After a couple of minutes of looking from shelf to another shelf, I finally stumbled upon the RWBY manga, which I thought after reading the first two chapters last time online that it would never be published through one of the U.S. retail stores.
Since I liked the ONA series, I grabbed one copy of the manga, bought it along with Juuni Taisen, and went home so I can enjoy the manga myself.
So after reading the manga, did I feel some sign of enjoyment? In other words, did I love it as much as I loved the animated net series?
Well....not much.
To start off, let me talk about the most important aspect of RWBY which is the story.
Story - 3
Ever since the first two volumes of the animated series, RWBY was known to have a yet developed plot for the whole entire series from the start to endgame. The synopsis of RWBY only shows off only a little bit of what the story is going to about until volume 3 and 4 happened. So, considering this was going to be adapted by a different person, you think that he has some kind of creative process to go about the story, maybe some plans and good ideas. So did he had any original ideas for the plot in this manga?
Not much.
The entirety of the manga is based on the trailers of RWBY - how each character is introduced; peaking our interest for the volume to come.
In other words, the whole manga is FILLER!
They're not even good filler either.
I'm going to be writing this section as a fan of RWBY, but trying not to spoil it.
To put it simply, one filler was uninteresting compared to Weiss's introduction video where she sings a song giving her hints of her life, but then the manga disregard that and just put it straightforwardly, with uninteresting quotes. It shows that the trailer to manga is can't be adaptable if this is the mangaka's writing style.
Another filler, which was Blake's part, made sense at the first part, until it made absolutely no sense. Compared to the introduction trailer (original source material) it made sense why Blake 'did this' instead of that, but the manga decided to get rid of that by not writing why Blake 'did this' instead of that.
And the last filler where Yang's introduction awe factor died out. We have the first three panels of some interesting plot, but it just leaves that there following with another plot. There wasn't anything awesome, or interesting about this filler. We have Yang entering a bar (which I don't really know why there wasn't a security checking her I.D), and then we have action scenes which really doesn't mean anything honestly compared to Yang's introduction trailer. How it ended was different too when, in the manga, Yang just forgets about it and goes off happy...
Finally, we have an original plot which was short...and cute. Nothing special about this one... only three chapters.
Now that's out the way:
Art - 6
Now I can proudly say, comparing from the CG Character designs to the manga art, it looks really impressive. In fact, this is the only thing I can praise out of since the CG models lack any expression and emotion from their faces in the original source material. Action looks intense as it needed to be, and its drawn perfectly.
Although I like the character art....there wasn't much emphasis on 50% of the panels I've read through. From background to panel work, it didn't really have that appeal that it deserved to have .
But what pisses me off is how the mangaka can be extremely lazy when drawing stuff in panels. In some of the panels, there were a lot of unnecessary white space which should have been a background of something instead of being pure white. Speaking of pure white, that also shows the lack of emphasis for some of the panels that needs to be focused more. Some of the panels created aren't even drawn, and panels that only filled spaces for speech bubbles.
Character - 4
I don't really have to explain this one, but if I have to describe the characters by boiling them down to the size of a kettle corn, then I'm just going to say these words:
Average. Shounen. Characters. With. No. Appealing. Texture.
That's all.
Enjoyment - 6
The only reason I bought this manga because I really liked the RWBY animated series, but if this manga's only purpose is to promote the animated series, then it does a really lackluster job at doing so (taking this perspective from a person that never heard of RWBY and starts off with the manga).
Overall - 5
And this is the part where you finally made a verdict on whether or not you want to dump this inside the trash. If your interest peaked because of the manga, then I would suggest preserving it for a little while, but if you weren't interested then I suggest taking this to the landfill where it deserved to be.
