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Oct 25, 2019
This is one of the best vocaloid songs and it could have made a fantastic manga, but this just wasn't developed well. The art is gorgeous, but there's so many loose ends in story and character.
What in the world is going on with Kaito's backstory? I don't even know where to begin asking the questions. His father stabbed him as a child and he forgot about this up until now? It adds nothing really to the story and I just didn't get this.
The love triangle is very, very complex, and everyone seems to have a different story and a different take on what's
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going on. It makes for interesting storytelling, but three unreliable narrators in a book that's only a little over a hundred pages can get tedious and difficult to understand after a while.
The ending is extremely ambiguous and not really much of an ending. It would have made more sense for Miku and Kaito to have died, and Luka to have killed herself afterwards. The ending is a very unclear cliffhanger that just didn't make sense in the context of the story. We still don't know who Kaito chooses.
Miku slowly going mad was a really cool thing to see though, and I always enjoy a dark, twisted one-shot. I just wish they had spent a little more time on this and done more editing so it would make more sense.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Oct 25, 2019
For such a quick read and a common plot, this is really well done.
The emotions run high without feeling forced or cliché, and the characters feel more genuine than the usual tropes you see in shounen-ai one-shots. The awkwardness of your best friend confessing their love to you; the heartbreak of not hearing it back; the rush to untangle your feelings for someone before it’s too late: it’s all written in a very real way that makes you feel for the characters. I wasn’t expecting to be so impressed with how authentic the emotions felt. A lot of this is due to the excellent
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use of “show vs. tell”, which isn’t easy to find the right balance of, especially in a graphic format.
I will say I was worried at how the story was going to be handled. There’s a lot of problematic “friends turned lovers” stories out there, where one friend is guilted into loving the other, and I was concerned that was where the story was going, but was pleasantly surprised. Kazushi respects Haru’s feelings and refuses to make him uncomfortable, even when Haru eggs him on out of frustration and confusion. Despite the awkwardness of unreciprocated feelings, their friendship always comes first, especially for Kazushi, and I loved seeing that validated. Haru’s eventual reciprocation doesn’t feel at all like guilt, and that’s really nice to see, especially in a genre where problematic tropes tend to run rampant.
I was also really impressed from the offset at how casual and natural the dialogue is. Its easy to believe that Kazushi and Haru have been friends for a long time from their early interactions, which is important for the rest of the plot. The panels don’t feel cluttered with unnecessary jokes or comments, but they don’t feel lacking or clunky, either.
Every scene, as well as every character, has an importance to the story, so there’s nothing unnecessary and no clutter. Even Minota, the main couple’s mutual friend, isn’t a throw-away or simply used for exposition; he’s a developed character of his own who helps further the story and encourages Haru to realise his true feelings. “Third-wheel” characters who aren’t completely unnecessary are pretty rare in this genre and it’s a nice change of pace.
The art isn’t a masterpiece, but it isn’t terrible, either. I feel like Kazushi looks a bit too mature in some panels, especially opposite Haru, and especially since he doesn’t really fit the “aggressively-pursuing seme” trope. The full-body anatomy really isn’t good, either. Most of the characters look like their clothes are way too big for them, shoes included; it makes the anatomy look really weird in most panels where it’s not a close-up shot. I do like the light pencil strokes and almost watercolour-like shading on the chapter covers, though.
Overall, it’s an unexpectedly good one-shot with authentic and relatable emotions and characters. A pretty enjoyable hour-long read.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 25, 2019
I wanted to like this more. The cover is so elegant and intriguing and the blurb on the back definitely made it sound like something it wasn't. But the storytelling was so clunky I had a hard time understanding it. Certainly not the musical game of cat-and-mouse I was promised.
First of all, there's a lot of exposition in the first few pages that isn't really well-explained. Everything is thrown at you all at once with no time for build up--much like the romance that follows. As the story develops, it becomes harder to follow the central conflict, and it's not really clear at times
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what that conflict is supposed to be. If Lorenzo dislikes being taken advantage of by performers, why does he do it? What does he get out of it? Is he just really weak-willed?
And why does Kenzo care enough about him to continue doing as he asks, even though he knows Lorenzo is breaking his part of their deal? The two don't seem to really have a lot of chemistry or believable interaction. There's hardly any build up to their first encounter and Kenzo especially seems to have feelings that come out of nowhere.
The plot is quite jumbled and feels confusing at times, which is unnecessary, because all the parts for a good story are there, they're just arranged in a really odd way and often don't feel like they really fit together. In the second half we're introduced to a part of the story that really should have been made more obvious all along, and that's Lorenzo's drug habit. It's a shame that this was brought up so incredibly late and not used to its full potential, because it could have brought a lot more to the story than just "Lorenzo doesn't play piano and no one knows why". In fact a lot of Lorenzo's relationship to the piano doesn't make a lot of sense, which seems important in a story largely about the character's relationship to music.
This really had potential to be an emotional and elegant addition to a genre that is often decried as being crass and cliche, but the story is just too jumbled and confusing. I did enjoy the lovely artwork though, so there's that. (Besides the few panels where 3-D renders were obviously employed for objects and looked out of place. But it was 2005, so I'll give it a pass.)
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Oct 25, 2019
I adore Wolf's Rain. It's one of the best anime ever written. The manga, however, is another story.
...Literally.
You literally cannot adapt a 30-episode anime into a two-volume manga. It’s not possible and they never should have tried.
The art is shoddy. It’s ugly and the wolves look like furry logs with furry stick legs. It’s a disrespect to the BONES team’s beautiful animation.
They took maybe a couple of the main scenes in the anime (but not even the important ones) and redrew them. It’s basically a storyboard of a couple of scenes thrown together into a book and called a manga adaptation.
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The ending is nothing like the anime--in fact, there's not really an ending. Who are the people/wolves at the end? We've never seen them before and they're not even given names. Meanwhile the other characters have disappeared without a trace and with no ending to their own arcs.
Wolf’s Rain was a masterpiece. This? It’s a travesty.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Oct 25, 2019
This just was not good.
I actually dropped this for about a year because I was so bored out of my mind. Every chapter follows the same villain-of-the-week formula, and it's only in the last two chapters that any actual story development occurs. It's alluded to that everything thus far was supposed to have been connected, but you never would have known had Artemis not outright said it, because each chapter is basically the same thing with a different villain.
The humour is barely humour and is really trying too hard, and the art progression can be very confusing. There are too many special effects
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that block out entire panels, and this especially confuses the "battle" between Ace and Venus. What happened again?
The Sailor V manga was something we really didn't need and I wish we hadn't gotten. Boring beyond belief.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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