Manga Review: Land of the Blindfolded (volume 1)

More CMX titles (am I sensing a bias here library?) and this one is actually complete! Land of the Blindfolded is a nine volume series and ANN tells me that all nine volumes were in fact published in the US so hurray for that, now, if half the volume wasn't taken up by random one shots.

Land of the Blindfolded by Tsukuda Sakura

Summary: Kanade is a fairly normal high school girl except that every time she touches someone she can see a little of their future (which she likens to being in a world full of people where blindfolds and hers is a bit loose). She quickly runs into transfer student Arou who figures out her ablity because he can see a person's past whenever he touches someone. They try to prevent the bad futures Kanade sees (after a bit of debate) and deal with another transfer student who can also see the future but uses it for his own gain.

The Good: I really liked Kanade, her reasoning behind why she wanted to use her powers to help people instead of just ignoring it was well thought out and I could very easily relate to her. Arou came off as more than a bit stereotypical but seemed like a nice guy so two likeable leads make the whole story better. Plus I did like the explanation for the title, before I thought it was a pretty strange title but the reason here makes it fit very well.

The Bad: That summary is pretty much all that happens in the first volume since almost half of the first volume is made up of two one shots. I remember that DN Angel often had one shots in the back of their volumes (I guess to pad them out for faster releases) and that I didn't mind too much but here I felt cheated out of my reading time since I was enjoying the story and got so little of it.

The Art: Standard shojo artwork, decent to look at but not very varied in character design (the extra in the back that shows the characters from all three stories emphasizes this).

So, I did enjoy reading and would like to read more but there's nothing really special about it. Of course, I did read only three chapters and I did like what I read but if it is a while before I get to read anymore (which it probably will be) I'm not worried about forgetting anything too important.