Princess Resurrection by Yasunori Mitsunaga
Genre: Shonen
Length: 20 Volumes - 87 Chapters
Art is a bit generic and plain and I mean this in the worst way, but characters are recognizable. There is a serious case of big heads where the head is too big in scale to the body, though it is mostly phased after about half the volumes. The characters also have thin bodies that often look too pointy or just plain awkward, especially as far as arms are concerned. Adults and children all basically have the same shape so good luck figuring out what age anyone is. The eyes at times were bulgy and it took some time to fix it but once it did the eyes became a good distinguishing feature. Clothing was often hanging on nonexistent hips in a way that defied gravity, one character had a long skirt that floated up just for panty shots, and the rest of the clothing is Lolita dresses and school uniforms. The art does improve, but most of the problems with the design are just something you get used to. For example, the blood splatter at the beginning is very poetic and cheesy looking but it improves, yet, the boobs remain just lumps in shirts with flat space between them or such insanely huge things they boggle the brain through out the whole twenty volumes. Personally, I hate that style of drawing big, saggy breasts so it frustrated me the whole time. On a positive note, the monsters (of which there are a ton) are well drawn and the shadowing is superb as well.
Hiro
Hiyorimi moves to a new town, able to live with his older sister now
that she is working as a live-in maid in a mansion on top of a hill,
but when he finally arrives, the mansion is empty and he doesn't know
what to do with himself. He looks around town, but just as he decides
to go back to the mansion to wait, he gets hit by a car. Next thing
Hiro knows he's awaking in a dark room and the last thing he can
remember is a young blond woman standing over him in the street,
calling him a 'corpse.' Unable to shake a dreadful feeling, mostly
because he found out he was laying on a bed in the hospital morgue,
Hiro hurries back to the mansion on the hill where the lights now are
blazing hoping his sister or her employer can explain what happened
to him. At the top of the wooded hill, he finds that young blond
woman fighting a huge creature, and his body suddenly starts moving
on its own to protect her from a fatal blow! Desipe being run though,
Hiro once again finds himself alive when he shouldn't be while that
blond woman looms over him with a smile on her face, blood dripping
from one finger as if she is offering him to drink it.I read the first volume of this manga years ago but found it off putting and, frankly, annoying. To some degree, my thoughts on this manga remain the same as they were back then, but I still cannot find it in myself to wholly condemn it. What I disliked about it made me remember its cover and title all this time later after all, but it has a few times that I actually enjoyed myself even though they were far and few in between. Like I said above, the art is off putting, though not technically bad it's amateurish and generic. The story at first is only held together by a thin thread because nothing is explained. If you push through, you'll get to where the plot actually starts going somewhere but that’s not until the seventh volume, and that is a long time to hang in there. Its sort of like a serious manga that is written as a joke. You can't really call it a 'gag' manga even though it has a lot of jokes in it, its more of a 'parody' type that makes fun of its own genre, so, often the plot seems cliched or trope filled, and it while sometimes it works in the manga's favor its actually of a case of more misses than hits. There is typical horror manga chapters, gory detective manga chapters, and movie/manga parody chapters but some are more of a direct telling and others are more of the author's own spin on the genres, in a sense that is Princess Resurrection's best and worst feature. Its writing is its strongest point and its weakest point depending on the chapter you are reading. Several times the beginning of a plot arc started in the thick of things, half explaining what already happened and then moved on before I was exactly sure what happened. A couple of times the intricate writing impressed me with such tactics, but it just couldn't make up for the times that I said to myself "Oh, it's another one of these chapters." When I was done reading for the day, most times it was only two volumes at a time which is a very slow day for me, I had no motivation to really begin again the next day; I simply didn't care for the characters because of the tedious pace. There was an omake (a parody of the manga itself) at the end of the volumes as well, but those were not really funny and once or twice I found them down right annoying. Reading shonen manga as a female you grow used to raunchy jokes and boob shots but the boob stuff, more than just the way it was drawn, fell very over done and you just get desensitized to the panty shots and low cut pants because they are shoved in your face so often. I can see the appeal but I think it was lost for a while, then found, then kind of allowed to fizzle out at the end. A heroine with an unexplained knack for suddenly having a chainsaw in her hand and a select group of warriors who will protect her is very interesting sounding, enough so to lure you in. The monsters are interesting, though sometimes not particularly varied, and leave chapter after chapter of action to read. A large re-occurring character list make for strong plots and rewarding continuation for a reader. Still, I can't say I liked this manga once I got to the end of it. I think there was four to five hours of enjoyable content out the whole twenty it would take to read it. That’s just not a passing grade in my book.
2/5 Not horrible but the lows are just too hard to overcome. Feel free to try it but remember it takes a long time to get anywhere.
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| All art and story (c) Yasunori Mitsunaga |
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