Title: Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
Author: Death Note: Black Edition Volume VI
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 426
Rating 4/5
Well, the adventure has come to an end, and while there was a little bit of a bounce back up in quality here, it just wasn’t quite as good as the first couple of installments in the series. Still, it was good to see the denouement of the story and to have it all come to an end, and I have to admit that it was kind of satisfying, even though it turns out that I already knew how it was going to end from somewhere. I think I watched it in one of the Japanese movies back in the day.
For my first introduction to manga, I don’t have much to complain about here. The writing and the artwork were excellent throughout, even though the quality did start to dip here and there after a while. Kudos to the authors for resisting the temptation to keep on milking the story and dragging it out to make more money. They could have done that, and it would have ruined it.
Looking around online, it seems as though a lot of people were disappointed with the series after a major character death towards the middle, and I can totally see why. That doesn’t mean that it’s no longer worth reading, though. You just might want to take your time after the first half, instead of forcing yourself to finish it, which is what I did. That probably didn’t help, either.
But you have to hand it to the Death Note series: they came up with a fascinating concept and they executed it in such a way that they could keep on planning in as many twists and turns as they wanted to. It never felt as though the story was slowing down, even though there were bits of it where I wasn’t as engaged. Stuff was still happening, I just didn’t care too much.
And then we get to the end of this volume, where everything all kicks off and gets tied together. I’m not sure if it’d be less predictable if you hadn’t had any previous experience with the series, but really there was only one way it could have ended, and that’s what happened. I liked it though, because it worked. It also had just the tiniest bit of ambiguity– not enough for it to be annoying, but enough to make you think.
