Volumes: 7/7 (Complete) Books: Out of Print, but not hard to find; eBooks: Available
Shoujo
Genre: Isekai, Fantasy/Scifi, Romance
Summary: Kaguya can’t remember anything before the age of 4, when she first appeared, bloody and dazed by the side of a road. Assumed to be an abandoned orphan, she was adopted and grew up in Japan. She lives a seemingly normal life, but she keeps having dreams of a raging fire and a kind, sad boy. One day that boy appears before her again, but this time as a doll/android. She finds herself in another world, and it is revealed she is the Princess of Prophecy. It is said she will choose the fate of nine different parallel world Earths, and only one Earth can survive. What will she do? What can she do?
Review: Re-reading this again many years after it originally came out is a strange experience. Back around early 2000’s there really wasn’t much manga available in English and Planet Ladder seemed really impressive in comparison. Now reading it again, over a decade later, the art really hasn’t aged well. After having read a thousand of volumes of manga later, it’s really obvious the artwork is really simple, a bit generic and has quite a lot of empty backgrounds, and people drawn either super close up or really small.
But the story remains a pretty good page turning read. It starts off fairly simple, but gets more complex as it goes. The first volume is definitely kind of rough, and basically an introduction anyway, so definitely read at least to volume 2.
The ending IMO, is pretty good overall and was decently satisfying, so I would recommend it, but I would have preferred a more epic climax and perhaps a bit more of an epilogue that detailed what happened to the rest of the worlds and etc. for some more closure. Also kind of interesting, but the genre is technically Scifi, but feels more like fantasy. The author did say she was going for a retro-style Scifi in the author’s notes.
Recommended: Overall, a good read and recommended for Shoujo readers who want a Fantasy/Scifi story with some romance and a fairly strong heroine.
Age Rating: PG: some mild fantasy violence
Publishing comments: I never noticed before but Tokyopop has quite a bunch of spelling mistakes, and some many minor and lazy editing mistakes. That being said, it is extra aggravating that the DMP releases are even lower in quality than TP.
Ebooks review: The DMP released ebooks are scans of the TP release, with only the covers titles redone. The actual inside pages are even worse than TP’s versions with weird inconsistent page size issues and the artwork is even more over leveled and low resolution. Plus you’d have thought they’d fix all the spelling/editing mistakes that Tokyopop made, but they’re all still there. Even the obvious “Dream” being misspelled as “Drama” in the beginning pages.
I do not recommend the ebooks. It would better to hunt down some used Tokyopop copies of this.
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