|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||
|
|
Reviewed by Park Cooper Magic Lover's Tower is not, unfortunately, about the tower of someone who loves magic. It's just a tower (that happens to be magical) of a lover, as the much-too-pretty girl on the cover suggests. A plain-looking girl likes a guy (he's kind of a jerk so you wonder why). She bemoans her low-romance-level fate. At home, she tries on her sister's nail polish. Then she realizes sis might not like this, so she goes out to get some nail-polish remover before sis notices. Here's one of the decent ideas of the manga: on the way home, boys are mean to her in front of a shop and they cause her nail polish remover to be broken all over a nearby scroll. Then the mean boys leave. However, the nail polish remover has eaten away at enough of the paint on the scroll that it releases a guy (and his weird floating rabbit familiar who turns into a magic staff) who becomes the girl's fairy godfather of romance. Twist #2 I liked: The fairy godfather starts falling for her himself. The twists aren't bad, but if you want a shlub who wishes for romance and gets a magical-person-of-the-opposite-sex, you'd be better off with Oh My Goddess (a.k.a. Ah My Goddess). This manga does some things right, the art is okay enough, but the pacing is off-- and other things are off. I was irritated every time there was a footnote explaining the references to mythology-- either the reader knows it already, or this is too fast and furious to educate the reader... I didn't really feel the love between the characters, it all felt forced. On one hand, I don't think that only being 2 volumes long in total is an excuse for not fleshing these characters out more-- on the other hand, I was extremely glad that there are only 2 volumes. My wife said "but you aren't the target-age reader for this... it could appeal to younger readers who already like manhwa and Clamp." I almost said something like this earlier, but I silently nodded as she worked out the rest of her train of thought-- "...but I suppose that those readers can go read Clamp, and better manhwa." I agreed. The trouble with magical romances in manga is that we have lots of those already (I'm even secure enough in my masculinity to edit one, so even though I'm a guy, it's okay for me to have an opinion on this). A fellow ML staffer recently reviewed something with an extremely lukewarm review and said that it was certainly not great, but was a decent (enough), fun (enough) waste of time. Sorry, but I just can't quite say that for Magic Lover's Tower, so that very stylized letter over there is a D+. Comment on this review of Magic Lover's Tower v1-2 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
|
||||
 |
| home | reviews | news | features | about us | advertise | privacy policy | contact us |
