Doubt by Yoshiki Tonogai

Doubt by Yoshiki Tonogai

Art and story (c) Yoshiki Tonogai

Genre: Horror, Shonen
Length: 4 Volumes – 20 Chapters


            The art is fairly generic for it's time, but not amateur. The eyes are the worst example, they are all just the same shapes and sizes that have been seen in a hundred other places, but there is decent

enough detail to the art despite the generic look. The clothes fit well to the frames and action movements, but they, too, are generic. The backgrounds, on the other hand, are there and give a good idea of what the setting is with out cluttering the panels. I don't remember anytime the movements or body frames looked out of proportion or anything, either. All in all, though, the fact that each character is 'generic' or a 'trope' doesn't much bother considering the murder mystery theme of the story and that helps to further the suspicion and what not. Or it could make things annoying, depending on your point of view of murder mysteries. In confusing conclusion, the art is good, but its not really anything worth noting beyond that.
            Rabbit Doubt is a popular online game where a group of people are assigned roles randomly, all but one being 'rabbits' and the lone one chosen as the 'wolf.' In the game of suspicion, the wolf chooses who to kill and the rabbits try to figure out who the killer is by killing off one of their own until they are either all dead or the wolf is found. One group who have often played Rabbit Doubt together decide to meet up in real life to get to know each other better, but when they wake up in an abandoned building with no recollection of how they got there, it soon becomes apparent that a new game of doubt is being started. So who is the wolf, and who are the rabbits?
            This happens to be one manga I've read before and decided to go back and read again. Though, I only chose Doubt because of it's content, not because I really liked it the first time around, but because it left a good horror impression. Doubt is enjoyable, at first, its a well paced and interesting murder mystery manga, but the ending is more than a little muddled. You never know who is next and you can only wildly speculate whether there is an outside force or whether one of the characters is the murderer. I'll try not to spoil too much as I write the rest of this review. I really like the 'Rabbit Doubt' game that is given at the beginning, it seems like an interesting game that people would enjoy playing, and it nicely sets up the rest of the manga. I actually would want a little hung rabbit key chain like the players have, but that's just my morbid sense of cute. Then when things get going, this manga follows along fairly logically with the premise given, at least until the 'reveal.' I do wish it didn't have such a long introduction though; you get to know the characters in the first unveiling but then there is a bit of an overly long extra set of pages of them in a karaoke bar that just slows down the story to almost a stand still right when things should be picking up. Beyond that, like I've mentioned, its not until the last volume where the plot starts to show some holes. I think wrapping it all up just led to a little too much explanation, though after that, it gets back on track. As I said in the art section, the overly trope-y design to the characters rides a line. On the one hand, having characters that seem simple and recognizable is typical for murder mysteries, it makes it easy to get into the story (or the character its self if you happen to be the one acting out the game) but the generic 'teen' character that the main person is given does leave sympathy for him at times hard to continue. In other words, his attitude is hard to pin down and sometimes its hard to tell exactly who he's supposed to be. He gets away with it, I suppose, it just bothered me from a writing stand point. If it wasn't worth a second read, I wouldn't have found it again after all this time, Doubt is memorable if nothing else. The mangaka has actually written two other Doubt-like manga but I can't find them to read them, unfortunately, that would have been an interesting review. Anyways, Doubt is not a bad little couple of hours worth of suspense.




3.5/5 A murder mystery done well enough, though a little lite on character. 

Creepy masks are always a plus!