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Reviewed by Park Cooper It's labelled "action/comedy," but let's face it, FMP:Overload is pretty darn comedy, a lot less action. My wife and I liked Full Metal Panic, liked Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu even more, but I've never thought that the manga of FMP was that great. Well, now, just as Fumoffu was the comedy version of FMP, Overload is the comedy version of the manga set. Set in the days after Sosuke started guarding Miss Chidori, but before she ever found out WHY he seemed so obsessed with doing so, FMP:O uses what I'm going to call "chibi-primitif" as its artstyle... basically a cross between manga art, chibi art, South Park, and a 10-year-old's drawings on the fridge. Yeah. That's part of why I can only give this volume a B+. And if I was reviewing the entire series of Overload, and not just volume 3, the score would be lower, like a B- or C+, I think. Volume 3 really pulls up the curve. But man, most of volume 3... ENOUGH of it... is FUNNY. I laughed out loud, and I mean LOUD, almost side-splitting, just reading this thing. As soon as I was done, I did a dramatic reading of the best stories to Barbara, and she loved it too. First, a little background: Miss Chidori is a high school student. She is, for a very good reason she knows nothing about yet, vitally important to national security. And so, an agent is assigned to guard her, 21-Jump-Street/Fight-Back-To-School style: Sgt. Sosuke Sagara, raised to be a soldier from childhood in some vaguely-Afghanistan-like country, who's risked death way, way, way too many times to count on the battlefields of the world, and is now a good-hearted 16-year-old without a clue about how civilian life works. Sosuke loves guns and explosives and treats everything-- EVERYTHING-- like it's a life-or-death military mission. EVERYTHING. Frankly, his superiors have sent him to school with Miss Chidori half to guard her, and half in an attempt to civilize the boy before he gets himself killed-- he's already been a veteran of brutal warfare for over a decade. How can this be funny? Sounds kind of grim? Well the best story, in my opinion, the one that stayed with me the best: Their homeroom teacher has sort of lost her confidence for teaching-- Sagara will shoot warning shots (live rounds!) at anyone who comes running up to Miss Chidori suddenly. And he can't get expelled-- for some reason, the government insists that he goes to school at this school, in this classroom. How can you have a normal class under these conditions? And since you can't, well, the other students have sort of turned into slackers lately. Sasuke's solution: Turn the class into well-disciplined students like you'd find at West Point or any hardcore military boarding school. He's in a tree outside, warning them against disrespectful behavior over earpiece communicators and backing up his commands with a sniper rifle (only warning shots of course). When he decides that's not enough motivation, he arms the motion-sensitive explosives he's placed under each desk-- THAT'll keep 'em in their seats, he figures. Sigh. Good times, good times. Volumes 2, 4, and 5 have so far fallen short in my eyes compared to this volume, but volume 3 lets the paramilitary good times roll. Comment on this review of Full Metal Panic: Overload v3 on the Manga Life Forums. |
14 May 2008
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