Hayate X Blade 1

Action/comedy series like this aren’t so much my thing, I don’t read them very often.  I was curious about this one since it was apparently a yuri action/comedy.  I would say that this isn’t so much the case, it’s more like lots of jokes are made by the main character about her partner being her wife, but maybe something more will develop later on.  I suspect it won’t, since romance doesn’t seem to be the focus.

The plot is basically that the main character, Hayate, is standing in for her injured twin sister at her elite fighting school for the purposes of her sister not losing her standing in the Hoshitori, the school’s fighting system.  Mysteriously, the sister is not seen or really talked about through the entire volume, no mention is made as to why Hayate isn’t attending this school as well, nor what’s happening at Hayate’s school.  Hayate had intended to keep a low profile until the orpanage she and her sister grew up in was being threatened with debt, so then she decides to fight in the tournaments with a partner for cash prizes.  Her partner is a stoic older student with veiled problems of her own who is eventually coerced by Hayate into being partners.  The parner, of course, has a comedic hate-type relationship with Hayate, where the two make a good team, but she sort of hates Hayate because Hayate has to be as annoying as possible when they’re together.

A lot of the comedy has to do with Hayate, who is the type who gets… very excited about things.  Most characters don’t mind.  Her partner does, mainly because this involves Hayate riding on her shoulders or the two of them wailing on huge groups of girls or talking about how she’s Hayate’s wife.  You know.  Stuff like that.

There’s some other characters introduced, including the somewhat eccentric head of the school, her hoshitori partner, the secretary (who mysteriously just gets beaten out of every scene), and the girl who used to partner up with Hayate’s partner.  The two of them have some sort of past that needs to be settled sometime down the road, but first Hayate and partner must catch up in rank.

I like the nuts and bolts of the plot, but it doesn’t do any more than it has to for being a “students at a school who fight all the time”-type series.  I would rather read Tenjho Tenge, and while I haven’t read it, I bet Ikkitousen is probably better than this series as well.  I also didn’t like… well, most of the jokes here.  It just wasn’t my style of humor.

It reads kind of like an anime.  I don’t really watch that much anime because I don’t like the humor, nor do I know if there’s a specific term for this type of manga series.  Maybe you’d like it if you were really into action/comedies, because it seems like it sticks pretty firmly to some genre specific devices.  I’m not so much into it.  Though I have to admit, it did leave me feeling curious about a bunch of things it left open-ended (what the deal was with Hayate’s partner, and whether or not her twin sister would reappear), so I can’t say I disliked it that much.

This was a review copy provided by Seven Seas.