Kekkaishi (Manga)

Image from: http://kekkaishi.wikia.com/wiki/Manga

Name: Kekkaishi

Author: Tanabe Yellow

Chapters: 345

Status: Completed

Release Date (for eng scans): -

Summary:

Karasumori is a mysterious piece of land which grants any ayakshi, who is within it, power. Being born legitimate successors of this mysterious land, Yoshimori and Tokine have been defending this plot of land from ayakashi since young.  

Yoshimori's lack of intelligence has always caused him to be known as the weaker of the two. However, as time pass, it became more apparent that although dumber, he has shown much potential in many areas in being a kekkaishi and a legitimate successor of karasumori. While Tokine uses her extraordinary intelligence to compensate for the lack of power, Yoshimori uses his gut feelings and battle experience to elevate himself.

Yoshimori being the kind person he is, after seeing many injuries and deaths within karasumori, he sets himself a life time goal of sealing the place up. As time passes, many groups grew more interested in karasumori, and many sets their eyes on this piece of land to fulfill their greed for more power. 

Will Yoshimori be able to seal karasumori up first, or will these groups of people get their hands on the ownership of the place first?

Summary by: AngelaAgness

Personal Ratings: 3.5

Watched the anime for this when I was young, but was super curious about the next part of the story, since the anime ended it quite abruptly.
The manga and the anime doesn't have much difference, but there are some adjustments here and there. Thought that some adjustments gave the story line more sense, however, some just didn't really make much sense.

There maybe many arcs in this manga, but the story revolves around one thing; sealing Karasumori. So form the start, we can see the motive of this manga, and how its going to end. So there isn't that kind of lost feeling in any part of the story. 

Could tell that the beginning and the ending of the manga is very well planned. However, for all the individual arcs in between (especially nearing the end), it felt that they didn't really had anything to do with the main story. It felt a little fragmented. You can somehow tell that everything is kind of linked, but the complicated relationships between the different parties were really messy, and hard to grasp the whole picture.

Overall really good character development, be it the enemies side or the good sides. Makes us feel for both sides, which is really quite rare to see because most of the time they only bother to develop the main character's side.

Really liked how they didn't 'dispose' of characters, especially when it comes to the enemies of side character. Usually in mainstream mangas, animies are usually thrown aside really easily. However, for this, up until the end, even if they died, they still play a certain importance to the whole story, and you can see them mentioning their names. 

However, I did think that they lacked specifics when it comes to talking about the past. Giving us the complete past would have enabled us to understand the character better. When I compared it with the anime, I thought that the anime did a better job in this aspect. 

The slow character development when it comes to Yoshimori really makes it interesting to see how he can use his technique in many different ways. It feels like we develop with the story; at first we only know the basic functions of his powers, and after awhile, there are more function and different ways added to it. It adds that spice to the manga, because it always gets really interesting when they show us his true powers. (maybe it's because in the beginning he is always that dumb kid that doesn't know how to utilize his powers).

When Yoshimori first completed his blank state, they somehow always seem to make him use his blank state just for calming himself down. I think it's kind of contradicting how at first they said that going into the blank state is actually quite risky, but than it's like all of a sudden he keeps using it. 
I also felt that during the time when he was training for his blank state, they kind of neglected him for a bit, focusing totally on Masamori's side. I think that they should have shows us some scenes on his training more often, or generally what's happening on his side.

The thing about his mother was also another mystery. I actually liked how they made us curious about his missing mother, and they did actually told us some information about his mother (Sumiko) in the middle, but that was kind of forgotten half way. Then all of a sudden, in the last arc, she is the most important person. However, even so, most of the time it was just her Shikigami, only until the last second was it really her real self. Felt that there is just not enough information about her. Really wanted a side story about her life. 

The ending was really sad. Felt that they made us recall back the sad times about Shishio and also about Sumiko. Though I didn't think that they could have made it a lot more emotional by actually building up the relationship between the viewers and the characters (especially Sumiko). It was sad, and I couldn't stop crying, but at the same time, it was like they finally did what they set up themselves up to do. So right until the end I had mixed feelings. 

Art Ratings: 3 to 3.5

In the beginning, you could tell that the art was really basic and standard, and the author didn't really make use of the panels to control how fast the reader reads. However after awhile, you could see that she started to maximize the space and overlapping techniques to enable the readers to understand which character they should pay more attention at that scene.

Panels were very normal; there wasn't much overlapping or anything done to it. Thought that they could have made used of more blank panels and effect panels to help elevate the whole manga. Blank panels are useful in helping the readers determine the time difference between the panels, so that it would be less confusing and it wouldn't make it seem like the manga is going too quickly. 

Overall I thought that there was a lack of use of screens and tones. Could see that she tried to keep the whole manga as simple as possible, but I still think that it needs that little more screen effects to help boost the level of intensity and also to help us understand the character's feelings. 

More inking would also have been better. For this story-line, I thought that it was quite a dark manga. So to match the story-line, I thought that having darker colours would have been better. When the panels are too white sometimes, it was pretty hard to grasp the mood, seriousness and dangerous atmosphere. 

Recommended for:
Gender: Both
Age: 13 and above
My Ratings: PG-13