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Reviewed by Michael Aronson “Aruto Kirihara is a student who spends his free time reading the book about Alice, and is even writing his own sequel. After meeting a girl who bears a striking resemblance to his heroine, he is pulled into a world where girls with strange powers and bunny ears battle to recover the true sequel, which has been lost for generations. What Aruto learns is that he has creative powers of his own, and he must use them to recover the lost book.” It’s never explicitly stated until the final pages, but the “Alice” in question, around whom this story revolves, is that from Alice in Wonderland. You can make an educated guess that it’s the same one, but the dialogue is never so forthcoming, and you’d never know it from the events that unfold. What we have instead is a boy who encounters various girls who dress in costumes with bunny ears and fight each other to unlock books that are hidden inside their hearts. It almost sounds like something from the video game Kingdom Hearts, but it’s nowhere near as graceful. Instead, KPS:EAR is loaded with very dubious subject matter, lingering extensively on breast size, brother/sister relationships and a little bit of cross-dressing. The excessive boobage is gratuitous and serves no purpose other than to make the female characters jealous of each other. The brother/sister stuff, that is Aruto’s relationship with his sister Kiraha, is much racier. His sister insists on bathing with him and the two often debate about what kind of behavior is appropriate for siblings to engage in. Kiraha is clearly infatuated with Aruto to a distressing degree, but Aruto begins to succumb and even cops a feel of her in the shower. If there was a greater point to this material, it might get a pass, but it’s pretty reprehensible as is. And after multiple scenes of incestuous flirtation, Aruto’s brush with cross-dressing is almost tame. But the problems aren’t limited to the content. The presentation is poor on the whole. The art is seriously lacking in clarity when it comes to any kind of action. Since the story is overly preoccupied with breast size, it’s odd that each female character’s proportions change from panel to panel. The most significant problem is that the narrative seems broken from panel to panel and page to page; oftentimes I was so confused that I would have to flip back to the previous page to make sure I hadn’t skipped one, and unfortunately I never had. I’ve rarely seen a story so bizarrely digress from its source material as Eternal Alice does. Comment on this review of Key Princess Story: Eternal Alice Rondo v1 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
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