A step in the right direction, but still not anything worth reading
Creative Staff
Story: Takahiro
Art: Kei Toru
Translation: Christine Dashiell
What They Say
Akame and her team target the rival assassins Babara, Taeko, and Chelsea. Unbeknownst to all, Cornelia and Taeko became friends without knowing each other’s true identities, but what awaits them now is…?! It’s the fierce second volume of “Akame ga KILL! Zero,” the prequel to the hit dark fantasy “Akame ga KILL!”
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This time around, the focus is on Chelsea (from the main series) and assassins known as Babara and Taeko who have been hired to take care of our “heroes”. And they’re pretty easily more interesting than the main cast from the start, with Barbara in particular playing the role of tough as nails old lady. Before these characters can clash for the first time, we get a brief look at the main group screwing around, which they do several times throughout the volume. And to be honest, I’m of two minds on this. They do provide some baseline of character interaction and development that was sorely lacking in the first volume, so they at least allow you to get a basic feel for the cast. But on the other hand, they’re all so incredibly generic and tropey, and they just feel like going through the (moderately perverted) motions. So I suppose it’s at least a slight gain over what was presented in the first volume, but it’s still far from perfect.
There’s a brief confrontation between the two groups, but Babara’s team cuts out before things get too heated, allowing the mercenaries they hired to take the fall while Chelsea uses her skills to get a brief look at some of their opponents. We then get a good bit more silliness, including the fact that Green has a crush on Akame, with her armpits in particular being his point of fixation. The big occurrence here, though, is that Cornelia and Taeko unwittingly become friends. Of course it’s one of those awkward situations where the two hardly have any interaction, making the big “oh no, we’re friends but we need to battle, how tragic!” thing feel more than a little forced. For what it’s worth, though, the action does indeed show some improvement over the absolute mess that it was last time. It’s still nowhere near as easy to follow as it should be, but this time around I can at least acknowledge that there are a few shots that do come across well every now and again.
Taeko wins the battle and ends up killing Cornelia, and she tries to follow up by luring Akame off alone. What we get then is a shorter and less satisfying battle, and of course Akame ends up cutting Taeko down and then grieving over the loss of her friend. And then we get a downright disappointing fight from Babara. After all the hype it’s hard to even tell what her fighting style is, and though she manages to keep up with the kids, she loses in short order to their “father”, who has a weird stretchy body and Akame’s sword from the main book. She goes down way too easy after all the hype that she got, and they didn’t even really manage to use her to hype up the “father” character very well, since she just gets nicked by the old one-hit-kill blade and self destructs. It feels like a real waste of the most interesting character the book has managed to create thus far, which is certainly more than a bit of a shame.
In Summary
With this volume we get a slight improvement over the first volume, though not enough to make it good. The characters gain at least a little bit of depth instead of being absolutely undeveloped like last time, but they still don’t manage to extend beyond anything incredibly basic. We also get a plot of friendship and betrayal that could’ve at least resulted in something of value, but it instead misfires completely because it’s not given anywhere near enough time to develop. There’s also a nice core focus on a rival group of assassins coming after the main cast, but once more the action just doesn’t flow right, so even if that’s seen a slight improvement as well, it’s still not where it needs to be. And the fight with the greatest potential completely and utterly drops the ball, wasting what was a potentially interesting character in the process. For what it’s worth, this book is a baby step in the right direction, so perhaps there’s hope yet that this series may one day drag itself out of the gutter. Unfortunately, though, this isn’t the volume to do so, so I’d still recommend giving this one a pass unless you’re a very hardcore fan.
Content Grade: C+
Art Grade: C
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: June 21st, 2016
MSRP: $13.00
