every opportunity for fan service and offers no character.
And once again this work has helped me to show a new perspective.

The remaining supporting characters are mostly irrelevant and uninteresting. There was an interesting approach and some poorly written development with at least one antagonist, but nothing else.

The opponents in this work were by far a complete waste of time. Their ambitions and their resolution have been so shallow, I wasn't even sure if that was going to be some kind of twist.


Conclusion

This title is definitely useful for newcomers who have neither claims nor experience. However, everyone who is already familiar with Manga and Anime is confronted with a huge problem here. So much could have been done better with this work. But where the talent or experience is missing, there is not much that can be done.


Annotation!

Whoever is addressed by the description of the work, no, this work has almost nothing to do with the concept of "demon world". There are only 4 different cases in the entire work, whereas one was generally only rushed because it was only supposed to introduce in Chapter 1. The second and third cases were terribly boring and the final case was only resolved by force. Say this is mostly a shounen, whose chapters are only felt with fights and with fan service.