"Attack on Titan" Review

Hello, out there.  If you couldn't already guess from the picture (or the title), today I will be reviewing Attack on Titan, one of the biggest smash-hit anime I've ever seen.

In a strange new (possibly future) world, mankind has been eaten and hunted to the brink of extinction.  By what, you ask?  By creatures like our little friend I have pictured here-the Titans.  These colossal humanoid creatures are nigh-indestructible, unpredictable and hungry for human flesh.

The final vestiges of humanity have retreated into a massive city with three protective walls.  This is where our story begins.

Hero Ehren Yeager, his cowardly genius friend Armin Arlehrt and the moderately-attractive Mikasa Ackerman have all joined an expedition/Titan-repellent force known as the Survey Corps.  This motley crew of warriors in their gas-powered, super-jumping flight gear, is sworn to defend their city from those few Titans who break through, as well as to try and take back their world.

Ehren, Armin and Mikasa are also doing this to take revenge on the monsters who slaughtered their family and friends several years before the story actually started.

Along the way, we also discover the existence of people who can transform into Titans (for good or evil) and a fanatical cult dedicated to worshipping them [the Titans].

All in all, it's a pretty decent series, as far as I'm concerned, though that isn't to say that it's not without its faults.

Somehow, despite the amount of time that the series has gone on, the Internet is still saying that there is no new information on the actual Titans themselves.  Their existence and where they came from remains a complete mystery, which is infuriating to me.  I like to have things explained for me right away, and to have the answers to all my questions delivered right to me and all wrapped up in a nice little bow.

That, and the series itself (at least the manga) seems a tad bit slow-moving.  Perhaps it's that the still and silent manga can't really convey all the "whoosh" and all the explosions and what-have-you in a way that I can really appreciate.  I still have yet to watch the anime, though I will most likely be watching it as the Funimation dub.  To me, as a manga, it pretty much seems all military-like: "This operation will take 15 minutes that we don't have, and it will take X minutes for Group Y to move to Point Z", etc.

Some people call this horror, but it hardly seems that way to me.  In point of fact, I only picked it up a year or two ago at the library just because it was something new on the shelves.

It isn't great, but I'll stick with it.  I leave you people free to take it or leave it as you please.  Let's hope that the anime version is good.

Manga Review: "Deadman Wonderland"

I was just down at Barnes and Noble the other day, and I saw a new volume of this series.  A few days later, I find that same volume available at my local library.

I think it came out a few years ago here in America, but then died out or something.  But it's recently made a comeback, especially with the Funimation dub of the anime coming out a year or two ago.  Greg Ayres, man.  That guy is good.

And, so we're all clear, we are talking about the blood-slinging adventure-horror series known as Deadman Wonderland.

Ordinary middle school student Ganta Igarashi is enjoying an ordinary day at school.  Suddenly, a mysterious humanoid creature only known as "The Red Man" somehow floats up to the third-floor window, breaks in, and violently slaughters all of Ganta's classmates using some unknown power.

Wrongly framed for the incident by a phony lawyer who is actually a crooked prison administrator, Ganta is sentenced to life imprisonment in the titular prison of Deadman Wonderland.  There, he discovers that The Red Man left him with some of his own powers during the attack, and Ganta is thrust into a series of life and death battles with similarly-powered fellow inmates known as Deadmen.  All the while searching for the one who slaughtered his friends.

The entire anime series only lasted for 12 or 13 episodes, but they were pretty good.  Unfortunately, it only covered material from the first 4 or 5 volumes.  They still had much further to go.  That is, at least according to the wikia.

I enjoyed Greg Ayres' portrayal of Ganta, first thing.  But then I began watching the drama and intensity unfold.  The battles are excellent, as well.  In point of fact, the blood-based Deadman powers from this anime directly influenced the abilities of Demon Sword wielder Chrona from Soul Eater, another series which I enjoy.

You wouldn't think there was a heck of a lot you could do with blood alone, but you'd be wrong.

Now that the anime is finished, I look forward to seeing how the story moves forward in the manga, beyond the place where the anime left off.  Reading how it all goes on the wikia is just too time-consuming, taking what you learn from one article and trying to connect it to the next.

Unlike Sword Art Online, this is a series that I highly recommend.

"Sword Art Online" Review

Hi!  Flatware Moth here, reviewing something that he just found new in the Graphic Novel section of his local library.

Sword Art Online has apparently become majorly popular for some reason, but, frankly, I just don't see it.

The story itself is an odd mix of the cliched and the stolen.  Anyone remember .Hack?  The one with the really realistic game that people could log into?  Well, that's about half the story.  The other half (or some other fraction of it, because the whole thing just feels like a big mishmash) is sort of "Battle Royale" -ish, in that the game's designer made it without a Log Off button.  The players are now trapped inside the game and must battle their way through 100 levels of a floating castle-world-thing in order to escape.

And, true to video-game-becomes-real-life cliche, if you ever die in the game, you die for real.  It's the price you pay for being hooked up to in neurologically and made to feel and taste every aspect of the game world.

The story itself is told in a very odd way.  We start with a flashback of everyone logging in and being told the story by the game's enigmatic creator.  We then flash forward to two freakin' years later, when everyone in the game is now coming closer to achieving their impossible task.  (And, also in accordance with the falling-into-another-world cliche, some people in Sword Art Online are quite content not to go home.)

Kirito, the hero, is a loner with a dark past who falls in love with a moderately attractive female knight named Asuna.  Their interactions are yet another facet to this confusing story, where they fall deeply in love (almost entirely off-screen) and come together to find their way out of the game.

