Torikago no Tsugai
Birdcage Castle

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Torikago no Tsugai is a short mystery manga about a group of characters that try to survive in a death game ruled by an mysterious person disguised as an owl that has some complex with birds and couples.

Story: 7

The story isn't very much original, has a lot of clichés, and felt a lot rushed at the end, but sometimes it is very realistic and has some plot twists.

Art: 6

The art is pretty much average, nothing to complain about but nothing to praise.

... Character: 6

In Torikago the characters are somehow interisting, but because the manga is too short some of them don't get enough developement and the ones that are given screen time don't have a too deep story.

Enjoyment: 6

It was a pretty entertaining manga, then it became rushed and i felt disappointed because of the lost potential.

Overall: 6.5

Torikago no Tsugai is an above average story, with some undeveloped characters and a rushed end.It is a manga for those who are fans of the mystery genre and want a short story.

WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD
(Side note: one of the first reviews I’ve written and it’s 4 am)


Story - 6

The story revolves around pairs going into a death game of sorts chained together. The story really hammers in the themes of no regrets with how the pairs can’t go back after walking in certain rooms. I felt that the ending was very rushed with how twist was reliant on the main character not remembering one of the other characters in a flashback as a child. It also relies on the cliche of “the villain is the one who suggested we should do the thing”.


Art ... - 7

The art is pretty good and the manga’s plot doesn’t really require stellar art design

Characters - 6

At least half of the characters are like really dumb. The “I know everything but I’m going to let everything play out” archetype is in this manga and I think he’s a good character. As said in the story section, the main antagonist is pretty weak and really drags down the story due to a lack of build-up. I like how the main character has the mumbling/thinking mechanism he has. I haven’t seen another character have this trait and the reason behind it is realistic.

Enjoyment - 7

I may sound like a broken record here but the ending really soured the manga for me. Overall it was enjoyable until that point.

Overall - 6

I probably won’t remember this manga in a week but it was a good read at the time I read it.

This review may content spoilers
(TL;DR at the end)

I really like to give chances to mangas that didn't get an anime adaptation yet, I makes me feel like I'm in a team where I have to raise a voice to make an adaptation real. But man, in all of the manga that I've read, Torikago no Trugai was BORING. It was so boring that while I was reading it the first four chapters, I wanted to get an overview of the mangaka himself, Toutarou Minami. Then I saw that it was the first manga he ever wrote. "Good", it answered a lot of question that I ... was asking to myself: "Why is the story kind of unoriginal? Why does it feel rushed? Why are the characters forgettable?"

We follow the story of 6 characters, all named differently and all refered to a specific bird. They all heard about a castle in an amusement park named the Birdcage Castle where if you get inside with the one you love, you can both get your wishes granted. They also heard that their friend Kumo Shirasagi got lost in that same castle too. So, like all normal human beings, they search for her by getting into the Birdcage Castle, which turned out to be a bad idea. They're now prisonner to that maze without end. If you can't successfully pass the puzzles in pairs, you'll die. "Who's the one behing the bird mask that trapped all the people inside?"

Do you feel like you've heard of this kind of synopsis before? I can feel the fact that it was done a bajillion of times, but THIS time it's unique, because of one specific thing making it different to the others. Like, I GET IT, THERE'S REFERENCES TO BIRDS! Don't make me feel like that I don't know what a BIRD is by talking about it each time they solve a puzzle. Bird button, Bird dilemma, Bird books, BIRD ROAD, DUDE! I just found it annoying that the whole aspect of the story is the fact that the characters must have knowledges about birds to solve all of the deadly puzzles. At this point, they're just lucky to be alive for four volumes by knowing that a bird have wings. And I hate when chance is involved, because they could just throw us a big bird mecha that they could beat with power of love, which is also involved, and justify it by chance.

A dead game in manga is mostly known to be challenging, surnatural, inhuman and mostly DEADLY. What was all of that? Like I said, "Bird button: Push the button correctly by someone with a pure heart or you'll die"? I also read Real Account, which is also a manga as stupid as it sounds, but better, and the "Bird button" challenge just feels like a joke compared to "Make sure your opponent get exposed, so he'll lose his subscribers and DIE." At least, we can see some challenge and strategy behind this, but the "Bird button", it's chance! And even if I talk about the other challenges, "You have 3 keys in a vending machine, so you have 1/3 chances of guessing the right one"... The characters are lucky like hell!

Speaking of which, the characters are so bad and generic. I'll try my best to not make it long, so here's a little description of the main ones:
Gin, the dark boy that don't have many friend but Kumo (hope y'all remembered her) that doesn't give a shit to found her without any circounstance and don't have a mother because she DIED;
Yuki, that one girl that knows everything about all the mysterious things that could exist in the world, is also Kumo's sister and comes right when she saw all the other people trapped in the castle (So she almost knows nothing about then);
Kaede, a girl that exist for being a girl in the group;
Yusuke, don't remember;
Yuma, a girl that like to dump guys;
Aoi, a guy that got dumped many times;
And finally Saki, that other girl dying right at the first chapter because she wanted to commit suicide by walking back to the front door to "quickly exit the castle."
I had to physically recheck the books for not getting any mistakes about who is who, and the worse is that the number of characters keeps goes up. I just made a simple description of the main group and there's like between ten to fifteen characters to describe, with some that are here for only one chapter (40 pages in average). And even with more characters, the story don't have any time to make big character developpement, it just throws us these forgettable characters with cliché backgrounds and they go with it. In result, when the characters suffer from things, we can't feel bad for then, we just... see then with a poker face while saying: "Ooh... Okay". Even when we see "Who's the one behing all of this" (Because it has to be more cliché'd), it's evident that the manga is trying to gives us its "You didn't see that one coming" feeling... but doesn't work. One of the main point of what makes death games good got rushed and wasted because of the minuscule volume number of four.

At the end, I didn't really enjoyed it at all, but in an other point of view, is it still a good manga? It honestly has a good artstyle that represent what it supposed to represent, at least, they're not chibi, but Torikago no Tsugai is a manga that I'll never ever recommend to other people to read. The lack of potential due to it's number of volume and the unoriginality of the challenges make it really ununjoyable to read, not worth it and regretable to buy. I almost got the feeling that the mangaka just wanted to do a test, in case his stories would evolve into some other things, because seriously: Overall, it's cliché and bad. Yeah, they all start with something bad and they get over it with a (hopefully) better manga.

TL;DR : Cliché manga with birds