Excel Saga Vol. 27by Wolfen MoonsgetReviews may contain information that could be considered 'spoilers'. Readers should proceed at their own risk. Publisher
Credits Grade: 7 Excel undergoes a temporary transformation that leaves those who witness it rather unsettled. Later, ACROSS makes another bid for takeover. This being the final, longer-than-normal volume, will they succeed?There's a fair bit of fan-service, and a little strangeness with people being naked with no nipples, but the nudity and groping either is funny or makes sense story-wise. I like the overall art style, even if the shading sometimes makes it a bit busy and hard to read, and there are a few panels that would make for good entries in our occasional Bizarre Breasts column. It's nice to see characters with more of a variety of body types, with a few girls (including the heroine) that are fuller-figured than one normally sees in manga. Story-wise, I like that who is the villain and who is the hero isn't exactly clear in this series, and that it mostly seems a story of people just trying to be whomever they want to be in what just happens to be a really unusual set of circumstances, while learning to accept others for who they are in the process -- even if they seem to have multiple personalities. I thought watching the anime, which I loved but my memories of are hazy after a decade, would help me follow this ... and, maybe it did a little, but it turns out the manga-ka stipulated that the anime should create its own timeline, so all it really helped with was in having a nominal idea of who the characters were. There's no "before" section or character guide at the start of the book. There's a whole story with these "core" things that I didn't really grasp. And the book, while funny, didn't have the frantic, madcap humour of the anime (which, to be fair, would be hard to duplicate in static pages). But it was fairly funny! My fave bit, humour-wise: when Excel tells Egala to commence the "cyber-attack," Egala relies, "What, like being rude on Twitter?" And there's some more in that bit that is hilarious as well. Ending-wise, in a way it was kind of anticlimactic, and yet, it was arguably the best ending for the series, most people getting what they want (or at least, not getting what they don't want). Life getting back to "normal" can be considered a victory, and the more calamity can be avoided to get there, the better. Relationship-wise, I'm fairly satisfied as well, although I would have liked to have had more characterisation for Il Palazzo, and seen more interaction between him and Excel when they were both themselves (even if that turns out to be more a matter of a more central part of a spectrum of personalities than one single identity). When all's said and done, I may not have understood a lot of the volume, but I understood enough considering I've never read other volumes, and there were moments I quite enjoyed. Knowing how it ends, I would indeed like to read what's come before. Written: February 2, 2014
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