Spiral: Suiri no Kizuna
Spiral: Bonds of Reasoning

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NOTE: This is my personal opinion and should be understood as such.

Where to begin with this manga? Well, to say that this is a shounen manga is a joke, it's clearly shoujou-oriented, especially the art. The boys look like girls, the panels overlap and you have flowers and sparkles on every other page. The characters are two-dimensional and follow a clichéd formula (the protagonist who has an inferiority complex that stems from being compared to his brother; the goofy, disgustingly cute sidekick; the villains who seem evil at first but are actually misunderstood but you can't sympathize for them because they're complete d*cks). The mysteries ... are pitiful. When you've read the likes of Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes and Edogawa Conan you expect more from a manga claiming to be Mystery. The "tricks" used are things even third graders could solve (nothing mind-boggling) and the logic followed by the characters is absolutely silly. And there's the staple of every bad manga: the attempt at being deep and psychological (and failing miserably at it). I had to drop this manga because I couldn't handle its stupidity. There's a possibility it could get better as it the story progresses but from my experience, that usually doesn't happen and I didn't want to risk a cerebral hemorrhage. If you're just looking for something to kill time with or like shoujou, read it. If not, stay away from this manga for your own sake.

If you're going in looking for a pure, logic-based mystery series? Skip this.

I was going through my manga collection and came across this and realized I'd never finished it. After hunting around, now I have. And I WISH I hadn't because all the enjoyment I had for this series is gone now. The first 2/3 of the series has SO much promise as a good mystery with really interesting characters, but the last third destroys that by veering away from logic and into the occult. Both for answers to mysteries up until that point and for the background and motivations going forward. It's stops ... becoming about solving mysteries and instead becomes about fighting a crafted fate.

To be somewhat fair: the occult is kept fairly low-key. You don't get characters casting spells, etc. But it is there and pretty out of left field and not until you're over 50 chapters in. Had I known it'd go in this direction, I'd probably have dropped the story.

I decided to finish, but honestly I regret that because for me, it just got worse. Many characters dropped by the wayside for the final arc which felt like it cheapened the journey there. There were a couple big twists but one was SO drawn out I honestly found it to be insulting to the reader's intelligence. And I really just didn't not like the ending.

tl;dr: A manga that has some pretty solid moments, especially towards the middle, but that doesn’t really have any good overarching aspects and has a really weak ending.

This manga is centered around a high school boy named Ayumi who’s the solitary logical type, but beyond that it changes quite a lot over the course of its run. It starts off with simple whodunit murder mysteries. These aren’t all that great but aren’t particularly bad either. As it moves forward, it transitions more and more into more straight forward battles of wit between Ayumi and the mysterious Blade Children. These actually started off pretty well written ... and although simple were interesting. As things progressed and continued to escalate, the writing got much messier and more ridiculous and involved a lot more absurd deduction and such during conflicts. Still, it also amped up the action and kept things moving pretty fast so even if it wasn’t realistic, it was still reasonably exciting and interesting.

The manga goes through a very abrupt shift two thirds of the way through, when it finally starts delving into the core of the mysteries that had been touched upon throughout the manga. This phase starts off pretty badly with what is essentially an entire volume of characters just info dumping explanation, though it doesn’t really get much better from there as the rest of the manga is also much slower and lacking in the excitement that made the previous parts enjoyable. The atmosphere in general is much drearier and more depressing. However, despite that the writing is even messier and nonsensical than before. It jumps the shark in all sorts of ways, with a heavy emphasis on half assed science and supernatural elements it bizarrely tries to force into the mold of Christian mythology despite really not fitting. Manga majorly escalating over time isn’t all that strange, but the transition was handled really badly from a tonal and thematic point of view. Furthermore, it just overall makes very little sense with supernatural rules and mechanics that feel completely arbitrary and changing on a whim. If this was a battle shounen or something like that then this level of writing would be okay, but when it’s a thriller centered around a central mystery and battle of wits then things like this just make the whole thing feel dumb.

It also doesn’t really help that the manga is really weak in terms of characters. Ayumi feels like he’s having somewhat of a character arc over the first two thirds. However, the the final third essentially crushes that in being really wishy washy and all over the place while also being overtly melodramatic about everything. The main heroine, the president of the newspaper club who is seemingly able to sniff out information on anything, also seems interesting and there seem to be some level of a relationship arc going on between her and Ayumi. However, that completely falls apart towards the ending. The twist was pretty predictable and I didn’t find it all that shocking, but how it handled the aftermath was atrocious. As for all the side characters, it didn’t really feel like it handled anyone properly. There were characters that felt like they were interesting and worth getting invested in in the first two thirds, but the final third minimized their role tremendously in favor of new characters that were nowhere near as interesting. All in all, by the end I wasn’t really invested in any of the characters or their fates, and as that’s what the core of the finale and epilogue are centered around, the ending had very little impact and was overall pretty dissatisfying.

The art I also found pretty mediocre. The style I wasn’t particularly fond of and I thought the quality wasn’t that high, even for the covers and color pages. I also thought that the character designs were pretty boring even for the setting.