Instant Manga Reviews: Melty Blood and The World’s Best Surgeon
I caught something at Otakon and I’m still feeling kinda bad, but I’ll try to get enough power to write it up by listening to No Border on repeat (although kransom and others pretty much got all you’d care about). Meanwhile, here’s some stuff I meant to post about ages ago.
Melty Blood, Takeru Kirishima/TYPE-MOON, 2006-ongoing (from the moon)
Man, don’t TYPE-MOON adaptations suck? Kara no Kyoukai is some good stuff, but everything I’ve seen out of Tsukihime and Fate/stay night has been completely forgettable at best. It’s usually because of their apparently editorless writer Nasu Kinoko’s scripts, which are thousands and thousands of pages, an endless sea of complete bullshit (but we love him anyway). Throwing enough words away to get a decent pacing is tough, and this manga definitely didn’t try hard enough – Melty Blood is supposed to be a fighting game, and I only count about four short hand-to-hand fighting scenes in the first two volumes. But that’s probably not the point anyway. This manga isn’t about fighting, it’s about tsundere fanservice. Pretty much every scene so far contains a girl trying to lecture/kill Shiki and then immediately complaining about how they can’t be honest about their real feelings, and the artist draws weird facial expressions all over the place. Highly recommended if you’re a fan of tsundere/crazy girl moe, otherwise you might want to stick to Airmaster. You’ll also need a better sci-fi vocabulary than me, although I think I saw some only-kind-of-bad translations.
Seriously, it’s all like this.
Saijou no Meii (The World’s Best Surgeon), Takashi Hashiguchi, 2008
When I started reading manga a few years ago there was one called Yakitate!! Japan, which was a shounen competition manga about becoming the world’s best bread baker. This is a manga by the same guy about becoming the world’s best pediatric surgeon. At this point you should be convinced – I haven’t read more than one chapter so I can’t say much else yet.
