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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Kimi No Iru Machi / A Town Where You Live Review

Kimi No Iru Machi is focused mostly around Haruto Kirishima and Yuzuki Eba, the whole series begins with Yuzuki Eba moving in from Tokyo to live with Haruto Kirishimas family. Haruto is at first very reluctant to have a girl of his age living along with his family, but Yuzuki turns out to be very aloof and nice. This is a promising start to a tale of romance and drama..

Art: I really can't give very high scores to the art of this series, since especially at the beginning it generally isn't very clear. All the points from the art point of view go definitely to the character designs and especially to the women part of the designs. They simply look good and are page after page done very well. This of course includes the feelings the characters express, I simply love how they don't go overboard with those feelings but are more closer to reality and by that I mean they are a used bit more subtly than strongly expressed. Like always, it has to be taken into consideration that the series has been going on for over 200 chapters so there are a lot of improvements along the way.

Characters: I have to say that the characters of the series are the best part of it and understandably so. Everything basically revolves around the character personalities and their interactions (romance, drama). What makes the characters so good in this series is that they all are designed in such way that it's impossible to find basically anyone irritating, in other words I've found basically every character enjoyable in some way. Especially the main characters, Yuzuki Eba is a genuinely nice, positive girl and reading about her brings a lot of good feelings to the reader. Haruto Kirishima however isn't that positive, but he has a lot good qualities which I find very good and at the same time very respectable. What brings the most out of the characters (especially the main characters) is that there really is minimal amount of emotional anger/hate which is often related to judging other people. In that sense most of the characters seem emotionally very confident (I mean they are not negatively moved with small things) which in my opinion is very refreshing sight for such a manga. Basically everything comes to how strongly they express themselves: In Kimi No Iru Machi's case it's somewhat close to real people, where they express themselves sparingly, especially when it comes to anger and hate.

Story of this manga could be better. All the twists and cliffhangers in the chapters mostly rely on the readers feelings towards the characters and their relationships. That basically means that if there are no emotions towards the characters on readers part the twists won't have as big of an impact as they could. I believe that this doesn't concern most of the readers, but it was somewhat obvious to me since it's too rare of a treat for me to find genuinely enjoyable characters with good qualities in most of the series. This doesn't mean that the story is bad: it's actually the opposite as the whole story is so dependant on the characters that without them it would be basically meaningless, so I can't give too high score for the story, but the character part of the totality makes a lot up for it. It's really all about getting to know the characters and once you do the story manages to generate some powerful, depressing emotional scenes

Overall I could say that this manga is very suitable for people who 1) like romance 2) have a tendency to root for characters 3) like drama. In these three aspects this manga excels very well and that's how its meant to be. What I especially noticed (and was VERY pleasantly surprised) at the beginning of this manga that it doesn't go overboard with fanservice. Actually, there is very minimal amount of fanservice which actually enhances the effect of it when the author actually decides to use it.

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