70-oku no Hari

If you've read any of my reviews, you know that I put a lot of stock into story concepts. The concept of immortality, reincarnation, lucid dreams, and basically any concepts that I, as a reader, find interesting. The concept this time is evolution, and boy did they mess this one up.

We'll start with characters, because they were almost as disappointing as the story itself. All in all we have three main characters, and a handful of side characters. Some characters develop(not all), but they do so very artificially. We don't see the development slowly happening over time, or through actions. Instead, the characters that develop pretty much just say "Wow, I think I changed and here's how" but we never really see that change. Also, a lot of those changes don't make sense. In one instance, we have a character who shows up and is never explained very well. Already a strike against him. Then he completely 360s his opinion and thinks the exact opposite of what he was dead set on for no apparent reason. As a third strike, quite a few characters do the exact same thing. The characters are just sloppy and not relatable, or even believable.

The story itself was decently interesting, if not a bit generic, until the start of volume three. I had found myself cursing how generic and lackluster the series was, but about halfway through volume three I wished I could take it back. The story goes from generic to borderline nonsense, and basically everything stops making sense. I'd take generic over whatever the hell that was any day.

The art was pretty good, all things considered. There were a lot of animal drawings, and they looked very nice and realistic for the most part. The character designs were plain, but not terrible. The background panels were also decent, so I'll give Tadano Nobuaki a pass on his art. I just hope he works on his storytelling.

If I were to rate this on its first two volumes, I'd give it a 5. It wasn't anything special, but it wasn't bad either. Sadly, there are two volumes following those, and they were rather horrendous. I do not recommend this to anybody, and advise to spend your time on something else. Hopefully Tadano takes heed of her interest in evolution to evolve her storytelling skills.

Helpful

read more