Ral Ω Grad 3

Tsuneo Takano / Takeshi Obata – Viz – 2008 – 4 volumes

Ah.  Because I am a geek, I am sitting here writing reviews of a pile of manga and watching them blow up the second death star for about the 100th time, and talking about it because I don’t have anything else to say about something I’m trying to talk about.

I’ve heard that this series is quite terrible, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting.  It’s a video game license, and it only lasted four volumes in Shounen Jump, so I didn’t have high hopes.  It doesn’t suffer from some of my worst Shounen Jump pet peeves, like a cast of a thousand characters or an overly technical or convoluted magic/fighting system, but was pretty unremarkable in both plot and characters.  A solid C from me, in other words, though perhaps those without a taste for generic plot and characters would think worse things about it.

It was surprisingly easy to jump into in volume 3, and it was also easy to understand that the characters were fighting with some sort of shadow monsters, Ral, the main character, unsurprisingly possessing the most powerful.  Also not shocking is the fact that he’s traveling with a knowledgeable, but powerless female and two lesser shadow users in order to stop some sort of terrible evil.  Meh.

The characters were serviceable, but completely unexciting.  Ral seems like the usual nice-guy SJ hero.  He has a sudden, somewhat surprising bout of selfishness in this volume that is cured almost immediately by his friends, but other than that… you know, he likes fighting and is looking to save people and beat the bad guy.  The girl is kind of interesting since she knows all about the shadows they come up against, so I sort of liked her.  Everyone else worked well in their roles, but basically left no impression.  Well, aside from the bad-guy-turned-to-our-side who, for whatever reason, shouts random Spanish words that embarass everyone.  I liked that.

The battles were my favorite part, probably.  There are a few interesting ones, but even they don’t come close to some of the better fights you’ll see in SJ.

The art’s good.  I mean, Takeshi Obata doesn’t let us down in Hikaru no Go or Death Note, and he certainly does a good job here.  That’s probably the main reason most people are picking this up.  Get Castlevania Judgement while you’re at it.

I’ll see how I feel after the conclusion.  It’s probably going to be about the same thing: entertaining, but completely unremarkable.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.