Manga Review: Lunar Legend Tsukihime Volume Five

[Jason]

Name: Lunar Legend Tsukihime
Volume: Five
Mangaka: Sasakishonen / TYPE-MOON
Originally Serialized in: Dengeki Daioh (MediaWorks)
Published by: DrMaster
Genre: Action, Horror, Seinen

As Arcueid and Shiki continue their quest for the vampire Roa, things take a more light-hearted turn in this latest volume; at least, comparatively speaking for a series like Tsukihime! The volume starts off with Shiki continuing to wonder about the mysterious, unknown child from his past, and big sister Akiha continues to thwart him at every turn.

Fortunately, after a mysterious accident causes Shiki to miss a planned meeting with Arcueid, the cutely tsundere vampire shows up in his bedroom the very next morning, eager to make him compensate for lost time. The majority of the volume is thus filled up with a wonderfully sweet date of sorts between our two leads, with only the story's ending returning to our usual dark atmosphere and leaving us with a dreadful cliff-hanger!

Unlike my last Tsukihime review, I have to say I enjoyed this volume from the very start. While it misses the gloriously haunting music that gives the animated series and PC game so much flavor, this volume of the manga makes up for it in spades. Dramatic ‘camera’ angles are used to excellent effect in a number of spots, and many panels capture Shiki's growing schizophrenia masterfully.

On top of that, DrMaster continues to do a pretty nice job with the localization. The one issue I have, however, is that they continue to print their books with extremely thin margins and extremely stiff spines. This, as I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone twice, is a bad combo. More than once I felt like I was almost going to tear the book in half just to read a text bubble that was unfortunately placed near the edge of a page. It's a shame too, because if DrMaster fixed this issue they'd turn out to be an excellent publisher across the board.

Still, it's not a deal-breaking issue, and you'd only be doing yourself a disservice if you bail on the story by this point. Tsukihime keeps getting better and better with each volume, with the only negative side effect being that it makes the anime look more and more mediocre with each passing page!

Reviewer: Kiara
Proofer: Eduardo Menendez
Editor: Lissa Pattillo