Slightly Biased Manga

Sorry guys, summer has kicked in and I have lots of events on the weekends to go to, and I have to spend a lot of time preparing through the week.  Though my company is not fancy enough for BEA or… any trade show other than CIROBE really, the consumer-oriented events we go to are awesome all the same.

…after a 45-minute digression where I surf through all the websites for my upcoming events, back to the main topic! I bought this last July when it came out, and regretted my purchase immediately.  This was not helped by my roommate, who loathes stupid titles and would ask me if I wanted a glass of “jell-aid” for months after I bought it.  I kinda knew it was going to be mediocre, so I let a couple volumes accumulate in hopes I would get into the characters.

There’s something about this series that reminds me a lot of Skies of Arcadia, but the two are nothing alike aside from both containing sky pirates.  This one’s fantasy-ish with a heavier bias towards action than coming up with… things for the world.

The first half of this volume is mostly concerned with one big action scene where the main character’s air pirate ship gets raided for the robot girl (or maybe she’s not a robot-girl, but she’s some sort of bio-experiment-type-thing, which is close enough for me)  it contains.  Of course robot-girl is an ultimate weapon that teams up with the main character and they strike out on their own journey.  Their first set of enemies, which include two energetic, outgoing and annoying females and a limp dishrag of a man, of course tag along as the main character and the robot girl (herein referred to as Cou and Ren).  They are part of an agency who are trying to round up all the super-rare beings like Ren, and they say they’re tagging along to do damage control.

Apparently, beings like Ren are a lot less rare than the beginning of the series would have you believe.  One of the three that tag along is also a bio-weapon, and of course the first town they stumble into has an agent who rounds up these weapons for himself.

I was NOT impressed by this first volume, as there was not too much original story in it.  None of the characters really stood out, and although I kind of liked the bio-weapons (called Edel Raids), nothing else about the volume appealed to me at all.   As much as I like the Edel Raids, there is not much else that is fascinating about the world that the characters inhabit as of yet.  The sky pirates may have wound up being pretty awesome, but they’re phased out in the first chapter.  After that, we get a journey-esque story with typical crooks trying to kidnap the ultimate weapon.  Who happens to be a cute girl.

Just not my type of story, again, though I give this one a lot less originality points than I gave Gals, which was also not my type of story.