A mysterious group of villains and a heaping helping of zombies
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Yuki Tabata
Translation: Satsuki Yamashita & Taylor Engel
What They Say
The Clover Kingdom is under attack by a mysterious mage who can control zombies! The greatest Magic Knights have come together to protect the kingdom and Asta’s caught in the middle of the ferocious battle.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As this volume opens, we see a continuation of the “introduce characters in a big stream” thing done last time, as those same new cast members each get their shot at beating down some zombies in a flashy attack panel. It still feels a tad cheap, since these single images for each character still don’t really give us a proper look into how they fight. But there’s at least some visual flair to it, and it’s not anywhere near as bad as what was done last time around. Once that’s out of the way, we focus a little more, with Asta taking on the guy behind the zombie monsters.
This battle of Asta’s is definitely the core of the book, and fortunately, it works pretty decently. Though Asta can easily neutralize each zombie thrown at him, the bulk of them certainly help to hold him back, making this a decent enough matchup. And midway through, when Noelle wants to help but is afraid of going out of control, Captain Fuegoleon jumps in to give her a pep talk. It’s a small but really effective moment, and it helps endear him to readers and flesh him out far, far better than the cavalcade of previous character intros. Oh, and it also leads to a nice enough moment for Noelle as she joins the fray. And then Leopold leaps into the thick of it as well, and he also proves a rather amusing character once he’s actually given a proper role.
As the volume continues, the enemy keeps pulling out cheaper “puppets”, keeping the heroes on their feet. And Yuno also fortunately gets a rather nice battle of his own. Which is certainly great to see, as his role as “rival” has been somewhat shaky as the series has progressed so far. Anyway, as this arc and volume come to a close, we get plenty of flashy action, interesting magic, and solid character moments, until the point where things end on one hell of a strong cliffhanger.
In Summary
Though it got off to something of a rocky start last time, this arc fortunately proves to be a rather enjoyable one once it’s given room to breathe. It actually does start off with a bit of what plagued last volume (though fortunately to a lesser degree), but once that’s out of the way, the book is smart enough to focus in more directly on two of the new cast members. And the result is that we get some truly interesting new characters, rather than an underdeveloped mess, making for a much appreciated development. Add to this a nice central fight for Asta, a solid aside for Yuno that actually gets him some page time, and a great cliffhanger, and you get an all around well done volume. While I can still certainly see room for the series to grow and improve (and definitely hope it does so), this really is a nice sign that it’s most certainly on the right track.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: December 6th, 2016
MSRP: $9.99
