St. Dragon Girl 6
Posted: March 12, 2010 Filed under: St. Dragon Girl 1 Comment »Natsumi Matsumoto – Viz – 2010 – 8 volumes
Oh dear. You know when you open the volume and the title page illustration invites you to fill in your own dialogue in the blank speech bubbles that you may be a little too old for the series. And I’m definitely not the target audience.
There’s a lot of fun in this volume. The chapters are still episodic, with the only continuing plot thread continuing to be the shy, unaknowledged relationship between Momoka and Ryuga. The chapters in this volume contain more stories of ghost possessions, demon fights, girls possibly moving in on Momoka’s territory, and a cute chapter at the end focusing on Ron-Ron, the stuffed panda inhabited by the spirit of the “Panda King.”
The clear winner of the stories in this volume was one involving a fox demon who was masquerading as a movie star and collecting souls through her popularity. Momoka was her stunt double in a movie, and she steals all her memories of Ryuga away. It’s a two-part story, and while it wasn’t edge-of-your-seat thrills or anything, it was still pretty heavy stuff for this otherwise light series.
It’s extremely cute, and as I said, it’s pretty fun, but it’s a shallow kind of fun. It lacks a lot of the charm similar adorable series have, maybe just because it lacks character and plot development. Nothing is ever a serious threat, and it’s pretty clear how things will shake out before they happen. One thing to its credit is that the stories aren’t repetitive cliches, and I think that’s what saves it from being uninteresting… but still.
This is adorable, and fans of cute shoujo aimed at younger readers will likely find a lot to like in it, but there are much, much better things to read out there.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
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