Asamiya-san no Imouto by Asano

Asamiya-san no Imouto (Miss Asamiya's Little Sister) by Asano

Art and story (c) Asano

Genre: Seinen
Length: 3 Volumes – 22 Chapters



          The art is pretty good, there were a few things that were distracting though. Such as, the arms looked too short for the body proportions, and the faces sometimes were a little askew.

Plus, there were times where the panels just didn't make sense even though they were supposed to be explaining a certain action. I wouldn't say it was confusing but, well, it was really confusing at times. The scope of things really doesn't come together for explaining how the world looks either, it just relied on using the names of places instead of showing things. It actually seems familiar even though I've never read anything by this mangaka before. Its passable but it isn't unique.
           When a wandering merchant, Kyoko, gets saved by a young girl traveling on her own she decides to treat her to lunch. Turns out the girl, Aoi, is following the many descriptions her father left in his sketchbook, but when Kyoko takes a look at the sketchbook it appears to be more than just sketches and is something she could make a lot of money off of. Forcibly making friends with Aoi, Kyoko decides she'll follow the girl on her journey until she can slip away with the notebook, but there just might be more to Aoi than having a valuable sketchbook...
           I'm just going to come out straight and say, I honestly have no idea what I read. There is a lot of back story to this manga, so much so that I though I there was a prequel of some sort, like a movie or a visual novel or something, but there is nothing like that to it. Everything is given to you by hinting at it for a while and then having really long sections of dialog explaining it, sometimes through a flash back and sometimes through secondary characters talking in a

There are a few funny scenes, tho.

separate location than where the story was happening two pages ago. Forcing you to sew all the disjointed information together, and even then it still doesn't make any sense. The ending did the same thing, it told me one thing and then told me a second thing so I'm not sure which ending is the true one. Sometimes stories like these work out and sometimes they don't. It actually reminded me a lot of Eat-man, which I read five or six years ago, where the scenery is more advanced than the present but is so far in the future that that advancement is worn down and old already and also was rather confusing. Speaking of the world, just like I said in the art section, it simply does not paint a cohesive picture of a certain world, instead it seems like each place visited is its own separate ecosystem. Also, the format of the first volume is just completely exchanged in the second and third volumes trading a story of a girl who isn't entirely what she seems to be into a story about some incomprehensible danger that has to be stopped and warring factions who all think they know best how to stop it. Kyoko was the only interesting character and they abandoned her. Much like BioMega where they randomly changed characters and explained things but not in a way that actually makes any sense, this story is shoved in your face too much to be enjoyable. I know people who like to read dense manga like this, Claymore and Gunslinger Girl were two I was recommended by someone who does and I found both of them more work than was enjoyable, too. I simply couldn't find pleasure from reading this and that really does lower my rating, as that is what I'm looking forward to when I sit down to read.

2/5 Too much explaining not enough actual plot.

Oh shut up, you were the worst part!