Book Information:
Twilight of the Dark Master
by Saki Okuse
Publisher: DMP
Type: One-shot
Genre: Action, Horror, Mystery, Shonen
Crime is big business in the city, but even the worst of Chinatown are forced to run for cover when crazed demons mysteriously mangle and devour girls in the street-sex industry. A wave of mutilation unlike anything in history has officials and civilians asking questions with no answers… and because strange times call for even stranger measures, the elusive Shijo Detective Agency takes up the reins. Will the enigmatic, powerful Tsunami bring an end to the madness… or will the quest stir something even deeper within his own soul?
Characters:
There’s really only the one character of note in this volume and that’s Tsunami Shijo. Sadly he isn’t that much of a character.
I’ve read a lot of manga over the years and encountered a lot of bad characters, but this is the first time I’ve come across a character that had so much potential just abandoned.
His personality is so flat it’s wafer thin. Yet at times during the volume he does manage to show that he has some inside him. I also found his character design to be really bad mainly due to it changing every few pages.
Story:
This actually has a fairly decent story, though it’s not until the very end of the volume that it starts to be revealed.
The core of this volume follows Shijo who is hired by Shizuka Tachibana to hunt down, and kill, her boy-friend. He’s become an ‘Oni’ and is doing a lot of raping and murdering. She also reveals that she was raped and ravaged by him after he had turned and as a result now had an almost total artificial body.
The way the story plays out is a bit confusing, and I did have to re-read a few bits a couple of times. Yet the story is an intriguing one that would have made an excellent first volume of a series.
Art:
The art is atrocious however, right from the outset is some of the worst art I’ve ever encountered in a manga. The ‘settings’ as in the cityscapes are pretty decent looking, however the characters are horrid. The inconsistencies in the character designs are really frustrating.
Publisher Handling:
No major comments to be said about this volume. DMP handled it rather well. Though as with Angelic Runes the text was hard to read at times due to the choice of fonts. In a normal manga this wouldn’t be a big issue, however on a reader like eManga it becomes a big issue (for me at least, since I have bad eyes anyway and wear glasses)
General Musings:
This is a sad tale since this has so much potential. The bad art could have been easily over looked if it was a longer series. The story would have been allowed to spread it’s wings and really grow into something interesting. This was made all the more evident by the revelations at the end of the volume. Sadly since it’s not a series, it falls short of being anything other than a filler read.
