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Square Enix: Full Force Manga! Part 3 Since we have the beloved internet again I can fully force part 3 of my Square Enix manga trilogy online. Here is the third and final installment of my look into Square Enix’s Full Force Manga! sampler book. This trilogy of manga commentary ends with the four titles Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Zombie Loan, Black God, and Alice on Deadlines.
Spiral - The Bonds of Reasoning: Tenth-grader Ayumu Narumi is walking down a hallway of his school, remembering that his brother disappeared two years ago on this very day. He hears a scream and goes to investigate. He opens a door that leads to the roof of the school and sees a dead high school student on the ground below with a nice large blood smear around her head. I guess Spiral is showing that it doesn’t screw around when it opens with the murder of a high-school student. Anyway, some loudmouth girl sees Ayumu and thinks that he did it. The police and detectives show up to investigate. The two detectives are Madoka Narumi (Ayumu’s older sister) and a douche bag officer named Wataya. Wataya has bad observation skills and seems to be an idiot in order for Madoka to explain everything (and for the reader to get an explanation). How does someone like Wataya become a ranking officer, by the way? Ayumu and the girl that saw him start arguing about whether he did it or not. Madoka comes in to break them up, but then sees that the other kids think that her brother is the murderer. Madoka and Wataya start interrogating Ayumu. Wataya comes to the conclusion that he is the killer with sparkly eyes and speed lines. This whole time Wataya doesn’t realize that the two are related until Madoka slams it in his face. Ayumu and Madoka go home (they also live together) and discuss the days events over dinner. A few random wacky events later it’s the next day and Ayumu is thinking about his brother again. He is playing the piano when the school newspaper president comes in to ask him, all in a flashy manga way, what it’s like to kill someone. Verdict: Spiral might be alright if the idiot character of Wataya wasn’t in it. I don’t know how much he appears in the actual manga, but his time in chapter one was more than enough. I don't think I could chance seeing more panels with him.
Zombie Loan: Zombie Loan begins with schoolgirl Michiru Kita lying on the ground all bloody with her nerdy glasses broken. She wonders how she ended up like this and the rest of the chapter is a flashback. Michiru is running down the hall with food for her and her friends. She runs into the two “hot guys” of the school, Chika and Shito, and drops her food. One of the guys helps her up and Michiru goes to sit with her friends. The two super cool dudes walk by the table and drop off a piece of bread that she didn’t pick up. The girls get all crazy girly and start yapping their flaps about the boys. One of her friends has to say that the two were the only two survivors of a bridge collapse, which Michiru seems to have forgotten about for the moment so her friend can throw up the exposition. Michiru looks over at the boys and faints because she sees something weird. She awakes in the nurse’s office later and thinks about what she saw. Somehow Michiru can see the mark of death on people, which looks like a black collar around their neck. As she walks home she seems surprised that there is a graveyard on school grounds, like it’s the first time she’s noticed it. Shouldn’t she know about the graveyard if she goes to the school? She accidentally bumps into the two dudes again and one of them asks her for money for the reparations from earlier. She doesn’t have any money so they walk away, but Michiru is an idiot and follows them. The two boys meet up with a person or fellow zombie thing that might be a boy or a girl, I can’t tell. Anyway, the two remove their right hands and exchange them with each other. Michiru sees all of it and freaks out. In various pages throughout the chapter there are far away shots that reduce the art to nothing but stick figures. Stick figures, huh? Well that sure doesn’t cheapen the feel of this title at all. Verdict: While I appreciate the idea behind Zombie Loan, it was a thoroughly annoying read from beginning to end. Michiru’s stupidity, girls yapping like stray dogs, and stick figure drawings are really not something I look for in zombie-related lore.
