I don't know if it's been mentioned, but Ruri Dragon is apparently on hiatus until Mar 1 according to M+.
Alright, reviews. I only discussed the good ones this week, so all of these are chapters that I liked.
Votes #11:
1) Shinobi
2) Under Doctor
3) Alien Headbutt
4) Ichi
5) Hero girl
Shinobi: Nice teamwork! I wonder if the boy will change sides? Either that, or Suzume will just take him out of the picture. And of course Yodaka was absolutely precious too,
channeling the voice of his dead lost mentor. He should do that more often, it seems to work really well.
Doctor: This was a good chapter! It's a bit wordy, but we got some nice character development for both the doctor and his assistent. I guess
the money is at least going to a noble cause, even though that friend looks remarkably female to me (50 bucks says the translator f**cked up). I also liked how they built up to the reveal that changed everything. Much, much better than last week.
(Hilariously, the comment section on M+ has two people saying they're going to drop the series and 20 people complaining about people saying they're going to drop the series.
Also a lot of confusion about the president of Istanbul. I'm just gonna headcanon the bodyguard is a dunce who can't tell the difference between cities and countries, but this better never come out of the mouth of an intelligent character.)
Alien Headbutt
The last entry of the batch. First let's do a quick play-by-play as usual (even though I got spoiled a bit already).
- Why even put a date on it? Now the story will feel outdated in two years. (If this becomes a succes,
there's gonna be so many people gathered there on that date and place well, maybe not, since it's 20km from land)
- All grown up in 3 pages.
- That goat looks like it came out of Kintaro's Magic.
- Goats do wag their tails apparently. I didn't know.
- Yay for proactive mom.
- I appreciate the sentiment, but you're sounding mighty old-fashioned there, little 'man of the house'.
- Who let him walk in with a chain?
- Dream
fulfilled by page 19. They really are speedrunning this.
- Brutal.
- What's with the catwalk pose?
- The fight choreography is pretty good.
- A flashback within a flashback so soon? I mean, it's not terrible, but it definitely makes the story feel slower all of a sudden (especially since it's a repeat of things we already knew).
- This manga sure loves subverting our expectations.
- So was the alien
being controlled by the slithery thing or what?
- I don't think we've seen him headbutt an alien yet.
So yeah, the premise is definitely interesting, the characters feel like people, the fights are decent, the plot moves fast except when it doesn't (please don't grind to a halt in chapter 2, it's lethal) and the art is quite good and fitting for the story. It's nothing groundbreaking, but I also don't really have anything to complain about, though I am slightly concerned this first chapter relied heavily on shock value and that's gonna be hard to keep up.
(Crackpot theory: The one headbutting the aliens will actually be
Little Mei. She has grown into a sizable goat by now, still charging everything she sees, and she will be fighting alongside the MC to save the family.)
Ichi: ... Honestly, at this point, I'd take Uroro over whatever that thing is. Good job, both of you. I just hope the old guy will be okay.
Hero: Well, this series just got me to laugh out loud for the first time. Their attempt to
convince everyone the demon lord is a cat only to realise how stupid that sounds was so absurd it got to me.
For me, this is the only gag series in the magazine that works most of the time... unless you include Kiyoshi and Shinobi, those are funny too.
Nue: This turned into a game of chess all of a sudden. I like their counterattacks, but I can't help but feel they're just playing catch-up and this won't actually help to take down the main guy.
OP: That was a lot more fun than watching a flashback of which we knew the ending already. I just hope we won't stay stuck in this fight for over half a year now.
WW: For people trying to save the world, they sure made a lot of careless mistakes. They're dealing with it well though, so there's that. I wonder who the new girl is, in these circumstances she could be anything from their greatest ally to their worst enemy.
Kiyoshi: So Cook was
with the other guy first? That's neat. I admire their persistence, but I'm still not 100% convinced they will manage without Kiyoshi.
Mage: That's not a hawk. And did she summon that thing with the carrot already included? Anyway, glad to see a fight with something else than a water gun. I like the face that came with the thumbs up, but I don't like that she's so stupid
it took her FOUR exclamations of "Divination! How unlucky!" before she even started to realise something luck-related was happening, and then she STILL needed her opponent to spell it out for her. And apparently the other girl thinks this is normal? I'm starting to divine that mages as a species just have a lower IQ than humans, because we haven't met a single smart one yet.
KGB: Another translation mistake (first panel on page 5 should be Samura speaking). I sure wish the translators would pay a little more attention to context. Or do they literally only get the text without seeing the pictures?
I suppose it's a good chapter, but I don't like what happened, so this low score is just personal.
Akane: Strong immersion, slow plot as usual. I wonder how that 'odds' joke worked in Japanese? (It would be completely untranslatable in my language.) The guy from the horror story is lucky he didn't run into any dyslectic aliens (Mukojima and Mukurojima? That's pretty damn close for a mere coincidence).
Kinato: ... I still don't like her. And I like the mascotte even less. It's a pity, because the story itself is decent enough (though I don't think
the kid was much safer after his intervention, getting blasted three stories into the air and all). But if a manga has too many annoying characters, the story needs to be more than decent to make up for it.
Gonron: Huh. It's rare to see someone
try and reject a time skip. Too bad it didn't stick. It's definitely ending now, since we jumped straight to the final battle. I wonder it that means we'll never get to see the egg hatch?
As a sidenote, the difference between the characters and the background felt less jarring this time around. I think they've been experimenting with new techniques to make them blend better.
I hope they bring portuguese translation to Someone Hertz asap, the jokes are already hard to understand but is even worse when you’re reading in a non native language… I can’t understand shit
but i still find cute lol
There's no guarantee they'll be funnier if you understand them, unfortunately.
Most of their quips are just the girl saying something nonsensical and the boy pointing out he got the reference. If that's your kind of humour, you'll probably enjoy it more if you get all the references. If it isn't, then no amount of translating or explaining is going to help.
I guess it would help with the radio entries? Though those aren't usually that hard to understand.
Modulo has reached a territory where the chapter is totally not making sense if you are not a former JJK reader.
I mean, you can still follow the story, but the cameo, references and easter eggs in ch 21 is so crazy
Yeah, it lost me a while back.
It's sad, because I really liked the first chapters. But now it relies so much on old concepts and references, plus I still don't get why the fights are even necessary... I'm just waiting for it to wrap up.
I hope this doesn't become a big issue to readers but Tanimoto seems to make dumb writing mistake for not fact checking himself prior
- president of istanbul (i thought this was a translation error but it seems japanese readers brought it up as well)
- converting 500m yuan to yen equates to 1 billion as stated in the manga, eventhough it's generally 10b+ irl
- I also heard that the surgery he did on Ishiguro (being done in 58mins) is actually on the slower end, not 90 min as mentioned by ishiguro. 30mins is what you would considered fast.
I'm not a doctor, but digging a bullet out of the minefield that is the human torso, fixing up all the damage it did and closing the wound in under 15 minutes sounds entirely unrealistic to me. Whoever is claiming that probably read that
Google Bing says bullet extraction takes "between 30 minutes and several hours" and forgot that there were two bullets and they were in a very tricky location. (Fun fact: Unless the bullet is in the way of something important, they often don't even bother to remove it, since it's not doing any harm just sitting there. Fixing the damage is far more important.)
The other two, yeah, those are just careless mistakes. If you're not gonna do your reseach, just make up some countries and currencies, it'll be safer. :/
) big 3 of WSJ xd
