Welcome, everyone.
My name is Flatware Moth (an anagram). Many years ago, I started a blog on this site with the exact same name for a college computing course. Only recently have I decided to start it back up again.
Here I will leave my honest reviews for the various graphic novels and manga that I've picked up. Maybe my reviews will be useful to you, maybe they won't. It's your call.
Before I begin, please allow me to explain the pun in my blog's title. Yarukiman-man is a Japanese phrase which means "pumped up" or "motivated". I guess you can say that this blog is my attempt at being yarukiman-man about manga (hee hee).
Now then, without further ado, here is my review of the latest manga series by legend Ken Akamatsu-"UQ Holder".
Akamatsu's work began with A.I. Love You, the tale of a computer nerd who brought his hot virtual girlfriend to life. He then continued on with award-winning love comedy Love Hina, and the strange semi-magical fantasy school life Negima.
This is the semi-continuation of the latter.
Decades in the world of Negima's future, the grandson of former protagonist Negi Springfield is being raised on Earth, when much of the world's population lives on top of a magic tower in space (I guess it makes sense in context?).
His legal guardian following the deaths of his parents is one of ten-year-old teacher Negi's former students, the semi-evil Evangeline A. K. Mcdowell, who now lives under the name of Yukihime.
Now, Evangeline is an immortal and a very powerful wizard with a high bounty on her head. Long before our story began, she promised Negi's grandson Touta that he and his friends could leave their small rural village and head for the space tower once they could defeat her in battle. With a little help from a "magic app" (?), they manage to give her a good showing, but still lose.
Following that, the man who gave them the app reveals himself to be an immortal hunter after Yukihime's head. He mercilessly mutilates both her and Touta. While seemingly dying, Yukihime reveals to Touta (who has no memories from before he was twelve, following the incident that killed his parents) that she secretly made him a partial immortal right before she took him in.
With the hunter about to kill Touta's close friends, the situation forces her to make Touta into a full immortal, never aging and never growing up. The villain is then promptly defeated and Touta and Yukihime depart for the tower. Along the way, they meet and befriend the immortal hunter Kuromaru (after a quick fight with him, that is).
As I see it, really knowing this work seems to require having read all of Akamatsu's previous work Negima. I read it for a while at the beginning, of course, back when it was a simple slice of life school/magic comedy (note that I did not say "magic school"). But then it started introducing serious bad guys and a whole magic world and all sorts of weird rules for magic, so I just gave up after, like, Volume 20.
I have no real idea where this story is going, but I think I'll continue reading it for a while longer, or at least until the official English translations stop making sense to me.
As I see it, Akamatsu should really stick to semi-realistic, non-combat related love comedies like Love Hina. Making all these rules and making so much reference to a previous work only serves to alienate first-time readers like myself, who never finished the difficult work in question.
(Also, a note for all you horn-dogs out there: this series, while it does contain a fair amount of nudity and fanservice- and not just with the females, for a change- it contains nowhere near the amount that we've previously seen in Love Hina and Negima. That's probably because we haven't seen too many female characters yet, but I wouldn't exactly be holding my breath, if I were you.)
And now I take my leave. But, rest assured, I will return sporadically to post some new reviews. See you then!
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