Jul 11, 2023
tl;dr: A decent start to a manga that collapses after rushing to a clearly forced ending.
This manga is centered around cryptids and their handlers. The term cryptid is generally used with pseudoscientific animals such as chupacabras or the loch ness monster, but in this manga it’s used to refer to beasts out of fantasy such as unicorns and dragons. The protagonist Asuka is a Japanese teenager that goes to London in search of his mother, Honoka, who mysteriously disappeared ten years ago. However, he discovers that she was a powerful cryptid handler and as someone who shares her blood, he has the abilities to pick
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up where she left off, thus he gets pulled into dealing with the mess she left behind while also doing his best to search for why she disappeared and where she disappeared to. He does this alongside one of his mother’s loyal cryptid, the electric black dog Edgar, who isn’t particularly fond of him, but she’s willing to work with him if it means getting closer to Honoka.
The first two volumes of this three-volume manga are pretty good. They’re not particularly unique, having the standard premise of a protagonist that bonds with supernatural girls that then take part in battle. Still, it taking place in London gives it an aesthetic that differentiates it pretty well from most similar manga. The world building and use of mythology are also pretty good, and although it’s moving pretty slowly the main characters feel like they have potential to their character and relationship arcs. The action is also pretty solid. Thus, even if it isn’t incredibly original, it’s a pretty solid execution of the concepts it’s using.
The manga unfortunately goes downhill really fast starting with the end of the second volume. It’s very clear that the manga was axed as the writing rushes to try to quickly get through a lot of plot points that were very likely intended to occur over a much longer period of time. It pulls out lots of plot points out of nowhere and then quickly rushes past them with little explanation into more plot points pulled out of nowhere. There’s infodumping that just straight out explains a lot of key things in passing. There aren’t any major plot holes and I suppose it technically does resolve all the major plot threads, but in order to do so it takes things in directions that feel really off thematically and thus nothing really has any impact at an emotional level. As such, the ending isn’t really satisfying at all.
In terms of character designs Edgar has a few good ones but outside of that none really stood out. The art isn’t particularly good but is reasonably solid. Also, I’m very confused about the origins of the story in this manga. It has an author, an artist, and someone in charge of the adaptation. That’s pretty standard for manga adaptations of light novels. In the afterwords the “original novels” are also referred to. But I can’t seem to find any novels that this matches up to. I can’t find any information on this being a part of some other novel series either. It’s very strange.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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