My first thought after finishing all 7 volumes in one go: WTF, can’t you end on a good note?
“There is an Angel Buried Behind the School Building” is the story of… yeah, you saw the TW. Bullying. Nothing can compare to the WTF I screamed when I flipped to the last page of the first chapter. Judging from the title, I thought this was gonna be about a bunch of kids investigating a school ghost legend or some shit, not becoming the school legend.
Inorihime wa Sora ni Warau (The Prayer Princess Laughs at the Sky) is a 4-volume fantasy shoujo manga by Mizutani Yuzu and Kaede Tooru.
It’s pretty much a standard fantasy shoujo manga with all its common tropes, but I don’t know why I like it so much. Maybe it’s because Maritza and Azurite are soooooo cute together.
The plot is as follow. The Kingdom of Forestuana consists of the kingdom itself, and an island with a huge tower surrounded by the rivers, where the “Inorihime” (Prayer Princess) lives. The royal family of Forestuana is strictly forbidden to meet the Inorihime, or else it will bring ruin to the kingdom.
Maritza is the current Inorihime who inherited the “Inori no Uta” (Prayer Song), a melody capable of creating various miracles despite nobody aside from her being able to hear what it actually sounds like. (She sings it out loud but the sound waves are inaudible to regular people or something.) One day, Azurite came to the tower searching for his companion’s long-lost sister and ran in to Maritza, and the two immediately hit it off. Azurite became the first person to be able to hear what Maritza’s prayer song sounded like. However, it turns out that it’s because Azurite is the first prince of Forestuana, and now that he’s met the Inorihime, woe will befall their kingdom.
A lot of stuff happened. Turns out that Maritza’s best friend and handmaid is the long-lost sister kidnapped to the island. Maritza had to escape the head priestess who wanted to abuse the Inori no Uta and went to Azurite for protection. The two grew closer and met many different people and gained more perspectives on the current situation. Maritza and Azurite realized that they fell in love with each other and wanted to find out why their meeting was forbidden.
The kingdom of Forestuana was actually founded by… people from space? Anyway, this spaceship fell in the middle of the island and the residents got stuck there. (The “tower” is actually the spaceship that dove nose-first to the ground.) The people argued on what they should do. One side wanted to abandon hope that they could fix the spaceship and go out to explore this new place. The other side wanted to stay and protected the spaceship. The two leaders of the ship then had to separate these two groups before conflict gets any worse. The male leader went out and became the founder of the Forestuana Kingdom, while the female leader who stayed behind became the first Inorihime.
The two leaders were in love with each other, but had to separate because of duty. To prevent further conflicts between the sides, they set up a rule where the royal family must not meet the Inorihime at all costs.
Flash forward to the present, it turns out that Maritza is a clone of the first Inorihime. The head priestess gave up trying to manipulate all the clones for her own goods. Maritza and Azurite’s meeting did not result in the fall of the kingdom, but to a new era where the royal family and the tower’s residents lived together in peace.
If you like a light, fantasy story with a cute relationship between the leads and their friends, then I recommend this manga. I really like it and I like the concept of the story. I got this fluffy feeling when I finished the manga and I think this story deserves more love.
I started this thing on Jan 2013 and finished it Feb 2023. The reason it took me so long to finish was partially waiting for new release and partially just me forgetting about this manga.
Soooo I’ll keep this review short.
Watashi ni XX shinasai (Missions of Love/XX Me) follows the story of the “ice queen” Yukina, a stoic middle school girl who’s actually “Yupina”, the popular online novelist. She finds it difficult to write romance, so she blackmailed Shigure, the school’s most popular boy, into doing missions of love with her so that she can inject some romance into her writing. However, Yukina’s cousin Akira became jealous and confessed his love to her. And then we have (in JP Beaubien’s voice) a love triangle!
Let me start by saying this: I did not read or watch Kouga Ninpouchou. I did not know this manga was a sequel until I bought all the books and started reading, so I have no point of comparison lol. I could understand the story without reading the prequel.
