Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom 1

I actually like this series quite a bit, so I’m glad I finally got to go back and read the first volume.  It’s one of those shounen series that probably should be middle-of-the-road action, but isn’t.  Or perhaps it is, and it just strikes all the right things for me to be something kind of special.  I do like demons, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before.

I actually thought Kazuma was portrayed as a bit more of a good guy in this volume.  I probably should have known better.  He’s sort of an evil guy with good intentions.  He’s president of the student council, but even in that capacity, he seems to enjoy ordering people around and torturing them.  The students can’t argue with him though, and sort of like him for it since he helps them out.  I guess.  I was a bit curious how his contract with Nora started too, because he just doesn’t seem like the type of character that would bother.  I was right, he simply agreed to things because he was bored.

We get to see Nora as Cerberus twice in this volume, which I thought might be the case after he came back in volume 4.  It’s kind of interesting, but the fights in this volume don’t make that much sense after reading the next three, where he’s going through all sorts of magical training.  I was under the impression he couldn’t use magic at all.  He uses it to fight Resistance foot soldiers, but they do point out that he doesn’t really have enough control to fight someone like Knell, a character that not even Kazuma can really lock horns with yet.

And I still enjoy Kazuma’s part of the story immensely.  I like the types of series with fights that are won by outsmarting the opponent rather than overpowering them.  Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is like that, where every stand user battle is sort of a puzzle, some with more hilarious solutions than others.  I also like that Nora is driven to fight by Kazuma’s insults, and that this is also part of Kazuma’s plan.  Though Nora is sort of… obtuse (I laughed really hard when he labeled the parts of the body to show Kazuma he’d been educated), I like that he hates so bitterly to be insulted and belittled.  This is true through the next three volumes too, but it’s established pretty well here.

So yeah, I’m pretty fired up about this series.  The cliffhanger in volume 4 is killing me.