KageTora Vol. #01

By Matthew Alexander     March 31, 2006
Release Date: March 28, 2006



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Akira Segami
Translated by:Akira Tsubasa
Adapted by:

What They Say
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

The young ninja Kagetora has been given a great honor "to serve a renowned family of skilled martial artists. But on arrival, he's handed a challenging assignment: teach the heir to the dynasty, the charming but clumsy Yuki, the deft moves of self-defense and combat.

Yuki's inability to master the martial arts is not what makes this job so difficult for Kagetora. No, it is Yuki herself. Someday she will dead her family dojo, and for a ninja like Kagetora to fall in love with his master is a betrayal of his duty, the ultimate dishonor, and strictly forbidden. Can Kagetora help Yuki overcome her ungainly nature . . . or will he be overcome by his growing feelings?

The Review
Packaging:
The front cover of this volume shows Kagetora wearing blue and black ninja garb standing behind Yuki dressed in traditional Japanese clothing. Yuki is holding a shuriken with rope attached to the hilt and Kagetora has a star-shaped shuriken in his hand. The pink background has numerous light green star-shaped shurikens. The title is a large K T in white, with the smaller yellow colored font 'age' below the K, and 'ora' below the T. This cover is almost exactly the same as the Japanese original, with just small alterations in the title color and a small black border that works better than the white border of the original. The back cover of the Del Rey release has the same pink background as the front, a synopsis of the story, and a small version of both Kagetora and Yuki drawn in SD. Yuki hints at her clumsiness as she kneels on the ground all wrapped up in the rope attached to the end of the shuriken she's holding on the front cover.

The reproduction is nice and crisp, which is something I've grown to expect from Del Rey. However this book suffers from the pages being printed to close to the spine. I really had to force the book open wide to read a lot of the text, and in the worse cases I had to guess at some of the words. The off center printing was even more obvious on some of the pages where the artwork stops short of the edge, leaving a white border.

Extras include a note from the author, table of contents, description of honorifics and the much appreciated translator notes. There is also an 'extra page' where the author describes some of the facts he learned about ninja's during his research and two pages of comics poking fun at his characters.

This volume is a tough one to give a Packaging grade. On one hand the print quality is very good and there are a lot of extras, which would normally result in a high grade. But on the other hand, the print is off center and I had a difficult time reading a fairly large amount of dialogue, this would normally receive a very low grade. So I decided to compromise and give it a B-, which is sadly the lowest grade I have ever given any Del Rey title.


Artwork:
The style of the character design for this title is nothing new to the shounen romance genre, ninja's with spiky hair, girls with extra large eyes and a good amount of non-nipple fan service to boot. The artwork itself isn't bad, just fairly standard. The lines are clean and the shading is well done, except for the fight scenes where the art and tone work tends to become dark and scratchy. The backgrounds are as sparse as one would expect from this type of title and the facial expressions aren't very expressive.


Text/SFX:
The text reads well and lacked any apparent grammatical errors, plus honorifics were also included in the translation. Sometimes I forget the fact that a lack of honorific shows two people that are interacting on a very intimate level, so it was nice to see that Del Rey included a discussion of the [blank] honorific and its meaning in the Honorifics explanation section. Something that stood out to me about the text in this title was its size. The text size is really quite large and fills the dialogue circles completely. This really caught my attention because of the many books that use one font size throughout most of the book no matter what size the dialogue box. This was a welcome change and really helped out the old eyes.

Del Rey also continues to do an excellent job of translating the SFX. The original SFX remain with small English translations placed alongside, leaving the artwork unmolested.

Contents: (Oh yes, there may be spoilers)
Kagetora is a teenage ninja sent by his master to serve the esteemed Toudou family in modern day Tokyo. With his pet monkey in tow, Kagetora seeks out the master of the Toudou family to report for duty. The Toudou family is well versed in many styles of martial arts and is currently led by the woman Saya. She informs Kagetora that his mission will be to train her daughter Yuki to become the next head of the family. The only problem with this order is the fact that Yuki is an ultra cute, popular, short and very clumsy teenage girl. So it's not too surprising to see Kagetora quickly become infatuated with a kind and cute girl that pays a lot of attention to him.

Kagetora soon discovers how difficult it is to train someone with very poor balance. Yuki is very short for her size and easily thrown around during her P.E. judo classes. Kagetora does his best to train her, but he finds himself resorting to his ninja skills to protect her in every day situations from the classroom to the beach. Every fan service situation is fairly standard and has been seen before.

The appearance of Kagetora's older brother Shiroumaru allowed for some character development as Kagetora remembers what it was like to grow up with a bully for an older brother. It turns out Shiroumaru was summoned by Saya to make sure Kagetora was performing his job as a good honorable ninja should. He may be trying his best, but it's not easy to physically train someone you are attracted to. I found this situation interesting because Yuki's mother appears to be more interested in her daughter becoming stronger than she is in finding Yuki a boyfriend that she approves of, which did cross my mind in the very beginning of the story.

Comments
This series starts off as a pretty standard romantic comedy with the exception of Kagetora's character. I agree with Jarred's earlier review when he mentioned that Kagetora is a nice change from the usual shounen protaganist. Kagetora isn't weak or perverted, and he genuinely wants to complete his assigned mission. This volume wasn't very unique, and I enjoy my fan service as much as the next guy, but it needs to be plugged into a story that's going somewhere. But with that said, I am interested to see the direction the story may take. I fell there must be a deeper plot to this, because I don't know how anyone could write nine volumes worth of manga with nothing but bath scenes and unrequited love between Kagetora and the cute but somewhat clueless Yuki. Personally, I think Yuki's martial arts competent friend Kiritani is a better match for Kagetora anyways. Kiritani is sexier too!

Overall, the story is a cute 'first-love' story about two people who just happen to be living together. I did find some of the situations pretty funny, especially when the monkey was involved. My real complaint with this title was the problem with the pages being off centered and the resulting difficulty in reading the text along the spine. But if the other Del Rey series are any indication, I'm sure they will fix this problem before volume 2.