Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom 9
Posted: December 21, 2009 Filed under: Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom 1 Comment »Kazunari Kakei – Viz – 2010 – 9 volumes
Ahh! I was worried about this! I wasn’t sure how the story was going to fill out another volume, since most everything wraps up nicely in volume 8. It doesn’t fill the whole volume, and the second half features two short stories, including one that was the pilot for the Nora series. I liked the short story quite a bit, since it lacked the plot about the resistance and was mostly about Nora and Kazuma making each other angry and being themselves, which is what I love so much about this series. Usually I dislike pilot chapters like that, since it’s clear that the ideas evolve quite a bit by the time they get turned into a series, but this time, all the good ideas were right there to begin with, which is pretty cool.
The second short story was unrelated to Nora. It was called “The Severer,” and was hilariously terrible. The dialogue was so bad that I suspect the person doing the adaptation had a lot of fun punching it up with lame-but-still-awesome English phrases.
The conclusion to Nora absolutely crushed me. I like this series quite a bit, and I was hoping that with an extra-long ending we’d get to see a lot of wrapup with Kazuma and Nora, but there’s one last conflict, and the story ends abruptly on what seems like a cliffhanger. Literally, the final chapter just cuts off in the middle of an action scene, with no resolution. It’s totally unfair. There’s a sequel series called SUREBREC: Nora the 2nd, but it hasn’t been licensed in English yet. Tragic. I hope this was popular enough to warrant releasing the sequel.
As I’ve said before, I have a ridiculous fondness for this series, which has a lot to do with Kazuma and Nora being great characters that work together quite humorously. The plot was only average, but that was easy for me to overlook since I tend to like demon-oriented series. Nora and Kazuma more than made up for any weaknesses in the plot, though. There were some really cool plot twists along the way, to be fair, and I was more-or-less highly entertained until I got to the end. This was probably one of my favorite shounen series from last year, and while it seems like a mediocre offering, it’s definitely worth reading from the beginning.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
I liked this series for the first half or so, when it was mostly one-off chapters but whenever ii introduced the main plot line it just became another meh shonen fighting manga with no real strong points. I remember thinking that the last 4 volumes or so were a drag to read compared to the beginning.
I was sort of surprised that Viz never released the sequel series since it was only one volume long on account of the magazine it was running in getting canned and only a couple of the magazine’s series getting placed in its replacement serial. I guess Viz figured better off just leaving Nora as a single nine volume series than spending the money to license and release an abruptly ended continuation.