Quote:
Originally Posted by yezhanquan
Looks like I'm not the only one feeling uncomfortable about the direction of the series. Anyway, waiting for Vexx's comments after his advanced viewing.
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Well... just finished rereading the entirety of the festival arc and it still feels quite muddled and Chao Lin in particular came off not-well-explained. Yeah, yeah, she thinks revealing magic to the world will fix some future horror but her whole manner in losing just seemed to make the motivation that drove her less meaningful. I do recognize this is purely an emotional gut opinion, though. It will be interesting to see how/if various players suffer the consequences for their actions in the melee.
As far as telling the story -- it suffers from two recurring issues at least for me:
1) Action in comic frame form is a difficult feat to pull off --- Ken still has a lot of work to do before he can match some of the work one sees in action comics. Much of the time it was distracting to have to figure out what happened beteen one frame and the next.
2) This was made more problematic by the issue that many of his tier 2&3 characters look alike. At times, I had to keep the cast of characters sheet available to figure out who had just popped into a frame.
Ken is trying to do something that stretches his abilities - that's a good thing. But it does mean he's going to trip and stumble more often.
I'm interested in seeing some story arc progression in the earlier themes (Negi/Nodoka/Yue, Negi/Evan/Chach, Kono/Set, more library exploration, etc). I admit readily my favorite parts of the manga are the portions that play more like "small group of adventurers and how they inter-relate". I am encouraged by the sampling scans that pop up from those who are looking ahead.