Variante 1
Posted: December 23, 2007 Filed under: Variante 4 Comments »This series is powerfully, POWERFULLY mediocre. A girl comes back to life after she and her parents were killed by a chimera. Chimeras are on a rampage, but the government is keeping their existence a secret from the public. When the girl comes back to life in the government morgue, she finds that her arm has been replaced with a chimera.
This sounds like an awesome premise, and there’s a good mix of psychological horror and physical gore. Where the series fails is that it’s only about how sad the girl is. She’s put in an extremely sterile environment after being removed harshly from society by basically dying, and none of the people in the institution where she is being kept show the barest scrap of humanity. So basically, the girl is sad, and needs comforted, and there’s no one there to comfort her. This… is the entire book.
There are battles. A chimera gets loose and kills people in the institution, and at one point the main character escapes and runs into a chimera in a park. Not even these battles can save the manga, though. The chimera are drawn as amorphous blobs, and it’s not too satisfying when the girl crushes them with her misshapen arm. The action is also usually over quickly, and it normally takes only a few panels for a battle to play out. There’s a hint of some relationship (not even romantic in nature, just a regular human being) between the main character and someone else at the institute, so maybe things will pick up next volume. The art is pretty good, especially on the splash pages and color stuff. For what it’s worth. There’s not too much an opportunity to show off in the story itself though, since most of this volume took place in the drab, boring institution.
Interesting…this instantly reminded me of blood + for some reason I think is fairly obvious. I immediately got interested in the plot. I think its pretty nicely done. However, I feel like I’m watching one of those episodes of “Are you Afraid of the dark?” (a show that used to come on Nickelodeon..Well anyway…it got my attention.
The random Are You Afraid of the Dark reference made me laugh. I kind of know what you mean, plot-wise. I remember them being a little tamer, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they… well, weren’t.
I liked the first volume very much. It’s something between Saikano and Elfen Lied and it is exactly my cup of tea.. ^_^
Oh, you’ll probably really end up liking it a lot, then. I liked it better and better as it went on, and the ending was pretty epic.