ZombieToast's Manga

One of those series that you like the idea of it better than the finished product. When I was a child, I loved the series, but I never seemed to make it past volume 16. And I found that there's definitely a reason for this. While the good parts are still sweet, some of the filler that seemed to take forever when I was younger was especially bad when I got older. I still think that the series is more good than bad, but story-wise, I don't think it's a very strong manga.

I don't really know how to rate this one. I keep slipping between five and zero.

On the one hand, you have a barely coherent story that makes light of all sorts of issues and honestly is all very surface level... but on the other hand, Pure Trance really is imagination running wild on the page, with the distinctly beautiful art to back it up.

I'm not really sure how to qualify something like this. I could give it a rating in the middle, but I think the work is both better and worse than that. It really is something. I just don't know what that something is.

Bad. I love survival game manga, and the summary on this one was beyond promising. It was supposed to be essentially Town of Salem in manga form, and in my mind there was no way to fuck that up. That being said, I'm not even sure how they managed to fuck it up that badly, I just know that they did.

The art was mediocre for what it was, first off. It was serviceable at parts, but serviceable wasn't good enough. If the art was stronger than just generic anime faces, it could have saved the terrible story. If the gore was done better, the pain, the character designs... essentially, if they got a new artist it would have been better.

The story sucks too. At every turn, at every plot-twist I was disappointed. I won't spoil what little story it has. I'll just say it was bad.

Pretty much a staple Clamp work. Honestly, it's probably the work where Clamp is their most Clampiest. For me, that means beautiful and detailed artwork using their "love-it-or-hate-it" art style and a throwaway story that patronizes you the entire time.

Chobits had both of those in spades. On the one hand, it's lushly drawn with decadent dresses and laces and breasts-a-plenty, but on the other, you're essentially reading 88 chapters of the same sentence over and over: "A someone just for me". The story could have been a fourth of the length and wouldn't lose anything for it.

I wish they would get a better editor. They insult their audience by how often they repeat "key ideas" over and over, as if their audience isn't smart enough to understand metaphors or symbolism but somehow should know every shitty reference they try to cram into their under-utilized works. I'm really done with it all. They're not a bad team. They could make something really special if they would just have faith in their audience to take away their own meaning from their books instead of beating them with it.

Simply one of the best series I've ever read. It has a very familiar feeling to it and has some of the most well executed plot-twists I've read to date. Without spoiling anything, it's kind of like a mix of Series of Unfortunate Events, Mysterious Benedict Society, Professor Layton, and Danganronpa. Super unique in style and story.

Very inconsistent in quality, in the traditional Clamp way. Starts off kind of shaky, then turns into an enjoyable read. Then about halfway through it loses speed and starts trailing off. By the time, the series tries to shoe-horn an entire arc devoted to Tsubasa in, you just want it all to end. And then it does... poorly, leaving everything open-ended and half the characters without resolved arcs.

This is a must-read, in my opinion. Breath-taking art, original story-direction, lightning fast pacing, iconic characters, and, at the heart of it all, a relatable coming-of-age piece about exploration both mentally and physically. I cannot recommend this series enough.

3.5 stars. Definitely better than Tomie as a whole. I think Junji is at his best when making short stories. The problem with them, though, is invariably there's going to be a disparage between quality and impact between stories, hence the 3.5 stars rather than 4.

I'm a sucker for good art, and time-loop cliches don't bother me as much as they do others. So this series easily exceeded my expectations for it. I thought it would be some terribly translated slog, but that wasn't the case at all. It was a thrilling ride from start to finish.