I may be jumping the gun a little bit here considering that the anime isn’t over yet (although it is ending in just two months) and the manga won’t be fully released in the US for another 2-ish years if Viz Media’s (print) publishing schedule holds steady (they've already run the final chapters in WSJ) but frankly having a review out earlier is better than later. Honestly I wasn’t even sure I would be able to finish the manga as it concluded serialization but as I went poking around online to see where the anime had adapted up to I was hit with manga spoilers everywhere and this was after the series two biggest twists.
Dammit fandom spaces.
So at that point it seemed like the only thing to do was to ricochet through a manga that the American Shounen Jump editors themselves said had no chance of being licensed here and talk once again (since I’ve highlighted AssClass before) about why the series isn’t nearly as dark as you would expect from the title.
Assassination Classroom (Ansatsu Kyousetsu) by Yuusei Matsui
Apologies for going AWOL, last week was a bit rough, and there was a wedding involved, so I'm just shuffling around my book reviews so that I stay on track. Although, out of all of the material that I review, I have more books waiting to be talked about than anything else so that is a bit of a problem. I really don't have the energy to do additional reviews every week but at this rate it's going to be a race until the end of June for that "best books of 2015" post (yes I know I said initially it was going to be earlier but I'm still reading books!)
To the topic at hand, hurray, more sports anime that's fun above all else.! I feel like Haikyuu is also a really great example of how to make a shounen sports show for women, just give the characters personalities and the fans will flock!
This review originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses.
Title: Cronos Haze
Genre: Action
Publisher: Futabasha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)
Story/Artist: Takano Masayuki
Serialized in: Manga Action
Reviewed: 7 out of 11 chapters
Review copy provided by Crunchyroll.
Readers could be forgiven for looking at this series, which involves fights using sentient “jackets” and the original publication date, and thinking “is this a Kill la Kill rip-off?” Since this series is a reboot of a 2001 title of the same name the answer is no and upon a closer look the details of these two series are rather dissimilar after all. In Cronos Haze, Touya aims to find out more about his missing father by attending the same high school he did, Amagiri Academy, and quickly discovers that this school is bizarre by anyone’s standards. The school possess mecha, the student body president wields a military gun, and as mentioned earlier some of the students fight using “jackets” which when not activated take the form of a person and change their appearance to suit their wearer. Despite all of it’s shonen trappings the series runs in Manga Action magazine which means it’s actually a seinen series although it hasn’t done anything that would feel out of place in a shonen manga aimed at 14 year olds yet.
When Touya isn’t on screen there’s a subplot emerging in the background: Gigantes is a group of beings who have ruled the world (secretly I assume) for centuries and Amagiri is the one group that has been able to oppose them, despite their supernatural abilities. The abilities themselves are a bit vague, all of the ones presented so far seem to be related to probability, but more confusing is the fact that they have never caught onto the fact that their mysterious nemesis shares a name with an enormous, famous school and then when they’re searching for the headquarters (tipped off that it might be found at sea) run straight into the island.
None of this is portrayed humorously, which therefore means that the readers are supposed to take these characters seriously, yet the series hasn’t explained why Gigantes and Amagiri are fighting each other besides making vague speeches about ruling the world. Touya is as flat as a protagonist can be, with the vague goal of “I want to learn more about my father” but shows no interest in actually doing anything and the side characters are nothing more than walking exposition speech bubbles (except for when the series indulges in some particularly pathetic fanservice, just because you had a girl in a guys dorm instead of the other way around doesn’t suddenly make it funny). The exposition is also among the worst I’ve ever seen, the series literally waits a few chapters and then has one, two-page monologue by a new character explaining everything he thought Touya already knew and it still doesn’t answer many key questions.
If you want a series with the characters uncovering complex, hidden schemes there are better series out there and there are also plenty of series which combine that with action as well. If it wasn’t for the fact that this is a reboot I would have assumed Cronos Haze was a manga-ka’s first work where they were really passionate about their story but had no storytelling skills. As it stands I’m scared to look at what they’ve created in the 13 year gap between these versions.