Plot:
The Kouga and Iga ninja clans had been enemies since forever, but they made peace ten years ago. Kouga Hachirou and Iga Hibiki, a pair of twins born from the union between the Kouga and Iga clan, lived a seemingly peaceful life in a secluded ninja village. However, that all changed when the Joujinshu, a rising clan backed by the Jesuits, came to the village and slaughtered their family. Its leader Joujin dismembered Hibiki and turned her into a puppet, but Hachirou managed to grab his sister’s head and run away in time.
pangaea/ezel is the sequel to pangaea by Rin Asano.
I got all seven volumes from a second hand bookstore, and they didn’t have the first installment of the series, so while reading the first volume, I was trying to piece together what happened in pangaea from character dialogues. The story is simple enough, so I could guess what happened in the prequel.
In this world, there exists a sacred tree called the Kalpataru, which can make any wish come true. Lyzel/Raizel is an amnesiac boy in possession of one of its branches in the form of a long stick, which gives him amazing combat abilities.
At the beginning of the story, he was with his band of friends trying to get to the sacred city to find out some truths. They were attacked by another guy who got superpowers from the fragment of the Kalpataru in his body, and got separated.
Since pangaea/ezel picks up from the middle of the story, it’s the point where things start to get really complicated. I’ll try my best to not make this confusing.
I love when things go on sale. This was 70% off. It’s in eBook format, which means my mom won’t nag me for buying too many manga.
Mardock Scramble is a 7-volume manga adapted from Tow Ubukata’s novel of the same name. On my blog, I reviewed one of Ubukata-sensei’s previous works, Le Chevalier D’Eon, before. He writes great stories, so I had high expectations for Mardock Scramble, and it did deliver.
Mardock Scramble started with Rune Balot (Balot as in that food where you eat a fertilized egg with a developing embryo) getting murdered, then burned inside a locked car. She miraculously survived thanks to Dr. Easter and his partner Œufcoque (pronounced oof-cock). Rune is an important witness that can bring her murderer, Shell Septinos, to his punishment, and so the two convinced her to stand up and fight for justice.
Rune was revived under regulation Mardock Scramble 09, where experimental technologies can be used to save a witness’s life. Rune’s burnt skin was replaced with some kind of super-advanced metal fiber that gave her a lot of cool abilities, like interacting with electronics without touching them, or super human speed and perception. Œufcoque, a shapeshifting AI weapon that usually appears a yellow mouse, became her partner and help her adjust to her new life, and thwart Shell’s attempts to silence her.
The title, Giyoku no Koukyoukyoku, is a mouthful, so I’ll refer to this is as Ilegenes: Symphony of the Illusory Wings. This manga is a direct sequel to Ilegenes: Kokuyou no Kiseki (the Path of Obsidian) and a prequel to the novel.
Ilegenes is a shoujo sci-fi/military manga. The events take place on an island called Ilegenes, famous for its advanced technology in genetic engineering. However, as with biology and its ethical nightmares, people try to use this technology for the wrong purposes, and that’s where our protagonist comes in.
Story
Fon Fortinbras Littenber was a third-year student in Ilegenes’s military academy and the leader of ‘Elfenbein’, an anti-government organization aiming to expose and get rid of corrupted politicians. Fon planned to run for dorm master of the academy, so that he could make the rules more relaxed, and he and his friends in Elfenbein would have more wiggle room to get out of the dorms and do their anti-government things.
Things were not easy, however, when two females joined the all-male military academy. One of them is Gabrielle “Gabby” Grey, who possessed the same ‘peacock eyes’ that Fon had.
Peacock eyes are symbols of the ‘purge children’, genetically engineered superhumans. Gabby came here to become to queen of Ilegenes, starting with taking over the academy, and so she had to get rid of Fon first. However, Fon could not do anything to her, because it is programmed into the purge children that older children cannot harm the newer ones. F comes before G, so Fon is older than Gabby, and he can’t do anything to harm her while Gabby had the rights to get rid of Fon if she deemed him defective.
Youjo Senki Shokudou is a spinoff manga of Youjo Senki (Saga of Tanya the Evil), focusing on the character’s daily lives (kinda like the Youjo Shenki shorts). This should be one of those educational comedy manga that kids are encouraged to read lol.
Anyway, in Shokudou, Tanya takes us to sample the food she eats in her daily life as a soldier, from gross canned rations to delicious potato pancakes.
bonutzuu 