Ranked #599

Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo - Tokikake (Manga)

Note: At the time of writing this, I have yet to see the anime movie or any of the other media (it started with a novel and there have been a number of adaptations).

Story:
At first, the story is very disjointed - and not because of the time leaps! The beginning covers a series of minor, unconnected incidents in the main character's life, which gives you a sense of the type of person she is, but can be hard to follow.

Maybe because I'm such a science fiction and fantasy fan, I didn't expect the story to go as it does - to basically be a romance/slice of life. It's sort of a coming of age story. Nonetheless, it is well-handled, and becomes increasingly gripping as it goes on and things become more difficult for the main character.

Art:
The art is nice. In the black-and-white sections, it's clean and dynamic, showing movement well, while the color pages (which are few) use a coloring style that's unusual in manga, and it turned out quite well.

Characters:
The main character starts out pretty immature, but thankfully she grows over the course of the story. The other characters, though not numerous (it is after all quite a short manga) are realistically portrayed and easy to relate to.

Overall:
This manga is fun from the start, and gets better. I wouldn't say it's a must-read, but it does make me want to check out the earlier versions as well as the movie - there are several references to the other story (this is a sequel of sorts) which I enjoyed, even though I haven't seen what they're referencing! It's also a fast and easy read, even in the original Japanese. read more

I was expecting something good but this totally let me down. I don't even really understand how it ended, the art was very good and worth looking at for sure but the characters were flat, when they were mentioned at all and the story had no grip to it. For something like this the reader should be pulled in and made wonder what they would do in that situation. I think that over all this was very unsatisfactory but I guess that's not surprising since it is adapted from a movie which is much longer. I probably wont watch the movie though because I don't like the art, so the story will leave me as the book did, unsatisfied with something that has been done countless times before and had much potential, disappointing. read more