When your dream world seems just as real as your waking world, how do you know which is your true life?
Creative Staff
Story: Kenji Kamiyama
Art: Hana Ichika
Translation: Leighann Harvey
What They Say
When Kokone sleeps she dreams of Heartland, a place full of technology and warring machines, where she’s the Princess Ancien who possesses magical powers. But when events in her dreams and real life start to intersect, Kokone has to run from bad guys in both worlds. Will her dreams provide a way out, or get her into deeper trouble…?
The Review! (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Technical:
This mangaka’s art style is typical of the genre; sparse backgrounds with a focus on the characters. I do love the variety of their facial expressions. Also, nice variety in the panel layout with standard pacing sections having rectangular panels with gutter space and action scenes removing the gutter spacing and angling the panels to give a feel of movement. Nice styling for that.
Good printing from Yen Press, with clean pages and color pages at the beginning of the book. There is also a helpful Character File section that helps reinforce who the characters are and how they relate to each other.
Content:
The kingdom of Heartland is ruled by a technically obsessed king. The king wants everything mechanical and new, so there aren’t very many old cars in the city. But things get weird where it relates to his daughter. The princess has a magical tablet that lets her bring life to machines and other inanimate objects. I’m not so sure it is magic, but it does make her unique in her kingdom.
Not everything is rosy for the princess. It was foretold that she would bring a great calamity to the kingdom. Then one day, a massive demon appeared and attacked the capital. While the king built robots to fight off the demons, the princess found her warrior and took things into her own hands.
Then Kokone woke up, sleeping at her desk in the middle of class. What are these dreams and why isn’t she in them? Being a teenager, Kokone doesn’t have time to dwell on that, she is plenty busy with school and keeping her single dad in line. But she might have to get to the bottom of those dreams now that her dad has been kidnapped and she has no other family to help her. Where does she even begin to learn about her family and save her dad?
In Summary:
I like the premise of this story, but this first volume seemed a little confused. The premise is that the main character remembers a past life or an alternate world. But the way the mangaka introduces that alternate world in the first chapter made it confusing as it flipped back and forth. Once you get past that, the story does better at drawing the reader in as you want to know more about Kokone and what happened to her mother and father before she was born. It also helps that Kokone is a bubbly person, making it easy for the reader to empathize with her. I suspect the second volume will be able to hit the ground running and get the series off to a good pace.
Content Grade: B-
Art Grade: B
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: April 24, 2018
MSRP: $13.00
