Black God

More girls with powers...

Cliché’s are a part of life. We have it in movies and television and video games and of course we have it in Manga. Take for instance this cliché: A boy meets a girl with magical powers who just so happens to be running around in skimpy cloths and no underwear so he proceeds to invite her to live with him all the while the world he knows goes to Hell and the only way out has to do with that mysterious girl. Black God seems to have thrown the dart at the board-o-used-ideas and came up with this little story with a fighting magical girl who can only fight at full power when the boy shares his fighting spirit with her…or some nonsense. To be honest I slammed my face into my chair half way in. It’s going to be one of “THOSE” mangas I groaned. And of course, the tart wasn’t wearing any underwear.

Look, cliché’s can be done and be done well. Just look at Gurren Lagaan! It’s filled with some of the biggest cliché’s in the history of anime but it’s so brilliantly done that we look past all that and embrace it for the feel good rebel-against-fate kind of story it sets out to be. Now here’s Black God, trying to do the same thing with the damn harem franchise except it does a piss poor job at it. I mean I appreciate the fact that the writing staff for this series makes fun of themselves at the end of every issue by acknowledging they’ve never been to Japan, but something’s wrong when that’s the only part I look forward to every time I pick up a volume of their manga. The plot takes its sweet time dragging itself into place and you can’t feel a damn bit of sympathy or…anything really…towards the main male character. He could be called “douche bag #4” for all I care and I’ll care for him just as much as I do now. The female lead is forgettable as the ditzy girl with crazy killing powers and the childhood love interest character is just as dull and played out as she sounds.

Black God isn’t all bad however as the art in the series is pretty fantastic looking. I must admit I was looking more at the pretty pictures at one point rather than reading what was passing as a plot. The fight scenes are pretty interesting and it’s nice to see the creativity at work when combining all the elements of their powers, etc, but really I walk away with the sense that I’ve seen it all before. If you’re going to use a plot that’s been passed around like a two dollar village trollip then at least make the characters likeable. If you’re bored with the characters and you really couldn’t give a crap about the storyline, what have you got then? A little section in the back of the manga where you make fun of yourself for not knowing what you’re writing about. I mean imagine if I were to put something like that at the end of my reviews.

Author’s Note: Hey guys! Thanks for reading my reviews. I think they’ve turned out pretty well so far for someone who doesn’t actually read or enjoy manga. Heck I don’t even watch anime. They pretty much have me fake this stuff so that you can have something to read in a new tab on Manga.com while you’re browsing other sites. Hopefully you’ve bought all this stuff as real, otherwise I’d be out of the job. Oh wait, I have seen Yu-Gi-Oh on TV. Does that count?

Yeah. Something like that.