Reviews - Animefangirl!

Scout Seishirou manga review

Norifusa Mita is fairly well-known in Japan for his seinen series, most of which revolve around sports. Western manga fans probably only know him for either Investor Z, which Crunchyroll has been releasing, or Dragon Zakura, which was so popular it even got made into a movie. I haven’t read Dragon Zakura and I don’t plan to do so immediately, but I do plan to follow more of Mita’s stuff because he writes a lot of… baseball manga. Yes, I’m still at it. Most of his stuff is fairly long, so I thought I’d cut my teeth on his shortest series, Scout Seishirou.

What happens to failed baseball players when they retire or get canned? If they’re like Seishirou Takemitsu, they go out and get a job like everyone else. Unfortunately Sei has never done anything except play baseball, so he’s terrible at his new job. That’s why he jumps at the chance when his old team hires him back as a baseball scout. Through the eyes of Seishirou, Norifusa Mita takes a look at the baseball scouting process in Japan, from finding a future star to drafting and signing him.

Scout Seishirou is only 2 volumes long, but it does give a taste of the kind of challenges scouts face when trying to sign a player. First off, if the player is any good then you’ll have to fight your way through a swarm of other team scouts to get him. So you want your player to have superstar talents, but at the same time you don’t want him to stand out too much, so it’s a bittersweet feeling when he does.

Apart from competition from other teams, scouts also have to deal with opposition from the player’s family and also help the players overcome their own doubts about their abilities and about going pro. It’s a lot of legwork and traveling, and it’s also hard psychologically because you might go through the trouble of talking a player into wanting to sign for your team… then your team decides not to draft him after all. Not. Cool. But it’s part of being a scout. The manga did tackle (briefly) why teams might choose to sign one player over another even if they both seem equally talented. Attitude seems to have a lot to do with it.

The main character himself can be a bit annoying because he’s a bit timid and wishy-washy, but the manga establishes from the start that that’s his great character flaw and the reason why he quickly got cut from the majors. And he does get a bit better over the course of the series, if only because sitting on your bum whining is sure to get your player signed under you, and then what will you do?

It was an interesting introduction to life behind the scenes in a baseball team, though it did leave a few questions unanswered. Like, for example, how much do Japanese pro scouts make? Do they get any extra money if a player of theirs is signed? Does their stock fall in the company if their player turns out to be a dud?

If questions like that intrigue you, you might be better off reading about the Baseball Scout School the MLB runs in the Dominican Republic instead. But if you’re looking for a short, well-drawn and unexpectedly interesting introduction to the subject then definitely give Scout Seishirou a try. And now it’s time for me to move on to some of Norifusa Mita’s meatier stuff.

Thoughts on The Irregular at Magic High School after episodes 1-6

I’m more into manga and books than anime these days, but since I did name this site Animefangirl.com, I suppose I should watch some anime once in a while. Come to think of it, I should have picked a more manga-like name, but it’s too late now. Anyway I don’t have anything against anime. They just don’t fit my busy lifestyle so it takes me quite a while to get through even a short one these days.

I picked The Irregular at Magic High School because I usually enjoy high-school based series. I was also promised an overpowered main character who has all the side characters standing around going “Wow, he’s so powerful!” in every episode. That kind of premise sounds boring to many people, but I thoroughly enjoyed series like Akagi and One Outs, so I know this could be awesome if the writers tried hard enough.

Summary: In 2095, Tatsuya Shiba and his sister Miyuki Shiba are new students enrolling at the Private Magic University Affiliated High School (First High School). Miyuki topped the entrance exams and is selected to be the first years’ representative, while Tatsuya is placed in Course 2 due to his low practical test scores, despite scoring highest in the written/theoretical portion of the exams.

So I started watching Irregular about two weeks ago, but I only got up to episode 6 because of aforesaid busyness. That, and the show is pretty boring. The opening animation and the first episode fooled me into thinking this would be an action-y kind of show with Tatsuya kicking all kinds of butt with his awesome analytical and ninja-fu skills. Uhh… no. Maybe that part comes later. Like, way later.

All his fights have lasted about 5 seconds so far and then the next 15 minutes of the show is devoted to breaking down the fight like we care. If you like technobabble and world-building and that kind of thing then I suppose you won’t be too bored by all the talking that goes on instead of action, otherwise The Irregular is just a massive snoozefest.

