Slightly Biased Manga

This was an advance copy that CMX had sent me, I was surprised to see the actual book won’t come out until October. I’ll write a little bit more about it when it comes out and reset the date on this post, but for the time being here’s a few thoughts after going through a rough copy.

I was actually kind of thrilled when I first started reading it because the music-themed names and places reminded me a bit of the Violinist of Hameln. The comparison was reinforced by the father character turning into a demon (the plot of this series is that the prince and his bodyguard have to save the kingdom from the king, who has been accidentally turned into a demon), but the similarities end there. Well, they’re also on a journey in Classical Medley, but not in the same way. That’s the last of the similarities, really. As I started reading, it reminded me more of +Anima, mostly because it maintains a positive, adventurous atmosphere no matter what happens. And plenty of dark stuff does happen.

It’s definitely more of a kid’s series, and very kid-friendly at that. There are a lot of kid series that would make me nervous to give to a small kid, but there’s nothing objectionable about this one, and even the dark stuff is pretty mild. The storyline and characters are kind of flat and simple, but it’s much preferable to, say… the Pichi Pichi Pitch manga, which is likely unreadable for most adults. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It definitely is following a formula for a standard fantasy series… the bodyguard character is the one who gets the magical orb that can help the king, he and the prince are on a quest to find the older prince, who is studying in a neighboring kingdom, and the monster who has taken over the king realizes that he needs to recover other pieces of the evil orb in order to regain full power. I probably wound up liking it most for the upbeat mood I mentioned earlier, any kid series that can pull that off usually winds up being a really good read no matter what formula it uses.

The only thing I really didn’t like about it were the character designs, which are of the type where all the characters look like they fall between the ages of 8-10. The main characters aren’t even that young (one’s 12 and the other’s 15), but it works better in this series since it feels like it’s more for kids.