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Reviewed by Park Cooper I picked it up at the library under the much-preferred title “Psychic Busters,” but alas, my eyes were playing tricks on me. Nonetheless, I rather like it... I think. A kid, Kakeru, wishes he had an exciting life, but he doesn’t. Except uh-oh, suddenly he does, as a naked girl shows up in his living room (in wouldn’t-you-know-it the one week when his Dad is away AND his sisters have gone on vacation)! But she’s not really there—she’s psychically astrally projecting, using her psychic power, in the greatest plot device ever—we have to get this schlub involved in our psychic adventures because the kid who can see the future has foreseen that we need him around for some reason. There are, specifically: --A future-seeing boy --Astral-travelling take-over-someone’s-body-and-use-em-like-a-puppet girl --Healer boy who’s also pretty decent with the martial arts We soon get: --a Pyrokinetic boy (fire) Well, there’s the Farmers, who get ahold of psychic kids and make them more powerful with drugs (someone played the video game Galerians...), and then there’s whatever organization our hot teacher-friend spy person from school works for... but she loves us psychic kids more than she trusts her own organization... the villains, more psychic kids still working for the Farmers sent to bring our group back (cough cough Galerians cough), are also well-created and, if not always complex, certainly have presence. One problem here, oddly, is Kakeru. He’s supposed to be incredibly sane, with his feet fairly on the ground of reality, but he’s written, presumably unintentionally, like he has a personality split three ways… most of the time he’s a naïve middle-school schlub, very hapless (in volume one he shows a predilection for getting into his dad’s stash of schoolgirl-uniform porn, which I’m sure made the editor want to cry, what with America’s very different community standards, that they had to keep it in the story)... then sometimes in times of danger he becomes like a super-cool dude of action, and in volume 3 he’s starting to turn into a sweet, trusting, I-can-make-friends-even-with-our-psycho-enemies manga type, like a less-violent cross between Naruto and Sora and the kid from Dragon Drive… Add to all this that Kakeru also turns out to be a super-psychic himself, with powers so awesome that, as a built-in safety feature, he can’t even activate them through conscious effort (so far)... Uh, no. I liked that he was just a decent, normal kid coping with all this. Yuck. The other thing that gives me great pause is that the series seems to be losing its focus as we add to the supporting cast… Still, I’m not here (mostly) to talk about my fears for the future of this series, I’m here to tell you how volumes 1, 2, and 3 are, and, in general, they’re pretty okay if you’re not feeling too cynical. B+. Interested in writing for MangaLife? We're always looking for talented reviewers and columnists, so drop us a line! Charles Webb Editor-in-Chief, MangaLife.com |
1 September 2010
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