Moe monsters, moe problems.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Mujirushi Shimazaki
Translation/Adaptation: Amber Tamosaitus
What They Say
The new girls of the Tamers Committee are coming into their own as monster caretakers, yet the monsters remain ever mysterious. As Ion and her friends explore the touching personal stories behind human-monster relations, can looking to the past pave a way for the future? Find out in this final volume of Monster Tamer Girls!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This second and final volume of Monster Tamer Girls opens with the girls in question stripping down to bathing suits for no reason. Well, their reason is they need to wash the campus monster but it still seems oddly pointless. Pointless seems to be the theme of this series by the time it reaches the middle chapter of this volume.
Why pointless? Well, for a series that appears to have had little direction it still ends extremely anti-climatically. Each chapter remains extremely episodic and they all still follow the same pattern of meeting a new monster, learning a few of that monster’s habits, and ultimately moving on to the next vignette. There is a running theme in this volume about whether or not the monsters feel human emotions or not. The answer is probably yes, but they emote so little that it doesn’t look like they do. Then the series ends. Nope, we never find out why the monsters are here and what they mean for mankind.
There’s also the matter that a major plot-point from volume one seems to have been completely forgotten. The girls were Tamers because they could sing and control the monsters. There’s one brief moment of singing in this volume and it’s unrelated to any monster controlling. The author can’t even seem to remember their own flimsy rules to their world.
The one bright chapter in this volume involves an older man who clearly has dementia. (Yes, I said bright moment.) It’s a touching story about seeking forgiveness and coming to terms with death and learning to live and let live.
Unfortunately, it’s also followed up by one of the most nonsense segments in the entire book. The next story features a comatose girl, whose ghost is haunting a very strange monster, and the whole chapter ends with her waking up. Everyone goes back to their normal routine leaving the looming presence of a giant kaiju under the school forever haunting the faculty. Wait, why are their ghosts and what is that monster?
Despite the lack of direction and conflict, there is a sense of closure. A short epilog shows the girls post-graduation and the next batch of middle-schoolers moving in to take care of the monsters. Nothing is really resolved, and ultimately you get the feeling that the girls didn’t make much of any difference in how humans view the kaiju. In a way that’s an oddly realistic outcome, but it’s still disappointing that everything basically went nowhere.
That epilog and a few short comics make up the extras for this volume. As usual, Yen included a color opening page. There’s an author’s note that doesn’t really say much other than thanks for picking up the book.
In Summary
Monster Tamer Girls ends here with still a great deal of mystery and not much between the ears. There’s a point where cute just doesn’t cut it, and while there is one bright moment in this volume the rest of the stories are so cookie cutter they don’t matter. I still can’t remember any of the characters names and can barely tell them apart. A manga about girls taming monsters should never be so boring. A series about middle school students shouldn’t have them acting like elementary kids. Ultimately this short series was a letdown, and there are better stories about cute girls interacting with supernatural critters.
Content Grade: C
Art Grade: B –
Packaging Grade: B +
Text/Translation Grade: A –
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: May 6, 2018
MSRP: $13.00 US / $17.00 CAN