Angel Densetsu is a manga about a high school student named Kitano that others judge as evil solely because of how he looks. He’s actually a very kind and honest boy, but because his face is terrifying everyone thinks he must be incredibly terrifying as well. Kitano is sad about not being able to make any friends and tries to improve his image, but it doesn’t help that he’s incredibly innocent and thus fails to actually understand how people are really seeing him and how they’re interpreting his actions. This combined with fate itself seemingly conspiring against him results in all sorts of bizarre misunderstandings that just snowball.
This manga is primarily a comedy and the majority of the comedy is humor centered around all these misunderstandings and how the rest of the cast react to them. It may sound like this’ll get repetitive it never really does. The manga is constantly throwing in new characters to misunderstand and act in new ways, so there’s a lot of variety to how things play out. And just in general the writing in this regard is just really well written. This also isn’t all the manga has so there’s enough of other stories mixed in to keep things feeling fresh. Though some of these stories definitely feel like they’ve overlived their welcome at times, such as pretty much everything regarding Kuroda in the second half of the manga.
While this manga doesn’t really have much of an overarching plot, there are overarching plot threads stemming around the friends that Kitano makes. And a lot of them are pretty touching. The main reason for that is that Kitano is really likable. He doesn’t really have any character arc or development, but he’s really easy to get invested in just because of how good of a person he is. Thus, when people do acknowledge his true self and all the goodness it entails, it’s pretty satisfying. His friend Takehisa is also somewhat likable as well for being a pretty loyal and good friend, though he doesn’t really have any character development either.
The two characters that stood out in terms of development were Ryouko and Ikuno. Ryouko is the heroine of the manga and has pretty solid relationship development with Kitano over the course of the manga. She’s also a pretty fun character due to how she’s strong and pretty high-spirited, and because of her character arc where she starts off as somewhat of a hard ass but slowly gets softer over time. On the other hand, while Ikuno also does have some relationship development with Kitano, the focus with her is much more on her character arc. This was centered around her changing from someone that lived solely to fight to someone that could make friends and enjoy just hanging out with them. What makes her a lot of fun is that a lot of the extreme parts of her personality persist through that. In hindsight I find it kind of strange that in a manga in which the vast majority of characters are guys that two girls end up as the only ones that get developed properly, but in context it worked pretty well. The ending isn’t some epic finale or anything like that, but I felt it did well by the cast of the manga and thus overall, I was pretty satisfied with it.
The art, to put it frankly, starts out pretty awful. Like straight up bad. However, it improves tremendously over the course of the manga. Around halfway through the manga, it’s pretty good and by the end pretty great. This is probably one of the biggest improvements I’ve seen within the span of a single manga, though it starting so low is probably one of the main reasons. The fan translation was also really solid and I thought they did an especially great job with making sure characters voices came through well, such as thugs speaking roughly and crudely and in contrast Kitano always speaking and thinking in a super strait-laced manner. I have some nitpicks regarding translating terms that probably shouldn’t have been, such as it probably would have been better to just leave banchou instead of translating it as guardian, but as mentioned these are just nitpicks.
