Stylistically this manga was innovative and artistic - lots of song lyrics positioned to match the mood of the scene, lots of negative space and white backgrounds that created a bleak and somber atmosphere in your mind while reading, and lots of chapters that are 1 or 2 pages long.
All of that is fine and I do have an appreciation for serious/quirky series (I am an Utena fan after all). What turned me off was that the ENTIRE manga was like this - all 4 volumes - with heavy style but very little character, plot, setting, and art development. I don't like finishing a manga that was meant to be heavily emotional and not caring about anything or anybody.
CLAMP was probably more concerned with making a graphic poem instead of a graphic novel. Clover had an abstract, free-flowing feel to it - like a poem - instead of a start-to-finish story. Time-skips, 1 page chapters, and more song lyrics than actual dialogue.... this was definitely not a conventional story. Some would argue if the series is even finished because the ending was left very open....but you could say that about the whole series, so who knows.
The foundation and potential was there to make this an amazing series. The set up being in a futuristic, dystopian sci-fi world was cool, the Clover Leaf Project idea was cool, all the pretty people with super powers was cool - but all of this was underdeveloped. The art however - when there actually was some - was very pretty and CLAMP-like.
One example is Suu, the main character who is supposed to be very powerful and the most dangerous person in the world. Okay. That 'danger' was never shown or elaborated on and I guess as the reader you are supposed to take CLAMP's word for it. This is how it was for the whole story. How am I to get emotionally invested in a story when there's no initial construction for the characters, plot, and setting? You can't, and I didn't.
Fans of CLAMP will enjoy this series obvious. I would recommend that this NOT be your first CLAMP series because it's so different from their other work and it may turn you off from seeking their other titles.
This wasn't a terrible series.... it's different and I did like it stylistically, I just wish there was a lot more substance.