I was never really a fan of .Hack, and this series only seems to be a sappier, somewhat darker version of that.  True, The World was in certain danger in .Hack, but at least the players could log out whenever they wanted to.

Here, people die by the thousands, we wallow our way through pages and pages of angst and regret, no real answers are given, lots of time is skipped, and all the action sequences go by too fast for me to really understand how the characters pulled off some of their moves.

As I said before, it all just feels like a weird mishmash of fantasy, sci-fi and romance, mostly made up of ideas stolen from better works.  There's a sexy scene of Asuna in her underwear, but that didn't really seem like enough to really try and undo the overall suck factor of what I've just read.

There's a novel out there too, I think.  But my advice: go read something else.  Black Butler just put out its 17th volume; go read that.

"Nisekoi" Review

Wouldn't you know it: The last time I posted, I couldn't think of anything to write about, hence why I posted about Seven Deadly Sins.  But a recent trip to the library showed me a new volume of another series I'd been meaning to blog about, but had forgotten.

The name is Nisekoi, by a person named Naoshi Komi.

Our hero is high school student Raku Ichijo, the son of a violent yakuza family who only wants to live a sane and decent life.  He secretly pines for childhood friend Kosaki Onodera.  And, ten years ago, he made a promise with a little girl, whose name and face he can't remember, and received a special locked pendant, of which she holds the only key.

All of a sudden, into his life comes the brash and athletic Chitoge Kirisaki.  After getting off on the wrong foot, his family reveals that she is also the daughter of a powerful yakuza family, and that the two must be married in order to maintain a fragile peace.

 So, not only does this throw cold water on Raku's chances with Onodera, but there is also the problem of Chitoge's bodyguard Claude, who instantly sees that something is not right with their so-called "relationship".

In true romantic comedy style, several hints are dropped as to who exactly his promise girl may be.  A new suitor named Seishiro Tsugumi (Chitoge's other bodyguard/reverse trap) is introduced in Volume 2, clearly leading us to believe that more and more people after the fated couple will start to appear soon.

Now, I know what you're all thinking: this sounds like some sort of Love Hina Lite.  And it sort of is, albeit with much less fanservice (given Komi's unsexy art style.).  But I liked Love Hina, and not just for all of its fanservice (of which there was a LOT!).

I've heard that it's gone on for over 100 chapters in Japan, with no ending or resolution in sight.  Now, I like my stories tied up and explained with a nice fancy bow on top.  So we can only hope that the mysteries will be revealed some day.  (And it would be pretty ironic if Raku wound up getting together with Onodera after all, despite her not being the female lead.  Totally unexpected.)

One thing that really gets me, aside from the similarities to Love Hina, is the sheer amount of strange names that all the characters are given (Ruri, Raku, Chitoge, Claude, Kosaki, etc.).  Claude isn't even Japanese, and I'd never heard of some of those other names being used before, either.  Now, I love unusual names as much as the next guy, but that's usually more when I'm the one creating/assigning them.

But I do love Mafia/Yakuza stories, so let's hope that things continue forward on that point, as well.

Review: "Seven Deadly Sins"

Konnichiwa, everyone!

It's been a while since I've been down to the bookstore, so I couldn't really recall any new manga that I'd read off the top of my head.  So I figured that I'd review one of my recent favorite series instead.

Seven Deadly Sins is a weird magic-y knight manga set in a world quite unlike our own.  In the kingdom of Brittania (I believe it was), ten years prior, a group of powerful knights known as The Seven Deadly Sins were unjustly framed for murder and forced to flee the kingdom.  In their absence, a group of evil knights (ironically referred to as The Holy Knights) have taken the king hostage and forced the people of the land to prepare for war.

Princess Elizabeth, our main heroine, is forced to leave in search of the missing Seven Deadly Sins, who many believe are the only ones who can save the kingdom from the Holy Knights.

The first one she meets is our main hero, the perverted Luffy-ish tavern owner Meliodas.  He too is searching for his fellow Deadly Sins, through the use of information gathering and his mobile bar, which sits atop of a giant pig.  The pig's child, a talking boar named Hawk (funnier when romanized has "Hork", sounds like "pork") provides a loyal friend for him as well as mild comic relief.

Meliodas had his memory erased by one of his fellow Deadly Sins at around the time the murder took place, so he may also be searching for them in order to recover his memories.

Now, these stories are actually pretty fun.  Thus far, we're moving a mite bit slowly on meeting new Deadly Sins (thus far, the brash giantess Diane and the enigmatic former prisoner Ban), but the Holy Knights are popping up like daisies, and they have some really cool powers.  Thus far we have a lightning guy, a bug tamer a'la Tommyrod from Toriko, an illusion guy and an invisible guy.

Originally, I had just picked it up because of a fanservice-y chapter I'd seen online where Elizabeth and Diane are shrunk out of their clothes by a magic mushroom creature.  But now I'm more than a little hooked on where the story is going.  The characters maintain a decent degree of interesting and original (save probably for the nearly-useless Hawk, whose only skills are his nose and his appetite for food scraps).

Only one real problem that I can see: I took a look at the wikia because I was wondering just how many more Holy Knights were on their way, and they have the Deadly Sins outnumbered by four to one, if not more.  And, since they say that even one of the Holy Knights alone is enough to rival an entire army, I can definitely foresee things getting worse for our heroes before they get better.

Until next time, saraba!

Let The Blog Begin-UQ Holder!

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!