Monthly Archives: December 2018

Danganronpa 2: Ultimate Luck and Hope and Despair, Vol. 1

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By Spike Chunsoft and Kyousuke Suga. Released in Japan by Mag Garden, serialized in the magazine Beat’s. Released in North America by Dark Horse. Translated by Jackie McClure.

I tried to play the first DR game, but never got far due to frustration over a “gatcha” system giving you random pointless things. In other words, a typical game experience. I do know enough about the franchise, though, to know that the second in the series was more popular than the first, at least over here. As such, licensing the manga seems like a lock. That said, I think that once again this is a manga to read if you’ve already played the games – there’s very little help given to the newbie reader, and the character introductions come fast and furious. Given the large cast, and the complete lack of holdovers from the last game/manga (mostly), it’d normally be hard to get a handle on who we should be following. The player character is clearly Hajime Hinata, a weird fusion of Naegi and Kirigiri from the first series, but being a player character he’s pretty blank and dull. So the manga focuses instead on Nagito Komaeda, who… isn’t.

Danganronpa 2 takes place on an uncharted desert island, where the cast wake up after being in school previkously. They’re supposedly led by a rabbit bascot named Usami, but Monokuma quickly takes over by force and decides to restart the usual killing games. Quite how Monokuma’s mastermind is alive after the last game is not clear, but oh well. Everyone tries to make the best of it with a party, but midway through the power cuts out, and when the lights come back on, oh look, somebody’s stabbed. It’s Byakuya Togami who… seems different from the last time we saw him, and also a lot heavier. OK, frankly, the discerning reader knows it’s NOT Byakuya Togami, but as to why someone is impersonating him… we don’t really find that out either. There are very few answers in this book, but a lot of setup, and a lot of Komaeda. The conceit of this manga is that it’s from Komaeda’s “POV”.

Komaeda is a piece of work, and reminds me quite a bit off Izaya Orihara from the DRRR!! series. He says that he’s trying to prove that hope exists in a world of despair, but seems to want to accomplish this by getting everyone around him to despair and see if someone manages to beat him. He has a lot of “laughing crazy” faces too, as well as a heap of bromantic tension with Hajime. As for the rest of the class, so far there aren’t many standouts. One tanned athletic girl gives me memories of Aoi Asahina. There’s a nurse whose personality and looks are reminiscent of Hinata from Naruto, though Hinata never quite fell and exposed herself quite the way Mikan does constantly. (This seems to be a fanservicey running gag, and it’s awful, frankly. DR is still written for teenage boys in Japan, no matter how much ho yay may be in it.) And there’s a gamer girl who may be the Kirigiri to Hajime’s Naegi. But yeah, mostly still a faceless mass.

I believe this series is only three volumes in Japan, so I’m not expecting much in terms of coherence. That said, if you like Komaeda, it’s an easy purchase. He is all over this manga, and he is dramatic as fuck. Which is all the player wants, really.

Der Werwolf: the Annals of Veight, Vol. 2

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By Hyougetsu and Nishi(E)da. Released in Japan by Earth Star Entertainment. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Ningen.

I’m always pleased when a second book in the series proves to be even better than the first, and that’s definitely the case with Der Werwolf. I enjoyed the first book quite a bit, but the second volume steps up its game, showing off Veight’s political and diplomatic skills in the first half, then pulling the rug out from under the reader with a plot twist I wasn’t expecting for a few more books yet. Perhaps best of all, there’s virtually none of the typical isekai cliches in this book – probably as the “I’m from Japan” part is still mostly irrelevant. There’s no gamer terminology, dungeon levels, and the romance is kept very much on the back burner – i.e. there isn’t any yet, though there’s clearly a few women who like Veight. Instead, we are simply reading a fantasy book. It reminds me a lot of The Faraway Paladin, and fans of one should enjoy the other.

