Sum it in a line: pretty boy orphan gets drawn into a seemingly never ending war due to a continuous cycle of reincarnation and there’s lots of slender people and pretty, gothy artwork
Content Warning: queerbaiting (although Odagiri-sensei has done BL before and this could arguably be queercoding, since she indicated her editors did not want her to include a romance in this story) and incestuous behavior (particularly twincest)
This review is going to be SUPER SPOILERY because all of my feelings are tied up in the ending of this series and it’s difficult to discuss why I can’t even rate this story without talking about how it ended.
Pretty boy Yuki is an orphan who has mostly lived a quiet life, looking after his fellow orphans at the orphanage, raising flowers (I think), and going to school, until a series of events draws him into a potentially catastrophic supernatural war going on under the eyes of the ignorant masses. Yuki finds out he has a whole family and all of them are stuck in an endless cycle of reincarnation, brought back again and again to serve as soldiers in a war against the necromancer, Reiga, and his army of summoned demons. Oddly though, while all the other reincarnations have memories of their past lives, Yuki’s are firmly locked away. Each of them has a specific ability that contributes to the war and Yuki’s is to heal everyone. At his side is Luka, an extremely powerful traitor from the demon side who was in love with Yuki’s previous incarnation and is determined to still protect him no matter what. Yuki embarks on an adventure to uncover his past and stop the war to save his newfound family.
So... I’ve been collecting this series off and on since it started getting released in English back in 2011. Somewhere in there, I decided to just wait until I had it all before reading it in one go, so I was wildly unprepared for what I was getting into when poor sweet summer wyrmling me decided to sit down and do just that. I hadn’t spoiled myself in any way beyond reading the first couple of volumes and knowing that I liked this series.
I was not ready, okay? I loved this series. I was strongly invested in the characters. I wanted only good things for the good guys. I had a few moments of legit horror while we were waiting to find out if certain characters died. The tension was real. I read the author’s notes and I do, legitimately, understand what’s going on here. But that doesn’t mean that the ending of this series did not feel seriously upset me. This wasn’t an ending. It wasn’t even the attempt of an ending. This was spending five minutes pasting some ending lines onto the middle of a story.
I’m not upset about Reiga flipping sides. Again, this was a middle story thing to happen. I’m upset that we lost Takashiro and I’m never going to find out if they bring him back. I’m upset that one of the big driving parts of the story, which was to end the war and save the Zweilt, did not happen and the it ended with more of a “it’s okay that we’re still fighting because at least we’re doing it together” which feels like a direct contradiction of everything that they’ve been wishing for. I’m upset that nothing really got resolved with Yuki and Luka. Yuki never regains his memories and we never get to understand why previous-Yuki locked away her memories. Truthfully, nothing got resolved and for every question that was answered, four more were created based on new elements being introduced. I know Odagiri-sensei wanted to leave herself the ability to return to this story if she ever could, and to finish it in the way that she really wanted it to be completed, but the way it ended, as it stands, seriously upsets me.
So overall, I would rate this series 4.5 stars with the caveat that you don’t read the last 6 pages, and understand that this series cut off literally in the middle of it’s plot and you are probably never, ever going to find out how it ends because even the ending that exists is not an ending.
Sum it in a line: Cops partner with OP druggies to fight other OP druggies as some sort of prison release program
Hajime Tsukumo has just been recruited to a task force dedicated to hunting down criminals addicted to a nano drug that super-powers them. It’s called high-drug. No, this dragon is not fucking with you. It really is called high-drug. In order to ensure the cops don’t just get massacred in the pursuit, each officer is assigned a partner, called a hanger, who is also a high-drug using criminal, serving time with the task force to obtain points for perks in prison and their eventual release. Hajime’s partner is Zeroichi, an OP high-drug addict who can’t keep a partner to save his life. Hajime’s determined to prove he has what it takes to keep their partnership going. Zeroichi’s sticking it out with him because for some reason, Hajime can render the high-drug inert. Don’t ask me. I don’t know.
Look, if I hadn’t bought all three volumes at once in the mistaken belief this was a completed series, I likely wouldn’t have read past the first volume. I wasn’t terribly impressed. It initially felt sort of like one of those queerbaiting buddy manga from the 90s complete with weird gimmicks and even though it moved into definitely being BL, it never really shook off that feeling. The story becomes explicitly more queer with the introduction of the secondary pairing and the story does become more interesting (for a relative value of interesting when it’s baseline wasn’t particularly high) but it never reached the point of drawing me in to be like “oh yes, I must read more of this.” Hajime is one of those bland “good boy” characters and Zeroichi is a cookie-cutter lone wolf with a tragic past. The secondary characters were infinitely more interesting but they were very much secondary characters and their stories were told in addition to the plot, rather than having any real spotlight.
I might finish this series because I already bought three books, but I also wouldn’t hold my breath on that.
This book made me want to: watch Psychopass, which doesn’t really have any correlation except that they both deal with crime solving--sort of. If you can actually call what happened in this series crime solving.
