Dokkoida?! 1
Posted: March 4, 2010 Filed under: Dokkoida 4 Comments »Yu Yagami / Taro Achi – CMX – 2008 – 3 volumes
As I’ve said before, I love sentai manga. Sentai manga don’t appear very often in English, possibly because I’m one of only ten people who enjoy them. They are always very funny, in their way, and I still think that Heroes Are Extinct is a way-underappreciated gem. Dokkoida isn’t technically a sentai manga (there is no team, only a hero, sort of like Ultraman, I suppose), but it’s in the spirit of sentai manga, and is close enough, so it counts.
Unfortunately, of the four sentai manga I’ve read, this one probably ranks lowest. Of course, it’s only the first volume, and I plan on continuing, so it’s not that bad. The humor just wasn’t my thing. Most of the volume is spent introducing new characters, so each of the short chapters is spent in a battle with either a criminal or a competitor for Galactic Police, and then said new character takes a human identity and moves into the apartment complex with everyone else. There’s lots of repetition and stupid jokes, and the character hero and enemy types aren’t that funny or original. As humans, they have no idea who each is, which is kind of funny since the same joke is basically used over and over and, for whatever reason (possibly because Yu Yagami is the creator of Those Who Hunt Elves) there are many girls of various ages and character types who fall in love with the main character. There’s no silly romance, though, that’s mostly just played for laughs.
I was pretty frustrated with things until about halfway through, then the story and sense of humor started to click. Again, I don’t think I like it as much as any of the sentai I’ve read… mostly because I feel it misses the point of being a sentai/hero parody series by not having a ton of jokes based around the hero and monsters. The best jokes in the series do deal with that (like the aforementioned ignorance of alternate identities), so it’s a shame there’s not more.
But now that all the character introduction repetition is over with, maybe other things will happen. It is only three volumes, and I can’t bring myself to dislike a sentai series, so I’ll probably pick up the rest next time I see it on sale. I did like it better than Kikaider, at least.
[...] of the Sea (Back to Books) Erica Friedman on vol. 19 of Comic Yuri Hime (part 2) (Okazu) Connie on vol. 1 of Dokkoida?! (Slightly Biased Manga) Snow Wildsmith on vol. 1 of Itazura Na Kiss (Graphic Novel Reporter) Ysabet [...]
I thought this series was pretty meh but kind of liked Yagami’s sketchy art style and decided to try Go West and liked it much more than Dokkoida.
One of the things I hated about Dokkoida was that the man character was rather bland and the typical most of the girls become love interest deal. Wasn’t sure at the time, but I’m putting most of my dislike on aspects on this on the original writer and not so much on Yagami’s hands.
GW doesn’t do anything super great (it beats a fair share of jokes into the ground) but it’s an enjoyable enough light read that I was little sad to finish. Also IIRC, it’s the super rare comedy manga with a female lead that doesn’t have boob jokes. Boobs jokes and manga pretty much go hand in hand so I was pleasantly surprised to say the least, especially. Well, they may be there but I don’t remember them.
whoops
cut off the part after especially, should be especially since Yagami’s big hit had such a fanservicey concept of stripping elves. GW was decent enough to make me want to give Those Who Hunt Elves a chance but that’s never going to happen as it fell into the ADV manga graveyard like so many other.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, I would agree that the main character is pretty bland. It seems like his facelessness is made up for with the wackiness of everyone around him, but it doesn’t really work in Dokkoida’s favor. It is much better than I thought it would be when I realized it was an adaptation of a novel, it seems to suffer more from an overflow of bad jokes than the usual problems of details being left out or abridged storylines.
I was about this close to picking up Go West, and that was before I realized it was by Yu Yagami. It sounds like it would either be pretty fun or really bland, but I’m glad to hear that it’s enjoyable. I’ll probably finish Dokkoida since I do like sentai series so much, but I had decided against Go West after not liking the first volume of Dokkoida. If it’s good though, I’d gladly pick it up, especially since it’s another short series.
I thought about trying Those Who Hunt Elves when it was coming out, but I can’t bring myself to pick up a series I probably won’t like when more than half of it will never come out. Those Who Hunt Elves sounded kind of funny, but I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stomach the levels of fanservice that it contained. There is one other series by him in English, Hikkatsu, published by Go!Comi. It’s probably the least interesting-sounding of all four titles, though.