Still there’s more to anime than just action and talking. What about the characters? Uhh… yeah. They exist, vaguely. I think the problem comes from the fact that the show is a light novel adaptation so the director feels compelled to shovel in all the light novel characters even when the show would be better served by taking them out. It’s only episode 6 I know but a lot of characters barely register on the scale. Hattori, for example, pops up again and it’s like “Who?” And I haven’t seen the loli Student Council member in a while so why not just take her out? Erika hadn’t shown up in ages then suddenly she’s the star of episode 6 and it’s like… whaaa?

Which is not to say the main characters are so interesting that I’d like the show to focus on them, though. Tatsuya has all the charm and personality of a brick wall and his sister Miyuki just exists to bring the show down with her forced yandere reactions. Their ‘loving’ pseudo-incest interactions are not cute, not funny, not original and not anything I care to keep watching.

So having said all that will I continue watching The Irregular at Magic High School? Probably not. I have a pretty severe bandwidth limit so I don’t know if I want to waste it on stuff I’m not really enjoying. I’d like to check some forums and see if the series picks up a little later, but discussions tend to be clogged with light novel spoilers, which I’d really rather avoid. I’m going to put this show on the shelf and try some other stuff for now. Maybe I’ll be back later, maybe I won’t.

Ro Meishi ga Yuku manga review

This will be fairly short since I didn’t read more than a volume of Ro Meishi ga Yuku. It’s a one-volume manga by Takao Saito, better known as the author of Golgo 13. While personally I would favor the title Lu Ming-tsu ga Yuku, sites like Mangaupdates tend to write the title of this manga as Ro Meishi ga Yuku because in Japan “Ro Meishi” was how they pronounced the name of the Taiwanese player (呂明賜) that this baseball manga profiles.

So, what’s so interesting about Ming-tsu Lu (or Ming-soo Roo depending on how you romanize it) and why would a veteran mangaka spend a whole volume on him? Well for us modern fans it’s not that interesting, I suppose. Ming-tsu Lu was signed by the Yomiuri Giants and spent some time cooling his heels in the minors because of the Japanese “2 foreigners per team” rule (said limit was later waived precisely because Lu played so well).

His chance finally came in June 1988 when Warren Cromartie went down with an injury courtesy of a dead ball. Lu moved up to the majors and performed spectacularly, enough to garner him his own manga which purports to track down Lu’s history and find out the secret behind his stunning abilities.

The first chapter started off innocuously enough, showing bits of Lu’s personality (he works hard, eats a lot and has lots of friends) as well as the circumstances that led to his call-up and then his first few games for the giants. After that the manga rapidly goes downhill with the appearance of an extremely annoying reporter who is sniffing around to learn more about the player… for no good reason, really. It would make sense if there was some big secret Lu was hiding, or if he came out of nowhere, but we quickly learn that Lu was spotted when he played for the Taiwanese Olympic team, there was some debate over whether to sign him or some other player but Lu was better, so they got him.

All that makes for a very simple and straightforward manga and I guess that wasn’t good enough for Takao Saito, so he opted instead to throw in first the annoying reporter then another reporter, a female one who the first one has the hots for. They bicker and compete and run around and generally get on my nerves, so much so that I quit pretty quickly because it was obvious there wasn’t much story or drama to go around beyond what the author felt like inventing.

The other reason I quit was that while the manga does admit that Ming-tsu Lu is a naturally-gifted player with a great build and a great work ethic, they’re not content to leave it at that. That’s good and all, but in their search for that “something extra” they choose to play up a so-called “Taiwanese connection” between Lu and the great Sadaharu Oh, manager of the Giants at the time.

Now it is an established fact that Lu went to the Giants because Oh was there, but it still seemed to be like they were playing up the foreign-ness of both players by hyping their ‘unique Taiwanese background’ blah blah kind of thing. It’s like urgghh, why can’t he just be a great player on his own? Even the conversations he has in Chinese are largely transcribed as gibberish instead receiving any meaningful translation. It’s a bit sad. Ultimately the two reporters bugged me so much that I just skipped through the rest, so maybe it gets better. A quick skim told me later chapters focus on Lu’s childhood and introduction to baseball, but I wasn’t interested enough to stick around to find out.

At any rate the art is excellent and it’s not a bad manga per se. If you’re a fan of the player or of the mangaka, or if you’re interested in 80s Japanese baseball then Ro Meishi ga Yuku is a worthy read in a history book kind of way. Since it’s only 1 volume long, you don’t have much to lose either way. But to be honest, I found it a bit disappointing for the reasons I’ve just stated.

Heat Guy J manga review

I usually stay away from manga adapted from anime, figuring (usually rightly) that they’re cheap, poorly-made cash grab attempts. But I’d heard a lot about Heat Guy J, it was only 1 volume long and the summary seemed decent enough, so I figured, how bad can it be? And surprisingly enough it wasn’t bad at all. I wouldn’t have minded a second or third volume, in fact. The only, massive flaw was the excessive and unnecessary fanservice (when is fanservice ever necessary?) which wasted space that could have been better spent on character or story development.

