Reviews - Animefangirl!

My thoughts on: Bleach

Continuing my series on the 20 best-selling manga of all time (the ones I’ve read anyway), this time we have Bleach by Kubo Tite. It’s been a while since I dropped it, but I remember it’s about a boy named Shirosaki Ichigo who accidentally (and we find out later, not so accidentally) gains the power of a Shinigami (soul reaper) and has to fight enemies named Hollows so he can save dead souls from being eaten by them.

As with most shounen stories, especially recently, Bleach starts out relatively simply with a standard Monster of the Week format and then rapidly spirals out of control. I picked up the Bleach anime very early in its run, then dropped it and switched to the manga when I’d watched all the episodes currently out. For a while it went well. I liked the simple story, the Hollows were suitably threatening without being too scary, I liked the personalities of Rukia, Ichigo and especially Kon. The battles were a little hard to follow but the art style was clean and nothing dragged on too long.

Then Soul Society happened. And that was okay, really. But it just went on for so, so long that I was ready to drop the manga by the end of it. I decided in to hang in there a little longer and what did I get for my troubles? Hueco Mundo. My anime-fu powers told me by that point that Ichigo & Co. were going to be in Hueco Mundo for a loooong, long time, so I decided to get out while the going was good. IIRC the last chapter I read featured Kenpachi fighting with one of the Hueco Mundo bad guys and the battle was like “I’m stronger than you!” “No, I’m stronger than you!” “No, I’m stronger than you!” Repeat for 10 chapters. In fact, repeat for 200 chapters and you have every battle in Bleach.

Of the Big Three Shonen Jump manga (One Piece, Naruto, Bleach), Bleach is the one I dropped the fastest. Which is a little sad because I introduced several people to the series and they absolutely loved it. So they’d keep coming up to me week after week with “Did you see X vs Y this week!?” and I’d be like nooo, I dropped Bleach ages ago and they wouldn’t believe me. Unfortunately they’ve all grown tired of Bleach as well now. They stuck it out through Hueco Mundo and through the Karakura Town arcs and then instead of the manga ending Kubo Tite apparently started a new arc. Which I hear isn’t half bad, but series fatigue has just set in for most people I know.

tl;dr Bleach is not a bad series at all for shonen fans, but you do need a lot of patience. If you haven’t started it yet, it might be best to wait for the whole thing to end and then read it all in one go.

Shiratama! chapter 2

Chapter 2 of Shiratama!, the seinen 4-koma manga about a high school girl who creates a baseball team on a whim after watching a game with her sister. This is one of those “seinen in name only” series. It’s only seinen because it ran in a magazine aimed at young men. The contents are therefore largely safe for work.

This chapter is mainly a character exploration, teaching us more about main character Tsubame, her sister, Leona and Mr. Suzuki. As I mentioned in my first post on Shiratama! most of the character traits established early on are established just for establishment’s sake and will rarely, if ever be brought up again. It’s not a very good manga, even by the low standards of 4-koma moe loli-type manga series.

Chapters 1 and 2 should be enough to give you a taste of what Shiratama! is about. If you really like it, buy it…? There are better sports series and better 4-komas out there though, so only buy it if you’ve run out of everything else.

Shiratama! manga review

A less than stellar baseball 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. Shiratama! (しらたま!) is written and illustrated by Yuki Azumi, who I’ve never heard of before and never expect to hear of again. Frankly speaking if this manga hadn’t had a ‘loli’ protagonist and loli-like character art, it would never have been published. It still shouldn’t have been published anyway, but in the absence of a time machine all I can do is review what I’ve been given.

The art

Cutesy, but not too cutesy, loli but not too loli. The lines are clean and the action, what little there is, is simply laid out and easy to follow. Since the characters are supposed to be in high school, it feels silly to have them randomly flashing their panties and all the other things that count as ‘loli fanservce’ because they’re far too old to be behaving that way. But then again nobody ever reads 4-koma manga for their logic.

Shiratama 0011[Animefangirl.com] — Sample done by me. This manga is only available in Japanese.

Story

Tsubame Takatsu is a high school girl who isn’t very interested in baseball. One day she goes to watch a match with her sister and falls in love with the drama and excitement of the game. When she returns to school, she resolves to form her own baseball team. All that is chapter 1. The rest of Shiratama! covers her attempts to gather members, design uniforms, learn to play the game and finally have matches against… grade schoolers?

Is Shiratama! any good?

As a sports manga, not really. The team does play some games eventually, but the focus tends to be more on the novelty factor: *gasp* they’re girls! And they’re playing baseball! rather than on the actual sportiness of it. This is a common feature shared with other girls-baseball series like Princess Nine and Taisho Yakyuu Musume, and I always wonder what the point is of making a manga about girls’ baseball if you’re not going to take them seriously.

