Magi Review: Solid adventure

Magi tells a story about Aladdin and Alibaba, Aladdin is a boy aged around ten and has djinn with him, reminding us of genie. He uses his metal flute to summon djinn, but unfortunately djinns head always get stuck so he looks like a headless giant when summoned. How Aladdin obtained this djinn is left as a mystery at the beginning, but he claims to have found him from "a room" and befriended him.
Alibaba is a young man and a dreamer. He at the beginning worked for some rich wine vendor, but along with meeting Aladdin they both decided to go on an adventure. The point of this manga is adventure and that's what has me hooked. When I think about a good adventure that feels long and satisfying, Magi's only job is just to deliver. In this mangas world there are 'Dungeons' in which people go and try their luck: usually none of them come back and when one does, he has attained immeasurable riches...

At the beginning of the manga, I wasn't satisfied by the art, but believe me, it gets better as the story goes on. Eventually it turns out to be like any other mainstream shonen manga in terms of art, which in my opinion can be considered as pretty good. In the most recent chapters the author has turned the the art into having more and more contrast: it does give sort of an unique feeling to it and works pretty well, but it has it's flaws as well ie. it doesn't work so well with the backgrounds which in my opinion require more focusing on the different shades of grey, in other words, less contrast.

This series's protagonists, Aladdin and Alibaba seem pretty decent characters and they have only decent flow and banter between them. There are a lot other side characters which make up to their decentness and to be honest Aladdin and Alibaba both manage to grow pretty much as the story goes on: on emotional as well as strength sides. As the story progresses further there are lots of characters introduced which manage to eat a lot of screen time, which really isn't a bad thing: Magis character designs are honestly good which correlates a lot with me actually remembering a bunch of them.

The initial setting of this story had me 'hooked' and the story did what I waited for it to do: taking me in to an adventure. I can recommend this manga to anyone who longes for solid adventure because it certainly manages to keep the reader interested for longer periods of time due to better than average storytelling. The longer you read this the more obvious it is why this is classified as "shonen", it will introduce typical battle shonen elements and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Those elements have been carried out well considering the story telling of this manga. In Magi you can also find a lot of people / events / etc. having their designs based on the collection of One Thousand and One Nights stories