Magi: Sinbad no Bouken
Magi: The Adventures of Sinbad

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I loved this series. It's a prequel to Magi. After I finished this and finished Magi & the Magi manga I started the AoS manga. OMG it's so good. I couldn't stop reading it. It even got me excited just to read it. It takes a lot to excite me, especially when it comes to reading anything. Shinobu is a writing genius. AoS and Magi are perfection when it comes to writing. This story is so unique and I love the Arabic theme and how it ties into ancient history. I love this story so much and the characters. Especially Ja'far and Sinbad. Ja'far does ... a complete 180 character change. It's so great to see

tl;dr: A manga that has some rough spots but overall serves as a solid accompaniment to Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic.

Magi: The Adventures of Sinbad (AoS) is a chronological prequel to Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic (LoM) that as one would expect focuses on how Sinbad came to be who he is. However, despite it being a chronological prequel, AoS shouldn’t be read before LoM. There are things in LoM that the writing takes great care to reveal in a certain way that are just kind of casually thrown around in AoS, and thus reading AoS would remove the impact from encountering them first in ... LoM. Furthermore, AoS is pretty light on explanation on a lot of things and thus it feels like it expects the reader to already have preexisting knowledge from the explanations in LoM. However, though it is what I ended up doing, I don’t think reading AoS after LoM is the best option either, as I feel that the background provided on AoS helps flesh out some parts that LoM didn’t do so well with and that the final stretch of LoM lands much better taking AoS into account.

Thus, for simplicities sake I would recommend reading LoM right up to the final arc which begins in chapter 283, reading the entirety of AoS, and then reading the rest of LoM. As far as I can tell, everything you need to know going into AoS is before LoM’s final arc and the final arc is where AoS is most relevant. Furthermore, while there’s a pretty jarring shift from chapter 282 to 283 of LoM, thematically it flows pretty well off of AoS. There may be a better way to handle things that involves intermixing chapters of the two, but I think that’s making things overtly complicated for minimal benefit.

As for AoS itself, I’d say it’s a really solid side story to LoM that doesn’t quite have as great highs as LoM but doesn’t have as bad lows, and thus due to its consistency overall I think I liked it more than LoM. AoS is overall much more predictable, which makes sense as there’s a very clear point it needs to reach by its end to line up with LoM and thus you always have an idea of where things will go eventually. Overall, I’d say there are three core components to this manga: providing background on Sinbad, fleshing out his bonds with those that become his eight generals, and explaining how Sindaria and the Seven Seas Alliance came to be.

Sinbad has a very clear character arc, wherein he starts off as a mischievous and rebellious hero, but a standard shounen pure hearted hero nevertheless. Over the course of the manga he gets worn down by all the challenges and tragedies he faces, ultimately becoming the pragmatic anti-hero he is in LoM. This progression along with how he becomes more and more firm in sticking with his overarching goal despite his changes is conveyed very well and it makes his actions in LoM a lot easier to understand and empathize with.

How he met his eight generals is also handled pretty well for the most part. The majority of them get their own arcs where their bonds to Sinbad are developed well. There are three exceptions, though with two of them there’s still an arc centered around them in a sense, just not on them in particular as the timing wouldn’t make sense. The only exception that was really disappointing was with Yamraiha who didn’t really get an arc despite it feeling like there was a lot of potential to giving her one considering how she ties into magicians.

I guess I should also note that from reading LoM, you should know which characters maintain presence around Sinbad which makes their stories somewhat predictable. The lack of presence of certain major characters was more interesting, in that you know that they’re no longer relevant but not quite why. Thus, I kind of sort of expected what would happen to happen, but was pretty surprised by how abrupt and extreme it was. AoS is also provides background on a lot of other side characters that appear in LoM that one wouldn’t expect to have any connection to AoS, but despite that the writing flowed pretty well and didn’t seem forced at all. Furthermore, it felt like AoS was trying to give as many characters as possible from LoM at least some sort of presence, and thus there’s a never ending stream of cameos.

Both Sinbad’s character arc and his bonds with his eight generals tie in very well with the overarching plot of building Sindaria and the Seven Seas Alliance. It’s slow and steady for the most part, but that works well for the type of story it’s trying to tell as it gives a strong sense of adventure and a lot of variety. Things did start faltering in the last arc though as it felt like it was rushing through events that were absolutely critical to give the right amount of focus. Still, in the end it did manage to explain what needed to be explained and hit the emotional beats it needed to, just not as well as it could have.

The character designs from LoM were great and are still great in AoS. There weren’t really any new character designs that really popped out though. The style is also really interesting and works well with the setting. The quality felt pretty lacking though. It was really rough starting out, and though it got better it still felt noticeably below Magi despite it being published simultaneously strangely enough.

Sinbad no Bouken gives insight into Sinbad’s past. When Sinbad was a young child, his father, Badr, fought in the war for their country, Partevia, and ended up losing his leg. Sinbad’s father was a generous kind man who wanted little other than his family’s (Sinbad and Sinbad’s mother) safety and wellbeing.

Plot – 9/10
But the war did not really end there as there was a short false time of peace after which life got even harder on the people of Partevia and they had to give up their ships, services, and food for the army. Not going along with these things, Sinbad’s father was considered ... an expatriate (basically the worst thing you could be called). After that things start getting worse for them, but since there only four chapters so far, I won’t give away anything else.

EDIT: I recently read chapters 5 and 6 so I decided to update this a little since it's so short anyway ans talking about the plot of these chapter won't really spoil anything for later ones (but this is probably all I'll update this review). Having now skipped ahead to when Sinbad is, the story continues as Sinbad, now a hardwoking boy of 14 years old, encounters Yunan, a mysterious traveler who just so happened to be sleeping in a barrel of fruit when Sinbad met him. Yunan vows to guide Sinbad after Sin's sick mother asks him to take of the boy.

Art – 9/10
The art is just like in Magi, and it is does a good job of conveying the entire range of emotions in this short manga which as a good mix of drama and comedy. Sinbad as a child is very adorable of course. There isn’t much detail in the scenery because they never really leave the small village that the story takes place in so far.

Characters – 10/10
I found Sinbad’s father to be one of my favorite characters in all of Magi, not just this short backstory. I related him somewhat to Akio from Clannad and I think he’s one of the best fathers I’ve ever seen in anime. Sinbad’s mom is not very interesting, but Sinbad as a child is also interesting. It’s fun to watch as Sinbad’s enthusiasm about the world outside of his small village grows so quickly and the bond between him and his father just makes this manga truly great even with how short it is. Since the manga only goes until Sinbad is 5 years old before showing that it will skip to when he is 14 in the next chapter, not many characters are included in it yet.

EDIT for 5 and 6: Yunan is a character who not much is known about yet (though a little more is said about him in the Labyrinth of Magic). He's a traveler who Sinbad lets stay at his house. Yunan seems like kind of boring character at the moment so I hope as the story goes along, the author explores more into him and makes him a better characters overall.

Enjoyment – 9/10
As more chapters come out this number may go up to a 10/10 (I’ll update it if I change my mind about anything later). Still the bond between Sinbad and his father was my favorite part of this story. It’s just something that you don’t get to see very often in a story (as I mentioned before Clannad may be the only other story like it with such an exceptional bond between parent and child that I can think of).