But I can't, I just simply can't. However Death Note starts off as one of the best mangas ever made. A big piece of it is that the manga breaks a lot of bounds. Instead of focusing on the backstory of a character, the main character gets a Death Note, a book that will let people write names in it that will kill people, and then starts doing so.
What truly works here though is the main character, Light Yagami, is smart, charismatic and interesting, instead of seeing his day to day life, we can just accept it exists and the focus becomes around the Death Note and how it has changed the main character as well as how he protects it. Right from the get go, Light knows the power he holds and continues to wield it in a way that says he's taking precautions.
And then before the second chapter is over, we have an enigmatic L who directly challenges the main character (known by the public as "Kira") and from there Light and Kira compete to find each other. Now this would be a spoiler in most manga, but this is just two chapters into Death Note and Death Note keeps this accelerated pace for the entire 108 chapters. There are a couple weaker choices, but the competition between L and Kira is exceptionally well done, and more importantly keeps the readers attention because the writers change up the formula more than readers will expect at first.
But that's all great, and honestly, this is just a top notch manga... so what goes wrong?
Well eventually the competition between L and Kira finally change, about half way through, and the follow up never really reaches the same heights, I don't wish to go into spoilers, but it's sufficient to say the level of "play" between the opponents in the second part of the manga never can reach the height of the first. It would be possible, but the changes made make for a weaker story. It's a shame, because I would read the first part a million times, it's just that good and well written, but I can't help but notice how little the desire to reread the second part, and that's a shame.
Should you read Death Note? Absolutely, at least the first part. In fact I'd probably recommend people reading the entire manga at least once, it'd be hard to stop, but this will always be half of a perfect manga... and that's a shame, because it could have easily been just a perfect manga.
