The un-shonen-iest shonen that ever did shonen.
Creative Staff:
Art: Kei Toru
Original Story: Ishio Yamagata
Character Design: Miyagi
Translation: Nicole Wilder
Lettering: Rochelle Gancio
What They Say:
When the world is threatened with destruction, six chosen heroes will rise to save it. One of them is Adlet Meyer, who calls himself “the strongest in the world.” Wut when he answers the call to assemble with the other heroes and face the darkness, there are not six heroes but seven. Who is the traitor in their midst?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I know, I’m probably at fault for assuming the manga’s description on the back cover would actually serve as an accurate description of what I’d be getting myself into. Still, reading that the series is about a group of heroes when TWIST! one of them is a traitor honestly sounds like a cool premise. In theory, at least.
Of the many problems the Rokka manga has, its major one is its insistence on tossing the reader into the middle of its story and hoping that enough context throughout the volume will be sufficient enough to flesh out its world. It isn’t. Throughout the volume, we’re thrown with technobabble and expected to take it in stride like we’ve always known about fiends and braves and a single evil god (simply referred to as “the evil god”) when we know absolutely nothing about these concepts or the fantasy world as a whole to really have any stakes in anything being discussed. Usually I hate it when series take one big exposition dump to explain what it’s all about, but in this case, that would have been much appreciated over getting no explanation whatsoever. And considering this is volume 1 of the story, the exposition could have gone perfectly at the beginning of the manga. But no.
Even ignoring the story itself, the characters are shallow at best. Considering how each of the Braves (er… “Braves plus one unknown traitor”) is clearly set up to have a particular shtick, whether it be the depreciating funny-man or the loli or literal princess, none of these tropes are really brought into full focus. Instead, we get moments where the princess will occasionally remind us that she’s unfamiliar with non-royalty, like a tacked on post-it note after its stickiness already wore off and it fell off the character sheet repeatedly. Going off its cover and first few pages, I would have even accepted some fan-service as a cheap substitute for character building, but even that is few and far between.
I’d transition into the handful of things the series actually does right, but I honestly can’t find any. It’s narrative is shoddy at best, with this odd focus on one of the Braves as if it’s a first-person retelling, only to cut back to other Braves when it feels like it, resulting in these odd “why’d you tell when you could have shown what happened with the other cast” moments. The art is serviceable when it wants to be, though a number of times it’s hard to tell the male characters apart, and fight scenes become this choppy mess of following where speed-lines lead to and how.
But wait! There’s more!
The biggest disappointment I had while reading this volume was the mere fact that what’s made out to be the series’ premise and big twist with one of the Braves being a traitor is the lack of attention it gets. Sure, there’s maybe one or two pages where the characters are shocked by this, but the issue is immediately swept aside in favor of the cast wanting to escape the room (area? region? I already forget) they’re currently stuck in. While this doesn’t seem like all that big a deal, considering how this is supposed to be the series’ major selling point, you’d expect at least a little more pomp and circumstance, or even some prior buildup about the situation. Even the flow of the conversation the Braves have when they realize they’re one extra is odd. While they acknowledge the possibility that there could have simply been an extra Brave this time around, they immediately dismiss the idea because such has never happened before and assume the extra must be evil. And yet cat-men and underage killers and half-monster/half-humans exist without anyone so much as batting an eye. The in-world mentality and logic is just so frustratingly lacking in logic that I can’t help but be off-put.
And yet even with all these gripes, I still won’t say this manga is unreadable. Come volume’s end, the manga has one of the Braves who we’re supposed to believe can’t be the traitor being suspected by everyone else and is now on the run alongside one of the Braves he stupidly took as a last-second hostage. It’s an enticing enough cliffhanger and is probably where the series wanted to start off with from the beginning, but boy was the road in getting there a rough one.
In Summary:
Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers could have at the least been a serviceable shonen series that puts a twist to the standard fantasy manga group dynamic. Instead, the loose foundation in its fantasy world setting results in the entire volume suffering. Not only does the world itself feel poorly conceived, its characters, plot and simple overall feel is so unfocused. Perhaps if the series tried to play the plot straight as a whodunit-style mystery that happens to take place in a fantasy world, but as-is the manga is this oddball mess that isn’t sure what it wants out of itself.
Content Grade: C-
Art Grade: C+
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: January 24, 2017
MSRP: $10.99
