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Solid manga with amazing artwork. Think studio ghibli artwork meets the setting of a magic focused final fantasy world.

Lets start with the art. The art is very picturesque and beautiful. Honestly, the amount of detail put into every page is just astonishing. It invokes such a warm, happy fantasy sort of feeling. This is easily the manga's strongest pointand warrants reading it just because of this alone.

The setting is about this kid who wants to be a mage but cant since she was not born into it, but suddenly gets a chance to start studying magic after a series of events. Sounds familiar? While ... you may be thinking harry potter, the tone here is way more lighthearted and akin to a studio ghibli movie instead. Everything revolves about how fantastic and beautiful a world with magic can be. I also love that magic actually has some science behind it here. The glyphs are the root for magic, and they go over all these details in drawing and mixing shapes to create it. So clever and creative.

Despite all the greatness about this manga, I do find myself a bit bored with it sometimes. Its a bit too "look at how cool a world with magic is" sort of story with not much actual action going on. Yeah, there is a story and some cool dark magicians and forbidden magic or whatever, but the manga is so lighthearted that it is hard to imagine any sort of actual tragedy happening. I feel no thrill or suspense as I know it will always turn up well for the girls. Feels too fairy taleish.

Overall, a solid manga to read while snuggled up in a blanket with some hot chocolate to fantasize about a world with magic.

This manga is the exact definition of spreading yourself too thin.

The first chapter was like: WOW

The next chapters were like: good

The current chapters are like: ok..

Fumetsu no aiba to me is a very weird manga. It starts off super strong and then just kind of dwindles down over time. Seriously, few chapters in any manga have made me cry as much as the first chapter, but its all downhill from there.

So what are the manga problems. First, the theme. Youve got an immortal who can never die and can bring people back to life. Once that is set, its hard to feel sad when any ... character dies since they are coming back later. Then you have very weird enemies, these little creatures called the knockers who have no personality and are literally just annoying little monsters in my opinion. Then you have time skipping in the range of literal centuries which shrinks the magnitude of actions and events at any given moment. Finally, you got a ton of side characters. Ive always said that having too many characters in a manga is setting yourself for failure. It is just too difficult giving relevancy and screen time to all, so you usually end up with tons of background characters with no relevancy to the story anymore. Think about any successful manga with tons of characters, and think about how many chapters that manga has. Usually, a lot in order to develop them correctly, but that is not the case here.

Tbh, i think this manga is very average now. Not good, not bad. I still look forward for new chapters just to see whats going to happen to the characters that I once loved, but the story is just pretty meh now.

I think this manga could have been masterpiece if it had changed its direction from chapter 2 onwards. I would have liked to see a more serious seinen slice-of-life and honest story about characters, dreams, and the harshness of reality without all the shonen fights and all the time skipping like we saw on chapter 1, not the current product which is some sort of shonen action drama interwined mess.

Actually funny manga with beautiful art style. Its hard to find mangas which actually make me laugh instead of making me cringe. However, its not perfect. For starters, there is not much of a story progression. Every chapter is completely isolated and very funny, but goes nowhere. This makes me feels as if im reading a garfield comic on a newspaper lol. Because of this its easy to lose interest when nothing is ever really happening. Also, the comedy can get repetitive. The same "im a badass doing wholesome things" joke gets tiring after a while.

Good manga to pass the time but not one ... to really go in deep.

This is the story of a manga with so much potential which fell into a dark abyss.

Let me start off by stating I HATE ecchi manga. The manga I read is usually slice of life, psychological thrillers, comedies and romances. I hate manga with nothing to contribute other than vulgar scenes. If I wanted to read ecchi stuff I know a better place to do this (you know what im talking about). I never thought I would end up reading something like this, but after stumbling upon it randomly and browsing through the first couple of chapters, I got enthralled by the incredible quality of ... the art, and kept on reading it until the very end.

This brings me to my first point and arguably the manga's biggest strength: ART. The art in this manga is amazing. No, amazing is an understatement. It is incredible. The characters designs, shadow manipulation, facial expressions, and of course, ecchi scenes, are all done to perfection. Akira Hiramoto is an incredibly talented manga artist, and this is easily in my top 5 art in mangas I have ever seen. I can only imagine how much of an unstoppable force Hiramoto would be in a universe where his writing was even just half as good as his art.

This brings me to my next point. While the art is superb, the writing leaves much to be desired, especially during the last chapters.

First of all, let me start by saying the comedy is ok. Jokes are vulgar, and very oriented towards a male audience. Sometimes it gets overly raunchy and even disgusting at times, but this is to be expected out of ecchi manga so nothing out of the ordinary here. The incredible art does make up for this, by having some hilarous character expressions and scenes.

Now on to the story. The story is a huge mess. At first, the story is clean and concise. There is a goal and everyone is working towards that single goal with some hilarous events and some of the best scenes happening here, such as Kiyoshi's and Hana's hilarious and charming encounters. Howver, by the end of the story in the last few arcs, it is a convoluted mess, with multiple parallel events happening at the same time, some of which I could not care less about such as the principal's arc, constantly jumping between these parallels over and over again. To make matters worse, all of these parallels are convoluted and full of random, non-sensical events, and tons of secondary and uncessary characters which spread our attention too thin.

Character development is also a huge mess. It starts off good, with the characters seeming genuine, interesting, and real. If anything, they were a little too vulgar. They reminded me a little bit of the breakfast club. But as the story goes on, main characters start to lose their personalites and genuinity and by the end they are complete degenerate animals who think about nothing but sex. The manga then makes the decision to have some very real and charming moments in the first half, and then make a complete joke of these events as if they had no purpose later.

Why is Hana, arguably the character with the best development in the story and with the most charming events, completely thrown under the bus by the end? Why give us all these cute scenes of her only to completely ignore her and her feelings later? Why do I have to read a complete side story about the principal if it has no relevance in the main story and I do not care about any of the characters who show up in his story? Why give the main characters such a big part in the beginning of the story only to shift our attention onto random ass characters which are introduced at the last moment? Why is a scene of someone trying to take away the headband of another character 10 chapter long (is this is dragonball all over again)? Why did I read 277 chapters only for everything to go to waste in an ending that can only be described as playing a videogame for hours only for the console to shutdown unexpectedly and realizing you did not save and losing all your progress?

I am sad. This had so much potential and some characters I did care about. At some point during the later chapters I gave up on pretty much everything and only kept on reading it to see what would happen to hanna, kiyoshi and meiko, because at that point I had pretty much stopped caring about everyone else.

Hiramoto is an incredible artist who deserves to go on and create a masterpiece with his drawing skills later. Just for that I am giving it an ok score to support him. But this manga definetely left me with much to be desired.