Hiroyuki Utatane

Sunao, after visiting the moon to pay his respects to his deceased friend Kei, is working as a mechanic and tour guide till he can afford to return home, when he is assigned to be the guide of two U.N. investigators, one the voluptuous Attim M-Zak with "augmented" abilities, the other a girl who shares name and appearance with his deceased friend, but with a very different personality and an age much younger than Sunao's Kei. The two also hold the apparently important-enough-for-people-to-attack-them-for Emblem Seeds, which have some connection to a recently discovered alien ship.

I don't have too many feelings about this volume. Not too much in the way of plot is revealed, but I've always been annoyed with many mangas' apparent desperate need to explain themselves entirely in the first ten pages so that we may get on to the "real" story, anyway. I guess you can either see the plot as lacking, or just taking it's time in the explanation. Though usually in these cases I swing for the pessimistic former with manga, I feel there's something in the pacing and revealing that feels to me very cinematic and controlled, that leads me to side with the latter. All the same, the vagueness IS probably at least a little excessive.

On the other hand, with the semi sparse plot explanation, I would have expected a little more character exploration. What we do get isn't exactly bad, but there were so many characters and threads to introduce, we don't really get to settle and learn about any of them too much. It's not the sudden hurtling of dozens of characters you will not be able to keep straight you see in a lot of series, it's really just a comfortably full load, but it still keeps the manga away from getting too into the characters yet.

I do have to say, though, the fanservice could be jarring. It's a seinen manga, so I figured I could be willing to take some gratuitous shots with a grain of salt, but...they just seemed so out of place in such a story, some of the time. I'm used to seeing it in lighter stories... But here it seemed like the lighter times were reserved exclusively for panty shots, undressing, etc. If the story switched from light to dark more often, for different reasons, it wouldn't seem so weird. But here, it tends to be more dark or serious, be interrupted by page of panty shot and silly blushing, then back to the old tone. I hope for the sake of the rest of this manga, if there are more dramatic or serious scenes in the future, that they either leave the fanservice out of those, or find a more skillful way to insert them, as it could really trip up a scene.

As someone who, with nearly every manga she reads, feels overwhelmed by hordes of bad writing quirks that get under her skin making her unable to appreciate the good, this manga helps me look rather favorably on it just by avoiding a lot of bad things and being pretty solid. All the same, solid writing isn't going to keep me reading, I need a plot that interests me, and most importantly characters I find likable and psychologically interesting. As the rest is kind of 'meh' to me, I'll pass on future volumes, but for those who find this style and subject matter more interesting, it could very well be worth a try.… (meer)