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By Reki Kawahara, abec, and Tsubasa Haduki. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks, serialized in the magazine Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen Press.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, after my highly positive reviews of the first Sword Art Online manga, several people told me that the series took a big nosedive with the next arc. I was therefore quite interested to see what happened here, and how exactly the series lost all of the goodwill it gained. I initially though I might have to wait until the arc finished to get the full story, but no, that’s not the issue here. Everything that I suspect people hated about this arc is laid out right at the beginning of the story, to the point where I wonder if the author did this deliberately to tweak fans a little bit. After all, he is having to come up with a way to continue what was a fairly self-contained story.

Let’s run through the basic problems, which I think fall into three big categories. First, there is the introduction of Suguha, the younger sister of Kazuto/Kirito, our hero. As we hear from her angsty narration, she was told that she and Kirito were not really siblings, but cousins, while he was trapped in SAO. This allows her to have ‘legal in Japan’ feelings for Kazuto, which given that the reader spent the last two volumes marveling at Kirito and Asuna’s relatively quick and happy relationship can be a bit grating. Moreover, we discover she’s also playing an MMO to see what Kazuto found so amazing about them, and is now teaming up with him – without either one knowing that they’re really teaming up with their real-life sibling. Wackiness, as they say, ensues. (Oh yes, and there’s fanservice of Suguha’s naked, buxom form in the shower.)

Secondly we get introduced to the villain of the piece, Sugou, aka Oberon. I feel that it’s OK to spoil that he is the villain given that the story does so immediately after his first appearance. His entire personality is designed to be evil, which means he gets all the usual evil attributes, including gloating about his evil plans (which he explains in great detail to both Kazuto and Asuna), and openly discussing sexually assaulting a girl who openly hates him without her content. He’s a loathsome prick, and one wishes he had a bit of the subtlety of SAO’s first villain, who at least had better justification in his head for mass murder.

Lastly, after expecting a tearful reunion of Kirito and Asuna in the real world, we find that not only has Asuna not woken up, not only is she trapped in another MMO designed by her evil fiancee, but she is literally being kept in a BIRDCAGE and tormented by Sugou/Oberon, unable to even escape (though she may be trying to change that at the end of this volume). Seeing our favorite action girl as a prize to be won, passive and caged, is possibly the one thing that grated on me the most here, if only as her role is then handed over to Leafa/Suguha.

That said, there are things I did greatly enjoy here. The basic premise is still solid, if ridiculous. (The fact that these VR MMOs weren’t banned after SAO’s mass deaths came out is totally ludicrous.) Kirito is a very likeable hero, and I admired his resolve and willingness to use his cheat skills to get ahead in order to save the one he loves. The reunion with Yui was too short for my liking, but still very heartwarming, and I’d love to see her reunite with her mother as well. The narrative flows smoothly, with the battles being interesting and not taking over the entire book. The new game is sufficiently different from the first to add new depth. We have a new artist here, who seems to mostly be an artist-for-hire on light novels, and the artwork is pretty decent. And I did enjoy the brief glimpses we got to see of the real world – I wish we’d seen a bit more. (I wonder if the novel, due out in December, has some of the missing depth here.)

So overall, no, I didn’t loe this as much as the first series, for the reasons I mentioned above. It’s clearly retooling itself to attract new readers, and in order to do that burning a few of its bridges. That said, it’s still a lot of fun, and I would really like to see what happens next, so I’d call it a success overall. Let’s not lock up our heroines for the entire story in the future, though.

By Sou Sagara and Okomeken. Released in Japan as “Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Neko” by Media Factory, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Alive. Released in North America by Digital Manga Publishing.

I was a bit ‘meh’ about the first volume of Stony Cat, which I felt showed promise but also had several flaws. The second volume is for the most part better, even though it has many of the same flaws, because the flaws are starting to look like they’re built into the work as a whole. This is not a manga about easy fixes – its very premise shows off the dangers of trying to fix your personality quirks with mere wishes – and we delve deeper into that here, as Yoto’s attempt to cheer Azusa up fail on a spectacular level, partly due to his being unable to avoid telling the truth but mostly due to his misconception about how deep her issues run.

There is a certain awkwardness that permeates the entire volume – indeed, the adaptation helps it along with some translation quirks that I’m not certain are deliberate. Azusa’s two old ‘friends’ from middle school, in the aftermath of the botched ‘date’, speak in a sort of stilted robotic tone, ending everything in ‘I did’ or ‘we did’. Indeed, everyone seems to talk a bit more formally in this series. It’s likely just a case of ‘how can I deal with this regional dialect’, but it helps to add an additional disconnect to what’s going on in the series.

