"Magical Girl Raising Project" Review

Somehow, it seems that lately no genre is more open for parody or skewering than the “magical girl” manga.  I think the last one I ever read was “Tokyo Mew Mew” for god’s sake!  Puella Magi Madoka Magica combines it with angst and ennui and a Deal with the Devil.  Magical Girl Apocalypse and Magical Girl Site (another big fave) combined it with ecchi, gore and some intricate storylines.

Magical Girl Raising Project seems like a mix of both and, for once, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing.  And it even feels like it’s thrown in a bit of Game of Thrones.  Game of Thrones Lite, if you will.

(Author’s Note: For the sake of saving space on the page and having you guys have to read less, I will use some acronyms from here out.  You can probably tell what they mean from the context, if you’re smart.)

In this series based on a novel (or maybe even a series of novels), magical girls like La Pucelle and Snow White gain their special powers by playing the titular cell phone game.  In the game, you can gain points in the form of Magical Candies for beating up the bad guys.  IRL, you gain said MC by doing good deeds…and you can freakin’ DIE if you don’t have enough!  We see this fate befall La Pucelle and Snow White’s mentor Nemurin on page.

The site admins of Magical Girl Raising Project claim that this is being done because they accidentally made more MGs than they can handle, so the number must be cut in half.  They had sixteen, so that means eight of them must die.

And die they do.  What ensues are several chapters of brutal betrayals, risky alliances and deep looks into some of the MGs’ pasts.  (Spoiler Alert: La Pucelle is a BOY!  Granted, there’s a male MG in Magical Girl Site, too, but still…  At least that explains the slightly yuri-ish feels I got in the first few chapters.)  It doesn’t help that, in addition to helping people, one can also steal someone else’s MC to gain their points.

Lots of people die off fast in the first volume, so logically that might mean that the remaining 10 girls die off much more slowly, leading us into more character depth and longer, drawn-out battles.

Fingers crossed.  I, for one, fully intend to keep reading.  We’ll see just how long this series manages to hold my interest.

No ideas for my next couple of series.  But the year’s still young.

Any suggestions?

"Beasts of Abigaile" Review

Normal Japanese high school student Nina Tsukishiro moves to a small country called Ruberia to live with her uncle.  Along the seemingly Italy-inspired beaches and fine stone architecture sit groves and groves of different rose flowers, apparently each with their own uses and capabilities.

When she notices a strange boy pulling a robbery and he bites her, Nina transforms into a furred humanoid not unlike the boy was.  This leads to her being shipped off to the titular Abigaile prison, where creatures like her and the boy, known as Luga, are trained to serve humans as slaves.

There Nina encounters the boy from before, the hot and mean guy with a heart of gold Roy Balfour and the Luga/slave guard (in that he is all three) Gilles.  As you can imagine, he is the hot and kind guy.  (I know, it’s clichéd, but frankly it seems a small price to pay for this series.)  The fair-minded Nina joins a clique (or “home”) full of funny lovable gay guys and dedicates herself to fighting the injustices within the prison.

And there we have a basic overview of Spica Aoki’s “Beasts of Abigaile”, Vol. 1.

Now, I myself am a writer and I’m writing a werewolf story, so Beasts of Abigaile is practically a goldmine of ideas.

The story itself seems basic enough on the surface, but there are serious racial tensions between the humans and the Luga, which have left many of them embittered against their captors and the entire human race in general.  This combines with some jealousy from the other female Luga due to Nina’s getting so close with both Roy and Gilles.

So, naturally, a big plot point is that Nina must use a special perfume to hide her human identity (and smell) from the school’s Luga.  (Even though it is hinted now and then that Nina herself is not, or at least isn’t entirely, human herself.)

And I’m sorry, all you fans of Kelly Armstrong, Vicki Lewis Thompson and Molly Harper: there is little to no nudity here.  The Luga are pretty much werewolves in name only, in that their only hints of a bestial nature are their fluffy ears and tails (and, I think, red eyes).  They have claws and sharp teeth and can become even larger and furrier, but they don’t seem to be able to become full wolves, or even those bipedal wolves with boobs and pecs that you see now and again.

So, basically, at the risk of sounding sexist, “Beasts of Abigaile” is basically a werewolf story written by a woman (I’m assuming), and thus naturally focuses more on story and relationships than on nudity and transformation fetishism.

But, for once, I’m not complaining about that.  I just want to see where it's going, because one problem this series does have is that, if there even is an over-arcing story in here somewhere, it seems awfully slow to move anywhere.

Oh, well: more time to focus on the characters.