Category: Reviews

Fate/Apocrypha #01: One Night in Trifas Makes a Hard Magus Humble

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hisui_icon_4040_round In just a few days Reverse Thieves will officially be a decade old.  I swear sometime in those ten years I made a Murray Head’s Chess reference on the blog but I could not find it with a casual search of our posts so I think I can use it and declare no harm, no foul. I just ask for a bit of forgiveness if I say name a post “One Night in Mariejois and the World’s Your Oyster” within the next decade.

Fate/Apocrypha is an odd beast. It began life in back in the day before mobile games were a thing and the game everyone wanted to be was World of Warcraft. If nothing else Type-Moon has been pretty good at adapting their properties to different mediums in order to seize on what is popular. If you have ever seen Fate/Complete Material Volume IV you will see that they had a whole slew of Servants by different artists for the initial release of the game. For various reasons the game was canceled and the designs for the characters and the general premise of a two team Holy Grail War mostly became a bit of trivia for hardcore fans. A few of the Servants from Fate/Apocrypha found their way into other Type-Moon titles like Fate/Extra but overall it was more a case of what could have been.

As time went on light novels became the popular trend swept the otaku markets and Type-Moon has never been a company to ignore such opportunities. In 2011 they took the overall concept of the Great Holy Grail War and with Yuichiro Higashide made some tweaks to the story so it would work as a series of novels. This led to some changes to the background and the Servants involved but the general framework of the plot was adapted fairly straight.

If nothing else each of the Servants who were dropped from the original concept of Fate/Apocrypha have made their way into Fate/Grand Order. At the same time, all but a few notable exception from Fate/Apocrypha have made their way into Fate/Grand Order. With a Fate/Apocrypha event on the horizon, all of them should be in the game by the end of the year. In fact, if they don’t add Semiramis soon there maybe been some riots in the street of Akihabara.

The novels have been popular enough to get a manga and anime adaptation so here we are today. Unlike most of the other Type-Moon anime, I have written about I only know the broad strokes of the plot. I know most of the characters involved, some major plot points, and some big spoilers but details on anything and some major chunks of the plot will be as much of a surprise to me as they are to a good deal of the audience. So this time I will be as much of a tourist as many of the people reading these post. Sometimes even more so if any of you can read Japanese.

So let’s begin our journey together and see where it leads us.

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Manga of the Month: The Promised Neverland

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The Promised Neverland by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demiz

hisui_icon_4040_round Sometimes you finish all your work for the day but you will have 20 minutes before you can go home. As anyone who has ever worked in an office will tell you that is YouTube time. It is not enough time to start working on anything you need to do but it is also not enough time to waste doing nothing. Finding myself in that sweet spot I loaded up a video that caught my eye about The Current State of Shonen Jump. It was an examination of the magazine since the conclusion of Bleach and Naruto. It is a solid analysis of the state of the magazine after they lost two of the recent Big Three titles. The thing that caught my attention the most was mostly just a footnote in the greater context of the video. One of the most popular titles in the magazine was currently The Promised Neverland. Other than Hinomaru-Zumou I was fairly familiar with all the other titles on the list. Hinomaru-Zumou is a sports manga about sumo without an anime so it is essentially invisible to the English-speaking fandom. I was far more surprised that I had never of heard of The Promised Neverland. That made me immediately buckle down and do some research.

The more I looked into The Promised Neverland the more I was surprised I had not heard at least a bit of buzz about it. Now it started in the middle of the pack rankings wise in Japan but really jumped up in popularity as the series has gone on. Carl from Ogiue Maniax described it as Death Note with tiny orphans. While it is hardly a perfect description it works perfectly as an elevator pitch. Demonic Seraph of the End or a cat and mouse version of Attack on Titan also work as broad overviews that sort of hint at what the series is about. Sufficed to say much like Death Note it feels a little different from the normal fare found in Shonen Jump. If you find that intriguing like I did then you definitely want to read the rest of this.

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Manga of the Month: Cells at Work!

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Cells at Work! by Akane Shimizu

narutaki_icon_4040_round If someone told me that my new favorite manga would be about the internal workings of the cells in the human body, I wouldn’t have believed it. But here we are!

In Cells at Work!, Akane Shimizu takes the many cells that keep our bodies running and imagines them as humanoid characters working in complex company systems. For example, the red blood cells are depicted as a shipping company ala Fedex with hundreds of workers running here and there with carts of packages to be delivered.

Our leads are Red Blood Cell  (RBC from here on) and White Blood Cell (WBC from here on), you have to know them by sight since there are hundreds of other red and white cells running around the series. WBC is a no-nonsense, precise, doer who goes to any length to protect and eradicate any threat to the body. RBC a hard-working, bright newbie to the delivery company and often runs into WBC on her errands around the body. RBC is often the point-of-view character to what all is happening.

The stories are episodic with a chapter, sometimes two, taking on various illnesses or other happenings in the human body. I’ve thus far learned about allergies, the creation of cancer cells, what happens when the body gets a scrape, and more! Each chapter has some asides which are no intrusive to explain terminology or give more information about a given subject.

Learning is great! But the thing that makes Cells at Work!, well . . . work, is the comedy. Each character has an over-the-top personality and everyone takes their jobs very seriously. Bickering, side comments, rivalries, mishaps, and everything in between pepper this series with a big dose of humor.

Cells at Work! is a delightful, laugh-out-loud way to learn about the mysterious inner workings of the human body.

~ kate