In particular I can’t help comparing Shiratama! to Macmillan Koukou Joshi Yakyuubu, another short 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. While both series start with the usual character introductions and amusing occurrences, the latter half of Macmillan is taken up by a well-drawn and interesting national tournament on par with any other sports manga and the whole “girls! and they’re playing baseball!” issue never comes up at all. Shiratama! on the other hand ends without Tsubame and her team ever playing any official matches, but they do have fun pretending to be a team. The distant end of the future shows that their juniors do eventually make the team a serious contender, but it’s really no thanks to our gang.

As far as moe manga goes, Shiratama! doesn’t have any interesting characters to latch on to. “Loli-lites in high school” has been done a hundred times before, in far more interesting ways as well. Furthermore, probably because it’s so short, the series never focuses enough on any one character. Thus character traits are raised and quickly abandoned, certain characters don’t appear for long periods of time (Kaname for example, but even main characters like Tsubame can drop out of sight), some characters appear so late that not much can be done about them, etc etc. You really don’t know who to follow or who to support and you’re never given any reason to do so either.

As a comedy manga Shiratama! barely cracks the ‘slightly amusing’ line. If you can’t see the jokes coming a million miles away, you need to read more manga. For example our main character, Tsubame is a high school girl who looks all of 10 years old. You can’t expect the author not to joke about this, but you can and should expect something better than 10 different “mistaken for a grade schooler” gags. It gets old after number 0.

tl;dr Shiratama! is not very good. Whether you like loli, moe, sports, characters skits or comedy you’ll still be disappointed if you try it. On the other hand if you do somehow like it, it’s only 1 volume of fairly simple Japanese, so pick it up if you can find it.

My thoughts on: Rurouni Kenshin

Rurouni Kenshin wasn’t the first manga I ever read, but it was the first one I ever read online. That was back when Viz had only just gotten started and hadn’t gotten round to licensing most of the juggernauts it later got. I caught a few episodes of the Samurai X anime on TV one day, got hooked, went hunting and got hooked like nothing else before.

What I liked about it: The cast. Most of it, anyway. The music – I loved the ending themes so much I became a fan of The Yellow Monkey and T.M. Revolution almost instantly. As a matter of fact I physically own almost all the albums The Yellow Monkey ever released, and I have the pics to prove it. I think I liked the story, but I don’t remember what it was about any more. The tragedy early on where the minister was assassinated and Aoshi’s troops were massacred really moved me at the time, being used as I was to happy-go-lucky series like Ranma 1/2 (more on that one day). At the same time it wasn’t a series about killing for killing’s sake, and I was just as satisfied when the series became less and less bloody with the passing of time.

What I wasn’t so crazy about: Kaoru. There’s a part later in the manga where she supposedly dies, only not really. I’m probably the only RK fan in existence who cheered out loud when that happened, but I really, really didn’t like Kaoru. And not in a fangirl “gyaaa, get offa my man!” kind of way because I wasn’t that crazy about Kenshin either. He’s a cool guy, but I was more a fan of the supporting cast like Saito and Sano. The final Enishi arc wasn’t anywhere near as good at the Kyoto arc, but it wasn’t terrible either. The series would have been too short if it was just Kyoto so for lack of a better ending arc the Enishi arc had to do.

Series quality in general: The action was slightly hard to follow at first, but it got better pretty quickly. I bought the Vizbig editions later and thought the translations were a little too heavy on the Japanese terms. The story wasn’t too memorable in the long term but the cast definitely was. The manga is a little better than the anime, IMO, but both are okay. Is it worth reading? Well it’s one of the bestselling mangas of all time, so I think they’re on to something there. In other words, hell yeah! Especially if you like action manga. If you’ve somehow managed to get by without watching it so far, get on it now!

Gamushara manga review

Another terrible manga from the terrible duo of Juhzo Yamasaki (writer) and Mitsuru Adachi (artist). Adachi has produced several all-time classics since he struck out on his own, but his early artist-only series SUCK.

I only finished Gamushara (がむしゃら) a few days ago, but I’ve already forgotten all the character names. It is completely unremarkable and not really worth a read, not even by someone like me who is currently grabbing any and all baseball manga I can get my hands on. By the way, all manga reviews on this blog will contain free, unmarked spoilers so, yeah. I probably should have said that earlier.

Anyway, the main guy on the cover there is a transfer student at a high school. He gets into an altercation with the guys on the regular baseball team and decides to form a softball team so he can go to the national softball tournament. As with many baseball series (e.g. Princess Nine, Taisho Yakyu Musume), a ridiculous amount of time is spent early on gathering members, even more time is wasted on some stupid rivalry and then the main character’s team loses the final match of the series but learns valuable lessons from it.

It’s a standard pattern, but in the case of Gamushara it rankles quite a bit because the main character is way off base. He is 100% in the wrong and probably has some serious personality problems. He picked the fight with the baseball team for no good reason and formed his own team largely to get back at them. Throughout the series he goes out of his way to antagonize and annoy them, yet somehow he’s treated as a hero for his pettiness. It’s very hard to swallow, which is why I took to skipping large chunks of volume 2. At least it was short, that’s all I have to say. I can’t think of a single redeeming feature of Gamushara, because even the baseball sections were boring, poorly-written and predictable. Another manga for hardcore Adachi fans only, I guess.