Gestalt 4

Yun Kouga – Viz – 2009 – 8 volumes

Crown of Love put me in a Yun Kouga mood, so I’m glad I happened to have the newest volume of Gestalt handy.  I really do like this series a lot, it’s a great early ’90s adventure manga in the spirit of things like Sorcerer Hunters and whatnot, and it does nearly everything well as far as that goes.

We get the answers to some of the mysteries of the series in this volume, including the curse of G and what the whole contest in Ouri’s family is about.  We also get a lot more character development for Ouri, moving her firmly into favorite character territory.  She’s goofy and completely devoted to Olivier, but she also has quite the evil streak to her, and seems to not care too much about the welfare of others, whereas Olivier is a priest and cares deeply about such things.  I’m sure they’ll clash in a major way soon.

Also interesting is the growing mystery around Olivier.  Black Olivier doesn’t make another appearance, but we learn that there might be more to Olivier’s past than just his being raised in the sanctuary.  They’re looking for a way to get his arms back, which will probably lead to some fun revelations that I’m looking forward to.

Also interesting is the fact that Olivier really did stay armless.  Usually when this happens, the characters get fully functioning prosthetics right away, which completely nullifies the point of the loss in the first place.  Olivier is armless and completely helpless, relying on others to dress him and do other things for him.  Ouri is absent for most of the story, but I’m sure there’ll be a little bit more about her nursing him in the future.  I really do like the growing relationship between them, which isn’t even really of a romantic nature.  It’s just… nice.

While all this is going on in the main plot, there are also shorter stories at work.  There’s a subplot about an evil mansion that harvests body parts and another about Ouri’s activities while away and another about the group returning to the sanctuary to get Olivier’s arms back.  It is varying degrees of successful juggling all this, and some of the story is told better than other parts, but I still like that there’s so much there and it’s still relatively easy to read.

The only things I don’t like about it are, again, some of the confusing character designs and the way that the story sometimes abruptly hops around.  At one point, Ouri was having an inner monologue before going to bed, and for no reason, it cut to a panel of her fully dressed finishing a thought, then back to her in pajamas.  There are several instances of that, and other instances of… major storyline ending and then having old villains introduced on the next page.  It doesn’t really suffer coherency issues because of this, because it never takes more than a panel or two to figure out what’s going on, but it’s still annoying.

I would also say that there’s a few too many characters, but it solves this problem by having the background characters so generic that I don’t care who they are.  Ouri’s siblings trying to defeat her?  Doesn’t matter which ones they are, they’ll be gone shortly.  I forgot that someone else came from the sanctuary to get Olivier, but he’s gone now, so it doesn’t matter.  I actually mean this in the nicest way possible, it really does make things easier when the side characters are completely forgettable, and I like how the slow development is continuing for the main party of four.

Again, I like Gestalt quite a bit.  It’s very flawed, but it’s still a fun read, and I’m growing more and more attached to the characters in every volume.  Ouri is quite a strong girl right now, and I couldn’t be happier.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.