Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom 2

I don’t often read volumes out of order, but I don’t have volume one of this series, and it has a handy character and plot summary in the beginning, plus it’s a Jump series, so I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to get into. I was right, I didn’t really have any problems at all starting with the second volume.

I was expecting this to be a middle-of-the-road Jump series, and it pretty much rose to meet my expectations. I liked this a little better than I thought I would because it’s got a fairly interesting premise and dynamic between the two main characters.

Nora and Kazuma are the two main characters. My only regret about not getting to read the first volume was that Kazuma seems fairly entertaining, and there’s far less of him in this volume than Nora. He apparently keeps his distance and has sort of a cold way of dealing with people, but he’s apparently got a temper and does disturbing and clever things when he’s angry, rather than blowing up comically like you would expect. I liked the series a little more for that. Kazuma is also comparable to Taikobo, since he uses a lot of tricks in battle to run circles around his opponents as well as Nora.

The plot is fairly simple, and involves Kazuma being master of Nora, a fairly powerful demon dog from Hell who is also a loose cannon. Nora can’t use any magic or do much of anything unless Kazuma says so, and Kazuma doesn’t often let him. Kazuma even denies Nora power when they are being attacked in order to teach both Nora and the opponent a lesson. Their opponents seem to be some sort of rogue demon organization that Hell is trying to stop since they are eating humans. Nora isn’t much help since he can’t control his powers or anything, hence the training he’s receiving from Kazuma. For some reason, Kazuma can go toe-to-toe with the demons and win, which I also find to be fascinating.

There’s some stuff about Nora revealed in this volume… he doesn’t know who his parents are, he may destroy both Hell and Earth, whatever. I’m not too interested in the depths of the plot as of yet, but I am interested enough in the characters to keep reading for a bit. It’s pretty middle-of-the-road as far as shounen action series go, but I’ll probably track down the first volume and give it at least another volume or so to see whether the story lives up to the interesting pair.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.