Thread: Licensed + Crunchyroll Maoyuu Maou Yuusha
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Old 2013-01-06, 20:13   Link #606
Cyprene
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Crude jokes aside, the Demon King's obsession with her chest is another example of the same thing I was mentioning a few pages back, which is how the book's original format (All dialogue, no descriptive text, which I saw Wiki today describe as a "Play" format) influences the character's personalities. With no visual clues whatosever as to what these people look like or what they're doing, you have less ways of including a lot of elements that are trivial in a different format.

For instance, including any kind of fanservice, which is especially critical in a story that would otherwise be rather tedious. (Imagine 24 straight minutes spent on charts and graphs showing the effect of the war.) The author can't show us what a character looks like, or what they're doing. The only way we can know is through the reactions of the characters, and so those reactions have to be exaggerated or we'll simply miss them.

You can see this exaggeration in a lot of elements in the book, like the magic (Spells are ten random kanji jammed together, and the more kanji the more powerful the spell), the combat (Fights are hugely exaggerated, with some of them taking place over miles and miles of territory, with fireballs 50 feet wide and characters flying around while brandishing legendary weapons.)

I never really felt that the manga version I read got across the sense of scale I felt in the original work. I know there are other versions, and I haven't checked them out, but that was one reason I was really looking forward to the anime adaptation. I think an anime is a better medium than manga for doing really big things, like Legend of Galactic Heroes and its fights between tens of thousands of ships. I'm not expecting the fights to match SAO, but I'm hoping that the anime version will be given the kind of budget it needs to match this sense of scale in terms of the whole story. If nothing else, it certainly has with the Demon King.
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