Azusa is merely the most obvious example of someone whose ruined self-image is causing great pain in her life (even her mother, who seems to be one of those standard ditzy anime moms, is not really helping her). Tsukiko is pretty unhappy with Yuto’s plan, but of course can barely express it thanks to her wished-for stoicism (unlike Yuto, who is able to get his wish reversed halfway through this book, she’s still stuck with her face being the way it is.) Yuto himself is the typical well-meaning but overzealous teen guy, deciding that he knows how to fix things without really thinking about how they’ll affect the person he’s trying to fix. Getting his ability to lie back allows him to defuse things with Tsukiko’s sister (who turns out to be the “Iron King” track star we saw in Vol. 1), but I suspect his basic personality flaws will continue to plague him.

Aside from that, this series has most of what you’d expect from a harem romance based on a light novel that runs in Comic Alive. There’s lots of comedic violence, misunderstandings, some blatant nudity at the end of the book. The aforementioned Iron King gets to show off her physical prowess, but also shows off how little she understands the human brain (similar to the rest of the cast) when she accepts Yoto’s ‘that was my evil twin brother’ story at face value. Despite the added depth revealed in this volume, it’s still filled with flaws, and I wouldn’t recommend it except to those who like its genre to begin with. But for those people, there’s things to like here, or at least things to muse upon in the hope that future volumes will run with them further.

Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign Volume 1 by Takaya Kagami, Yamato Yamamoto, and Daisuke Furuya

I highly enjoy vampire manga, so I was looking forward to checking out Seraph of the End. I think this series is a manga spin-off of a light novel series set in the same world. I was expecting more detailed world building from this manga, and I wasn’t disappointed. The series starts off by introducing a dystopian society where a virus has destroyed adults, leaving behind vampires and the young children they use as a blood bank. Yuchiro Hyakuya is the brash young hero who spends most of his time researching vampire lore and attempting to make himself stronger so he can fight back against his captors. His best friend and adoptive brother Mikeala is a bit sneakier, outwardly appeasing his vampire masters in order to gather useful intelligence. When Mikeala finds a map indicating a pathway to the surface, the orphans band together and try to make a break for the outside, only to find out that it was all a set-up. Yuchiro’s siblings are killed by vampires, and Mikeala is mortally wounded and urges his brother to continue the escape attempt. Yuchiro makes it up to the surface of the earth only to discover that it looks vastly different from what he was taught to expect.

Yuchiro is promptly picked up by the Japanese Imperial Demon Army, a vampire fighting paramilitary organization, and enrolled in a school. Several years later he’s older but still in the same mental space – eager to fight vampires, not following orders, and not yet finding his place in the world. Guren Ichinose, a Lieutenant Commander in the Army says that Yuchiro can’t progress and function as a vampire hunter until he is actually able to demonstrate that he gets along with his classmates. Towards the end of the volume Yuchiro has made some progress in his number of vampires killed, as well as beginning to form some bonds of friendship with his monitor Shinoa and his classmate Yoichi. Overall, I was impressed with the amount of ground Seraph of the End managed to cover in one volume. Yuchiro’s world and back story were set up, we see his character progress a bit both in terms of fighting demons and gaining a tiny bit more emotional maturity.

The art is clear and easy to follow, except I thought the character designs for Yuchiro and Yoichi were a bit too similar. Sometimes I had to doublecheck and read back a bit to remind myself who was who. While Yuchiro is very much the typical shonen hero, his back story is filled in here and there with flashbacks, which helped a lot in terms of explaining his motivations. I found the supporting cast interesting too. Guren Ichinose (the main character in the light novels) shows up and demonstrates his badass vampire fighting abilities at key points, and Shinoa as the main female character is both snarky and weird. I also enjoyed the power imbalance between her and Yuchiro, since serves as a bit of an instructor and is keeping track of his behavior improvements to report back on to command. Overall, I found this first volume enjoyable and am looking forward to the second. I can see this series easily appealing to fans of Blue Exorcist, or even (a bit of a stretch) Full Metal Alchemist, since there are some similar plot elements and themes shared by all three series. Definitely recommended if you’re looking for a solid shonen vampire series to try!