Prince of Tennis 2
Posted: November 4, 2004 Filed under: Prince of Tennis Leave a comment »I’m still not really sure why I feel guilty for not keeping on top of Prince of Tennis. Volume 2 came out in June or July, and I just recently picked it up after seeing volume 3 and worrying about volume 4 showing up in stores. But, uh, I don’t really like it. This won’t be much of a review. I promise to do a good, long one soon.
So, they played more tennis. The ranking matches finished up. There were some tennis scouts. That’s about it. I just gave you a summary of what happened in the volume in three sentences, and that’s actually a pretty thorough summary, expandable only by telling you what matches went on and who the regulars are now. They only play tennis.
It’s not even that I don’t like sports manga. God knows I love Hikaru no Go, and they don’t even really play sports there, just a board game. Hikaru no Go is good because its characters are really great, whereas Prince of Tennis doesn’t even have good, dimensional characters. Even hardcore fangirls will most likely admit that they only enjoy the series because they, er, imagine personalities for the characters. Ryoma’s a smarmy little kid, and I sorta like that, but that’s about all the dimension any character ever gets, ever. Well, so far at least. There’s some foreshadowing about FUTURE TENNIS EXCELLENCE and a little mention about why Ryoma plays tennis and a hint at some sort of mysterious home life… but all that is honestly not interesting at all.
Viz did a better job translating this time, there weren’t any errors that I really remember, so that’s always a good thing. Even the trim size was good, didn’t bleed into the binding or off the edge of the page, which is a major, major problem for many graphic novels (including one I read just after it). So, good job, Viz!
In short: tennis.
