Kentaro Yabuki

I read this originally when I was in high school and it was still being published in English for the first time. I'd seen trailers for the anime and it looked really cool so I started buying the manga. I liked it a lot back then. I've changed a lot since high school.

There are some neat things about the series. I would love a story about a lot of the female characters, who are simply far more endearing than the male ones. Eve, Saya in particular, Professor Tearju, Sephiria (now that would be cool), etc. Honestly, if it was a story about Saya befriending Sephiria, I'd probably love this. I like how the series brings up the idea of building of your endurance to handle weapons and muscle memory and how picking up a weapon isn't just like walking into an arcade. They're heavy, they have kickback, and you need to learn how to aim.

That's... that's actually all I can think of. Train is also sporadically truly funny.

Like most manga, the art drastically improves as the series progresses. Unfortunately that means that the first couple volumes don't look that great. Volume 1 is rather hard to get through. It's not as bad as "Yu Yu Hakusho", but it's also not great. It makes sense that Yabuki learned from the artist who made "Death Note", as there are a lot of stylistic parallels, although "Death Note" looks a lot better than this, and I hate the art style in "Death Note".

If you like stories about hidden male heroes with tragic backstories who are pretending to be nobodies in an attempt to atone or just live without hurting people, you will probably like this story. If you like "The Dresden Files", you will probably like this story. If Train and Sven were one person, they would probably resemble Harry Dresden. If you like bounty hunters and Westerns, you will probably like this story.

If you find stories that involve women as set dressing or backstory fuel, you will not like this story. There are some interesting women in the story. There are powerful women in the story. There are also not many of them, unless they are Eve they have relatively little screentime, seldom interact with each other, and they often get captured, tortured, used as mangst fuel and well... Sven. I try so hard to LIKE Sven because he's supposed to be a Good Guy but I'm really tired of the chivalry dudebro trope. It's not cute. It's not romantic. It's paternalistic and unimaginative. You want him to respect women as people? Fine. He can do that without marking "chivalrous" as a character trait on his resume.

Like most mangst-ridden male shounen heroes, Train has a fridged woman in his background and honestly, I would like this story a lot more if it was about HER. She seems to have had a fascinating life and an interesting personality and we get to see so little of it. Also the covers sexualize the frick out of the female cast, including the underage ones. It's INCREDIBLY creepy.

Train makes more sense after being more familiar with how trauma works, and if you look at him from the sense of "this is someone who's dealt with trauma all his love that's never been treated, and the most he's gotten help for is his brief fling with someone who was murdered and a small group of friends who are distant at the best of times. It's easier to watch in the anime, which is odd, because the anime is terrible, but it actually shows more of his personality development and it does a much better job of showing the character progression. It's still pretty silly but it's better.

I'm curious about this trend of "grizzled hero gets emotionless badass younger female sidekick and over time she learns how to be human". It CAN work. It's just feeling overused, although Eve's complete disrespect for Train amuses me. I love Eve. She's great. She truly shines on multiple occasions and she isn't going to be your princess. She'll save herself, you, and your village while she's at it.

It's just... not original enough for me. It's like "Rurouni Kenshin" in many ways but with more female characters, and that's about all that's improved. If it treated those characters WELL, that would honestly be enough. But it doesn't. The story largely doesn't excite me. The art isn't pretty (Yabuki needs to learn how to draw shirts on people with boobs). The spotlighted characters aren't interesting and their stories are frequently frustrating. I find the way that the Tao is handled silly and the one-off antagonists are well... one-off. Too much is contrived and it drags in the latter third of the series, and it's not that long of a series.

Honestly, if I wanted to read something with the same narrative aspects as this, I'd just read "Young Avengers" and "Loki: Agent of Asgard". Those do a lot of similar things and are better written, largely better drawn, and overall far more enjoyable and they handle redemption, self-worth, family, love, loss, the concept of fun, stories, and the use of power and corruption much better.… (mehr)