Akame Ga Kill is a dark fantasy shounen battle manga that bites off more than it can chew with its ideas that leave the reader feeling unsatisfied at the end. Although the art for the fights can be gorgeous at times, the fights themselves fail to deliver on the hype. The core group has great character moments that give strong emotional payoffs throughout the course of the story, but the bloat of having such a wide cast really holds the story back. The manga’s titular character, Akame, gets a lot of the story’s spotlight, but strangely enough we mostly experience the story through the eyes of Tatsumi. This results in her being the “chosen one” but not narratively for the reader as we experience the story from Tatsumi’s point of view. Overall, the narrative really fails to do the heavy lifting necessary to explore its dark fantasy ideas while still having the story fill its niche of being intended for a shounen audience. It tries to do both at the same time and ends up falling flat because of it.
Spoilers:
Positives
A large and varied cast of characters with their own unique backstories and abilities
Strong art, especially when it comes to high impact moments
Interesting political drama between the various factions in the world
An interesting concept of a story
Negatives
Akame Ga Kill tries to do too much and that is where its shortcomings are exposed. The world is huge, but we see almost none of it. The cast is large, but a huge chunk of them die off without giving the reader time to build a connection to them. The fights are set up in a cool way, but they rarely last more than a few pages and leave little impact. One of the biggest flaws narratively is Akame’s murasame blade. The idea of a one hit blade on paper seems very cool, but the fights involving her feel so trivial that Akame just becomes a Mary Sue character to resolve any conflicts. The author fails to really give her any interesting fights where she is forced to really struggle, except the Wave and Esdeath ones. Speaking of Mary Sue’s, what even is Esdeath. Throughout the entire story, has she even faced any struggles really? Her ice powers can freeze time, change the weather conditions of an entire region, and create an entire ice army without showing any strain on her strength, besides comments made by her opponents. Her unlimited stamina just makes any fights she participates in feel all the more pointless as she essentially can’t lose. Funny that the only way to kill off the Mary Sue’s was to run them into each other. The moral question that was introduced much earlier on about how the nature of Night Raid meant that they existed in a moral gray zone where they had to do abhorrent things to combat those who commit even more abhorrent crimes is basically completely ignored immediately after. The villains are portrayed almost comically evil as to assuage any guilt their deaths may cause. The few members of the enemy faction, the Jaegers, that do get characterization really don’t present a compelling case to support the Empire’s side. It really doesn’t help that the characters that are supposed to represent the “good” of the Empire are either not really bad people like Wave or Kurome or just raging psychopaths like Seryu and Dr. Stylish.
At the end of the day, Akame Ga Kill really shot itself in the foot by trying to incorporate dark fantasy elements while staying within the boundaries of the shounen genre. We hear a lot about the atrocities that happen, but they are never shown, rendering them weightless. Night Raid does get some solid characterization that do make their deaths feel impactful, but contrast that with the slew of villains we meet one time and get foddered away to build up another character. Another quality that bogs it down is the predictability of the story where the outcomes of events and their consequences do not come as a surprise. In conclusion, the manga does have some interesting aspects that make it a solid read, but its clumsy storytelling and inability to really commit to telling a feel good shounen or a depressing dark fantasy leaves it feeling undercooked.
