Gestalt 6

Yun Koga – Viz – 2010 – 8 volumes

I like this series more and more with every volume.  It’s still an acquired taste, but it’s to my liking, and there are a lot of others that will probably really get into it, too.  I imagine it being very much a “you love it or you hate it” series, though.

There are lots of fantasy and magic-based action still, but most of the video game allusions have been stripped away, and the majority of the action in this volume is a look at Ouri and her feelings for Olivier.  Yun Koga has a way with angsty, yet subtle situations like this, and it’s agonizing to see Ouri tear herself apart with having to be satisfied that she’s once again a stranger in Olivier’s life.  A stranger that gets to stick by his side, but a stranger all the same.  She has a few asides that come across beautifully.  I’m not entirely sure this originally ran in a shoujo manga magazine, but amidst all the vaguely defined action scenes and the somewhat foggy forward progress of the story, Ouri’s asides about Olivier give it rare and valuable moments of shoujo-ness.  I think I like it best because of Ouri being such an interesting character.

Later, the volume dips a bit into Ouri’s past.  The story returns to the fight with her siblings, and we finally see flashbacks to Ouri as a little boy and her connections to Gestalt, what the contest is, and some answers about her physical form.  This is my favorite plot thread, and I’m happy to see the story moving past the slow fights with the vaguely evil preachers and on to Dark Olivier, the journey to Gestalt, and answers about Ouri.

Again, the story is  a bit vague on some finer details, like its sense of place or even having only one thing going at once among the same group of characters.  I was surprised when the fight that started towards the beginning of the volume kept resuming, usually after something else had happened, like another set of characters enterting or another plot revelation, et cetera.  It would just show that evil priest, and I’d realize he really was still there, just hanging out and waiting his turn for a whoopin’.  Whatever.  I like it for this dreamlike quality, though, and I like that everything is so ill-defined as far as fights and time frames go.  It gives the story a kind of ethereal mood, something that works really well for a fantasy story.

We’ve finished the Continental part of the story, which means that next volume should feature Gestalt.  With Olivier’s motives revealed and a whole lot more about Ouri coming forward, I am very much looking forward to what the final two volumes of the series have to offer.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.