#I remember speeding through the game before that. ignoring every sidequest and shit

[rosenfey]

🌷💀 I was gonna replay the game from the beginning but the urge to just reload the save before meeting emmrich and going from there is too strong 💀🌷

[pengiesama]

Tales of Zestiria: A Time of Guidance, Volume 1 - REVIEW

SO, I got the Zestiria manga like 4 days early. Why? Clearly it is the universe rewarding me for writing lots of fic where Sorey and Mikleo do butt stuff. in reality i don’t really know why but i’m gonna review it 

so sit down

here's a picture of it on a cat

and here we go with a review

ART QUALITY

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. Anyone who's seen the manga's art before knows how beautiful Shiramine's work is. The linework is crisp and detailed, and her style works beautifully with the game's character, costume, and setting design. My main compliant is that the pages are so damn small that a lot of the detail in her art gets lost. Open letter to Seven Seas: print it out on those bigass picture books with the puffy plastic-like pages that like, kindergarten books have, and make it like Pat The Bunny so I can touch Mikleo's hair at my leisure, and there's a page at the end that I can lick and it tastes like Kool-Aid.

STORY QUALITY

HOLY SHIT, THINGS ESCALATE QUICKLY. The manga moves at a breakneck pace, covering hours' worth of game story within the space of a single chapter. We speed from the Mabinogio Ruins to Elysia to Ladylake to Sorey becoming the Shepherd in under two very short chapters, with very little in the way of downtime. With only four volumes to work with, it's certainly the only way they would be able to get through the plot on-schedule. Unfortunately, it cuts a lot of quiet character moments and doesn't leave a lot of breathing room to process big events. Bearing in mind that this is still just the first volume, I'm willing to withhold final judgement for when they've got all the exposition out of the way and have more time to dedicate to weaving a rich tapestry and so on instead of slopping plot factoids on you like spackle on a wall.

Some things I wanted to comment on:

Mikleo's increasing frustration at Sorey's refusal to let him help/form a pact/become meguca is shown a lot more and given considerably more weight, at least partially because it's dragged out a lot longer. The first volume concludes on Rayfalke, and they still haven't pacted -- Sorey is still stubbornly trying to force Mikleo to stay out of the fighting. While the game's handling of this drama is also good, I find myself really enjoying the manga's take on it.

Everyone's favorite trainwreck of a Shepherd gets a first-volume cameo! Bartlow mentions offhand that a cult of revolutionaries sprang up around him twenty years ago. Isn't that just swell. Those bougie fucks had it coming, Michael.

Uno, of all NPCs, gets a lot more screentime. In the game he kinda just eats a bridge and then sits in the church, taking all the garbage you give to him to get that Dank Grade. Here he like...gets loving closeups and gives mentor advice to Mikleo. I am fairly sure Shiramine has a crush.

Despite being close friends with Edna, Lailah has not only never met Eizen, but also did not know he became a dragon. You would think this brings an end to my headcanon that she did bodyshots off his nipples at a party at Katz Korner a couple hundred years back, but you'd think wrong.

Thank the fucking lord, the manga is nowhere near as interested in fawning over Alisha at the expense of every other character and the integrity of the plot as the anime was. She's back in the supporting NPC role she was intended to be and the story is far stronger for it. On that note, the blindness subplot with Sorey is included and gets a lot more buildup than in-game -- a common complaint was that Sorey's growing blindness was handled too subtly in-game, making the conclusion of that subplot seem like it came out of nowhere, so I would call this an improvement.

Also included are certain little Hyland factoids that the anime ignored in favor of sucking up to Alisha more. i.e., that 1) Hyland is a monarchy in name only; the royal family has little say in government, and 2) even if it did, Alisha is so low on the pecking order that no one gives a shit about her, hence why she is permitted to wander around. But what's it matter constructing a unique take on the standard video game monarchy anyway? /sarcasm

LOCALIZATION QUALITY / CONSISTENCY WITH GAME LOCALIZATION

As I am sure most of you are painfully aware, many adaptations of existing works that get translated are not usually given much scrutiny when it comes to keeping consistency with the localization terms used in the original work. So, you then get weird shit like character names being romanized in a completely different way, direct translations of terms that were given different treatment in-game (hi, Funimation! Remember when you ignored the game and decided to call the Celestial Record the "Compendium of the Heavenly Tribe" or whatever the fuck for the first few episodes of the anime? BECAUSE THAT PARSES SO WELL.), and so on.

In this translation, there's thankfully quite a lot of consistency with the terms and conventions used in the English translation of the game, and it comes across as a much more professional and carefully-put-together product for it. It seems minor in comparison to the bigger review points, but it shows that Seven Seas really cares about putting out a good quality product. I noticed a few really minor slips ("Round Table Palace" instead of "Roundtabel Palace", "Holy Lailah" instead of "Lailah the Pure" as Lailah's true name), but it's probably the cleanest adaptation I've seen in a while.

PUBLISHING QUALITY

This is a weird metric for me to be concerned about, but I'm still salty about how terribly TokyoPop treated the releases of Twelve Kingdoms novels -- toward the end of that abusive affair, the quality control was so far down the tubes that the product was literally falling apart, printed backwards, with missing chapters, and on paper so cheap that it ripped at the slightest provocation.

...but Seven Seas is not TokyoPop circa the late 2000s! And thank god for that. The book's got nice, crisp printing quality -- even though the art is too small for my liking, as I outlined above, the print job is clean enough that you can still clearly see everything, even in action scenes. The font choices are easy-to-read, and everything's nicely aligned in the speech bubbles so your eyes don't start involuntarily crossing. It's a quality job and should be recognized, so here I am, recognizing it.

FINAL VERDICT

As it is now, it's still not a replacement for playing the game. However, if you're not a gamer and aren't interested in watching a Let's Play (cough cough, here's a full no-commentary playthrough, including all sidequests and skits), at this point I'm optimistic for its future. It's definitely a step up from the godawful dumpster fire that was the anime. In fact, I'm a little mad at myself for even mentioning that garbage in the same sentence as this manga. I must perform appropriate repentance. I will construct a lovingly-detailed piece in the gouache method, of Sorey arising naked from the seafoam, riding a clam, his modesty preserved by tiny floating Mikleos bearing silk sashes.

Volume 2 comes out on September 5, 2017, which is the day after my birthday! And I'm pretty sure the water armatus is gonna be in that volume, which I consider a sign that it is meant for me as a birthday offering. I accept it in advance, happily, and will pay many dollars for it. Twelve dollars and 99 cents, to be exact. Plus tax.

VERDICT: YOU DO THIS. YOU BUY IT. MIKLEO'S NUMINOUS BEAUTY CALLS TO YOU AS A SIREN WOULD. TWELVE DOLLARS AND 99 CENTS PLUS YOUR STATE'S SALES TAX