From the back of the book: Daisuke Aurora works with the special division of peacekeepers in the city of Jewde, one of the largest cities on the planet. He and his android partner, Heat Guy J, team up to make sure that anything illegal stays off the streets and out of circulation.

However, their presence doesn’t sit too well with the local mob leader–a ruthless, unbalanced, well-armed son of the late Don, who is out to prove that he is not too young to take over the family business. In the city that never sleeps, will Daisuke and Heat Guy J end up sleeping with the fishes? The anime favorite as seen on MTV is now an action-packed manga!

Well… it is pretty action-packed, I guess. I rather liked the contrast between the girly character designs (apparently done by the character designer of Escaflowne) and the manly deeds of derring-do that take place within. The blurb is lying a bit, though: the son of the late Don doesn’t show up much and doesn’t do much when he does. They probably took the summary directly from the anime instead of from the manga itself.

As you may have guessed by now, I quite enjoyed Heat Guy J. I liked the Heat Guy android himself, and his interactions with his partner Daisuke are more father-and-son than typical cop-movie stuff, though there are the usual rescues of each other you normally expect from the genre. Each chapter contains a largely self-contained story that makes sense even without watching the anime. And while the setting and the incidents can be quite serious there’s also plenty of humor to lighten the deal, usually at the expense of team auditor Kyoko. Humor, action, nice art, buddy-buddy feel, it’s all good.

The only fly in the ointment, as I said, was the fanservice. Women in skimpy clothes come out of nowhere and prance around usually for no good purpose except to titillate easily-pleased readers. It’s one thing if it’s an ecchi manga to begin with. Or if a mangaka realizes his ratings are sliding and includes something to pull them back. But in my opinion Heat Guy J didn’t need to resort to that sort of cheap thrill, so it a bit of a shame that they included it.

Now then, to pick up the Heat Guy J anime or not? Sadly enough the back of the volume includes a ton of spoilers for future events and characters. That and Geneon, who licensed the anime, went belly-up several years ago. If I could find it cheap somewhere or get the chance to stream it legally I guess I would, but otherwise I won’t go out of my way to pursue the issue. It was good, but not that good.

Haridama Magic Cram School manga review

I must say Haridama Magic Cram School is a slight improvement over some of the stuff I’ve read lately. Instead of being actively bad it’s just meh through and through. After stuff like Ayako, Remember and A Single Match, this is actually a breath of fresh air. That doesn’t mean the manga is particularly good, though.

Summary: Kokuyo and Harika are a little unusual – and not just because they’re sorcery students. They’re Obsidians, wizards who must use enchanted swords to help them cast spells. Their fellow students think Obsidians are inferior to “normal” wizards. But Kokuyo and Harika have something that their cohorts don’t: the power of friendship!

The manga itself is slightly less cheesy than the summary makes it sound, but only slightly. The cover also says “Atsushi Suzumi, Creator of Venus and Virus,” a series I’ve never heard of, but I guess it was famous enough, or successful enough for Del Rey Manga that they thought it worthy of localization. In fact I’ve going to venture out on a fairly sturdy limb and say Venus and Virus must be a very popular series, because there’s no other way a sensible localization company would consider wasting good money on something as mediocre as Haridama Magic Cram School.

I can summarize the manga as follows: Harika and Kokuyo bicker while pretending not to like each other. When a monster shows up, they work together to defeat it. They bicker some more. Another monster appears. They work together to defeat it and discover they actually work quite well together. They bicker a little less but still pretend not to really like each other. And they all live happily ever after, the end.

So it’s really juvenile, predictable stuff, but there’s nothing annoying, confusing or offensive in it. On the other hand it’s not particularly funny or interesting or heart-warming either. It’s only 1 volume long and it does cover what the author wants it to cover in that length (i.e. everything works out when we work together) but I can’t help feeling a simple message like that could have been conveyed just as well in one chapter instead of four.

I think Haridama Magic Cram School might be okay for fans of Atsushi Suzuki, whoever s/he is, or maybe manga readers who like easy-to-collect one-volume manga regardless of the content (of which I am actually one, though I’m learning to be pickier). And I guess it does make a good “baby’s first shounen” kind of manga for younger readers (around 9-13 maybe) since it features characters of roughly that age. Apart from that it’s not especially remarkable or worth reading. I wager I’ll have completely forgotten it before the month is out.