Ghost Hunt

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Ghost Hunt is a horror manga, although by today's standards I would call it a thriller with great comedy and a hint of romance. The plot is relatively simple, 16-year-old Mai encounters a group of people who deal with ghosts. We have a young man who owns a ghost hunter agency, nicknamed Naru by Mai because of his narcissistic tendencies; a priestess with heavy makeup who wants to get a boyfriend, an ex-monk/band guitarist, a TV persona who's a psychic medium and a young exorcist from Australia who believes the Kyoto dialect is the polite form of Japanese language. After experiencing how they work and ... destroying Naru's camera accidentally, Mai becomes his assistant at his agency and they all work together to solve paranormal cases.

If you haven't guessed from my synopsis yet, this is a very fun story with an eccentric cast of characters. The story has an episodic nature, but every case is interesting because of all the new information we get about the paranormal and also the delightful interactions of the cast. They all play off each other very well and you never feel like they shouldn't be a part of the narrative. Although I said that the story is episodic, it doesn't mean that it's repetative. Through every volume, we always get new additional info about the main characters and that's how the main mysteries of the plot slowly come together.

And I cannot finish my review without talking about the art. It's absolutely gorgeous, the inking, the shading, they all just look so good while the characters are distinctive and you can easily tell them apart. It was such a pleasure looking at every page. I cannot recommend this series enough, it's a hidden gem if you like a good old msytery series.

Ghost Hunt is a very good manga, it deceives by the charisma and lightness of the characters to hide the horror force of the story. But let's go by parts:

The characters are very charismatic and the dynamic between them is really fun. This family atmosphere gives the work such a lightness that it's easy to forget that it's a horror story, and that's good because it shows that the characters are engaging enough to keep you in their rhythm.

The protagonist, Mai, is complicated.... She has a very aggressive and responsive side, and that's good because she constantly imposes herself instead of just being an innocent ... girl. However, it also tires how dense she can be... Seriously, the plot would move much faster if she didn't stay in denial and take action when things happen to her! Seriously, all she had to do was tell someone in the group that a lot of things would be resolved easier.

The story is pretty cool, it is told by cases that the group solves while building something bigger. This is really cool, as several clues and details are released that prove to be important in the final stretch of the story, giving a feeling of something well planned.
By the way, the cases are also very engaging. The author explored different types of terror from psychological to something more visceral.

My only criticism is in relation to the author's writing that can be very tiring to read, full of assumptions and information that leaves the story very loaded instead of being more objective when mysteries. Despite being positive at times, it also allows you to scrutinize the case they are dealing with.

The art is beautiful, nothing exceptional but very functional.

I became interested in this manga purely as a fan of Twelve Kingdoms and wanted to see what other things Fuyumi Ono had created. I've just finished reading Ghost Hunt and I guess I'm left pretty disappointed. Unlike Twelve Kingdoms, I felt there was little to no character development. Up until the very last volume, the manga is purely episodic stories with only the vaguest of callbacks from case to case. Even the characters themselves finally realize in the final volume that they know absolutely nothing about the people they have been working with for presumably months.

When an actual plot did emerge, I thought it ... was engaging and really well developed. Really, if the entire story had been like volume 12, I would have given this an 8 or 9. But after slogging through 11 volumes (honestly, around volume 3 or 4 I almost just gave up), we've only just finally learning some depth to the characters, but by now it's hard to even care.

So I guess, if you were like me and are now reading this review because you can't decide whether its worth it to continue, skip right to the very last volume as anything you could possibly miss is going to be summarized again for you anyway. Heck, you could probably just read volumes 1 and 12 and have a better experience than I did.