At the start of this book, Veight is interested in expanding his allies on the Southern half of the continent, so reaches out to a pseudo-Arabian city along the coast. As with the first book, we occasionally get the viewpoints of other characters (though I wish they were marked off in the text a bit better – it can be tough to tell when we’ve left Veight’s viewpoint and when we return), and that helps here to show off the rock and the hard place that the other city is caught between, and also how Veight thinking that he’s being calm and reasonable is seen by other people as Veight being threatening and terrifying. In fact, there’s a running gag here, even more than the first book, of Veight saying he’s “just a vice-commander” and denying that he’s anything special, despite constant evidence to the contrary. It would be annoying if he were doing it deliberately, but he means it, so it’s just funny.

The second part of the book is much darker. We’d been introduced to the concept of a Hero arriving and challenging the Demon Lord at the start, but this proved to be a false lead (though it did get us another cute girl character, the stressed-out mage who can do illusion magic). Then a real hero does show up, and things go badly very quickly. It’s great to see how the concept of a hero here, in a book essentially narrated by “bad guys”, is that of a fiercely destructive force that none can stand against except the Demon Lord himself. Even more intriguing, there’s clear backstory between the hero and the Demon Lord, apparently involving a woman… but we never really get to find out what it is, except it’s made the hero hell bent on revenge. Actually, I’ll be honest here, I was expecting things to get even MORE dark, but thankfully things got a little better at the end, and Veight gets to go on being the most humble yet awesome vice-commander ever.

This is a pretty long-running series in Japan, so we have a ways to go. This pleases me, as reading these volumes is a treat. I highly recommend Der Werwolf to anyone who enjoys good light novel fantasy without the “light novel” cliches.

Pop Team Epic: Second Season

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By Bkub Okawa. Released in Japan by Takeshobo, serialized in the magazine Manga Life Win. Released in North America by Vertical Comics. Translated by Yota Okutani and Maya Rosewood.

It’s hard to get all the humor at the start of the second volume of Pop Team Epic without all the buildup that came with it. Pop Team Epic, the manga, was pretend cancelled, and the author was going to start a new work in the magazine called Hoshiiro Girldrop. There were even some promos for it. Then we get the chapter you see in this volume, and, well, surprise! (It wasn’t much of a surprise – everyone expected something fishy.) Now, of course, we not only have the anime using the series for its previews, but there’s also doujinshi anthology books with other artists writing genuine Girldrop stories. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an OAV at some point (well, yes I would, no one does OAVs anymore). With all that said, Girldrop is just the opening gag here, and the rest of the volume gives the reader what they want – more of Popuko and Pipimi.

Fans of the anime will be pleased to know that they will still recognize quite a few gags, although a lot less than the first volume. The Undertale stretching head gag is here (in fact, a lot of the video game stuff is seen here) as well as Popuko ordering latte art. For the most part, though, these gags were left out, and so the reader can enjoy them in their original environment. There aren’t a lot of gut-busters, but Pop Team Epic doesn’t really go for gut-busting humor. It’s a nerd manga that revels in its nerdness even as it tears down nerds gleefully, knowing that having its cake and eating it too is part of the reader appeal. And for those who look for that sort of thing, there are again one or two strips that imply that Popuko and Pipimi really like each other, though this is never going to be a comic that will commit to yuri in any way that isn’t present for a gag. I am also very fond of the “Holy shit, you’ve ruined it, like everything you do” strip, which definitely falls in the category of “too real”.

Towards the end of the volume, it’s become clear that the anime had been greenlit, and so we get a number of strips making fun of that fact. There is another “fake cancellation”, which also didn’t stick (I suspect Vol. 3, when it comes out, will be called “third season”. There’s also some mocking of the fact that Popuko and Pipimi aren’t cute or moe enough for the anime market, and are being replaced with more “natural” moeblobs – the anime did actually mock this, with the hegemony scenes at the end, showing off the yuri schoolgirl series that PTE is never going to be. And so Popuko and Pipimi, shunned by their own production companies and publisher, end the manga in a literal cage, making one last joke about bad ratings before the end. I have no idea how good the ratings were in Japan, but PTE definitely became a bigger phenomenon, both in Japan and the West. How will a third volume deal with the fame? God knows, but for now please enjoy more of this shitty manga.