2 screenshot limit

It’s rare that I know about the anime prior to knowing the manga. Usually, I would stumble upon a fairly unknown manga series, read a few volumes, and then think, “wow, maybe this’ll turn out to be a good anime.”  Such wasn’t the case for Nabari no Ou — I actually thought that the anime was an original story created specifically for the show.

So, as you can presume, I was pretty excited to get my hands on the manga. Yen really does such a nice job with their covers; they don’t litter it with a lot of extra logos or match it to fit a pre-styled company template. I really appreciate that they try to stick to the look of the original volume as much as possible.

The story itself starts off fairly generically: Miharu Rokujou finds himself in the middle of a clan battle between opposing ninja tribes, as he posseses the secret of the shinra bansou, which is the most secret art of the ninja.  He is protected by his teacher, Durandal Thobari Kumohira, and his classmate, Kouichi Aizawa. Thing is, despite all this excitement going on around him, all that Miharu wants is to return to an indifferent and boring life.

Yes, like that other uber-popular manga series, the central characters in this series are ninja. Thing is, the characters and their behavior are far more believable here because it’s not as eccentric as the characters in Naruto. Meaning, nobody powers up and gets crazy abilities every two chapters.

Most of all, though, I really adore the interactions between Miharu and his protectors. Thobari-sensei is adorably quirky (his fear of trains and all moving vehicles is hilarious), and I love how Miharu can easily disarm him with his devilish charm. I also have a bit of a soft spot for Aizawa and Raimei — yes, they’re capable warriors, but they’re also children, so they still make mistakes and somehow, that’s okay.

I highly recommend picking this series up, but well, I adore this series so of course I’d say that.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under manga & manhwa, yen press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.