Black God: A girl named Kuro is walking down a street, looking like she is dressed in nothing but a rain coat and is gnawing on a sucker or something. In her raincoat perched in front of her chest is a cute yet angry looking puppy. The narrator is explaining what doppeliners are. What are they? “Three simple beings linked by the same thread of fate.” The narrator then goes off on humans and how simple and ignorant they are. He mentions the enemy that they will someday know called Mototsumitama. We then meet Keita Ibuki, an amateur video game programmer who is remembering his mother. When he was younger, he and his mom met a lady that looked exactly like his mom. The next day his mom was dead. That sounds a lot like what happened to me when I met one of my doppeliners. Fast forward to now, Keita and his female friend Akane are walking through Akihabara. Apparently this is the first time they’ve seen each other in some years, but then Keita gets excited when he sees a limited edition game or something. Good job, dork, keep up that otaku habit. They sit down for a snack and start chatting. Well, Akane is doing most of the chatting while Keita is telling the reader who Akane is with her thoughtful exposition. She obviously likes him, but Keita doesn’t seem to notice it. He quickly leaves to go meet his fellow game programmers. Their game project got the go ahead and Keita wants everyone to get piss-face drunk. Keita leaves and stops at a ramen stand. He orders the last bowl of ramen the owner has. The girl Kuro walks up to the stand and asks for a bowl of ramen, but Keita got the last one. Keita gives her his ramen and she gobbles it up and the dog sneaks a bite in. Keita is telling the ramen owner about when his mother died and the girl interjects that his mom and her twin are actually doppeliners. Suddenly a cloaked man attacks the girl. Keita tries to fight back, but Kuro gets up and has a battle with the evil cloaked guy. A couple pages of fighting action and swearing later, the evil guy is dead. Verdict: Black God was pretty good. It had nice ingredients of a game programmer, a girl in a raincoat (for easy cleaning), ramen, and a cute yet perpetually angry puppy.
Alice on Deadlines: Alice on Deadlines has a title page with a shirtless dude holding a chick whose back is to the reader. The girl is naked and we see her ass as plain as day. Alice begins with a decent ass-shot. Not bad, but it turns out to be the only decent part of this title. The story then begins with a demon saying that he’s a Shimigami and brings death to people, something we’ve heard in many other manga and anime before. Next is a splash page with the buxom Alice holding a big cross over a chained-up skeleton. Hmm, I don’t really like the skeleton’s face, it looks a little off. Okay, now the real story begins. Lapan is a death god and is caught reading porn on the job. Lapan is told to go see the section chief for his next assignment. He visits the chief and both make really stupid faces throughout the three pages that they talk. If this keeps up for much longer it won’t matter how much nudity is in the rest of the book. Lapan can’t go to Earth in his form so he needs to borrow the body of a human, except that the last time he did that he was in a girl with a “hot body” and just played around with himself/herself, so the chief intends to send him into a skeleton. We officially meet Alice who is walking home alone even though two of her under classmen reminds her not to travel home alone. She walks past a graveyard and is surprised to see a coffin in it. Wait, it’s a coffin in a graveyard, why the hell would she be surprised? Suddenly Lapan is in Alice’s body and Alice is in the body of a skeleton complete with a stupid manga skeleton face. Lapan starts feeling up Alice’s body (which is now his because he’s inside it) and discovers that Alice is “a living F-Cup.” Hey, great, it’s another underage girl with enormous breasts. Father Leon spots Alice and says that she shouldn’t be out alone. Lapan is able to easily get rid of him and wonders why he has so much cologne on. Well I’d say that‘s pretty obvious. Father Leon teaches classes of underage students with big knockers, why wouldn’t he want to be smelling good for his sexy church-going school girls? Lapan goes to Alice’s house and takes skeleton Alice with him/her. We meet Alice’s overly emotional father who makes a stupid face in every panel he appears in. Lapan and Alice go into her room and Alice starts talking. Lapan sneaks off into the bathroom to take a bath and feel up Alice’s body some more. Alice finds him and tells him to refrain from doing weird things to her body. Alice tries to stop him and the chapter ends. At this point the skeleton Alice has made too many idiotic looking faces that I’m just furious that I actually finished reading this chapter. Verdict: The characters make moronic manga faces on nearly every page. It is highly annoying and I couldn’t wait for this sample to be over. Alice is dead to me. Three you have it that’s the end of Square Enix’s Full Force Manga! sampler. Black God was the only decent title this time around. If you need to catch up read parts 1 and 2. - Shawn - 10/22/07 |
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