Air Gear is a frankly frustrating, confusing mess of a manga that is extremely entertaining to read through; is the only way I feel I can start this review, let alone summarize this manga. This is my first outing with anything written by the mangaka Oh! great, and I feel like you can solidly grasp his style of story telling and character direction from this manga alone, he really lays it all out on the table for you to read so it makes it very apparent if you're going to be a fan of his works or not.
I'm rambling at this point, so I'm going to cut to the chase already. Air Gear is at times utterly phenomenal, capturing that "shonen magic" that keeps you reading chapter after chapter until you realize you've read through the entire night and the sun is already rising. For roughly the first 200 chapters, well to say I was engrossed would be putting it lightly. The story felt incredibly tight, each character had clear drives and motivations, and the Air-treks themselves felt grounded in their absurdity. The pacing was just fully on point.
Another thing to point out, and this is something that is painfully apparent from the get go, is the heavy usage of ero/ecchi/harem. I genuinely despise this kind of writing. It feels lazy, and takes away a lot of the impact of the female cast when so often they get reduced to nothing more than "haha look I have fat boob and ASS". It is like this throughout the entire manga; and while not all of the humor stems from this, too much does. It's just really boring.
Another thing that is bluntly obvious from this mangas start, and probably what got you most interested in reading it (as it did for me) is the utterly stunning art. If Oh! Great can do anything, it is pull off beautifully framed, easy to read action punctuated by breathtaking spreads.
Gonna keep this review short at this point since I'm meandering and don't think I'll be able to properly express the frustrations I had with this story or the rest of its flaws and strengths so rapid fire is the way to go!
Air Gear doesn't really know what it wants to be exactly, a super natural-battle-sports-action-ecchi-harem-comedy. It's kind of a mess of these ideas, and for a long time it does balance these concepts, but after a while they seem to put too much weight on the core sports-shonen theme. It gets bloated, introducing far too many characters, far too many concepts and ideas that don't get developed enough or get too much development., it gets to a point where you don't really care about anyone in the main cast of characters, especially with ones who are barely even in the story. The main twist villain is a weird dance between stupid and earnest, but borders more on the comically ridiculous and overly serious than actually entertaining and smart. Air treks become absurd with what they are even capable of doing and it stops being entertaining to read about them.
For the final stretch of the manga (the last hundred chapters or so) this manga becomes an absolute slog to read through, and frankly I hate that about it. Air Gear displayed so much promise and potential at its inception, that by the time I finished it I was left frustrated at its inability to fully live up to what it could've been. Alas, I had a ridiculous amount of fun with this manga. There are genuine lessons to take away from this story, but I feel like a lot of the meaning gets lost in itself. Ultimately, I recommend this manga. It's a shit ton of fun, and is worth pulling through to experience the whole thing.
