Apr 18, 2020
I often think that it's inherently difficult to make fantasy work as a one-shot. High fantasy is so often reliant on good world-building and in a one-shot, there's so little room for this to be fleshed out that it often feels lacking, superficial or unfinished. Unfortunately, Doku no Aji is a prime example of this and is not very good.
The story is ultimately fairly simple: a blind guy who was raised by nuns (for some reason) finds a dragon in its human form in a cave and decides to help set it free. The problem is there are way more questions that there are
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answers. Why is the dragon in human form? Also, the nuns just seem out of place in this mythology.
There's no real fleshing out of either character. The main guy is blind and that's pretty much his only character trait. The dragon is: Sad? Angry? Who knows? There's several mentions of poison and a fire rope and it all just reads as nonsense. The BL is not particularly romantic or charming. The only erotic moments are when the dragon licks blood off his hands, which if that's appealing to you then great but it didn't push my buttons.
The artwork looked kinda messy to me and not in an intentionally artistic sketchy style like some other one-shots I've read. It was honestly a bit hard to make out what was going on in some scenes.
I didn't enjoy this. It felt unfinished and confused. If I'm going to acknowledge any positives about it then at least it had some ideas. Shame it didn't execute them well.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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