Mad Love Chase 4

Kazusa Takashima – Tokyopop – 2010 – 5 volumes

I’m trying to stick to Halloween/horror themes today. This one’s only marginally related, but it does have demons in it, so it sort of counts.

Not really, though. I like it because it’s a goofy comedy with good friends and demons, all things I can appreciate. The one-shot chapters are usually very entertaining, if a little over-the-top, and the characters are way more charming than they have any right to be. This really should be a middle-of-the-road title of limited interest, but quite honestly, I love it to pieces.

This volume had a kind of reckoning in it, and I loved the way it played out. Yamato and Taiki are obviously BFFs, but I always thought it was interesting that Taiki knew from almost the first day that Yamato was the Demon King he was sent to retrieve. yet nobody else knew he knew, nor did they figure out Yamato’s identity. Considering how deep the friendship between Yamato and Taiki runs, I always thought it was odd that Taiki never admitted who he was to Yamato. With a new character thrown into the mix (yet another 3rd party sent from the demon world to find Yamato), the whole situation blows up and everyone finds out what Taiki knows. It’s bad. But it also goes into a lot of detail about just how much Taiki and Yamato mean to each other. It gets about as close as you can to slashing two characters without actually doing it (and even then, I’m not entirely sure it’s not implied), but man, those are some really awesome scenes between Taiki and Yamato. I love stories like this sometimes, where two characters are just really great friends.

There are some sub-par one-shots mixed in, even while the whole plot about Taiki is running, and it did get a little sillier and more slapstick than I like. The new character introduced at the beginning of the volume, a wizard, did add something interesting since he seemed uninterested in Yamato or his disguise, but did like to mess with Taiki and company. At the end of the volume, three women are sent from hell for the retrieval, and so far their main function seems to just be comedy relief.

I’m looking forward to the last volume. Part of me thinks that the majority of the Taiki/Yamato moments were taken care of this volume, but I suspect it will have a pretty grand finish. It’s going to be some wait, but hopefully it’ll be worth it. In the meantime, feel free to catch up to the current volumes. This is a decent series that is fairly underrated.