Hitomi Hoshino
likes to dabble with tarot cards but one day, her hobby somehow leads her to a
world called Gaea. She soon meets up with Van Fanel, prince of the kingdom of
Fanelia. However, no sooner does he return home than the forces of Zaibach
destroy his kingdom. Hitomi must choose between searching for a way home or
staying to save the world with her newfound powers. (from Goodreads)
This review contains spoilers
This book was so not what I was expecting.
Hitomi Hoshino is a fairly normal high school girl (I’d
like to say she’s 15 or 16, but I don’t really remember) who likes to predict
the future with tarot cards. She hangs around with her best friend (whose name
I’ve forgotten) and has a crush on cute upperclassman Amano.
Everything in Hitomi’s life is pretty normal until the
day she suddenly gets transported to the kingdom of Fanelia on a world called
Gaea, where she can see the Earth in the sky. The first people she meets in
this strange world are Van Fanel, the prince of Fanelia, and Balgus, Van’s
mentor. They tell Hitomi that she is the legendary Energist that is needed to
power up the also legendary God figure of Fanelia, Escaflowne.
Hitomi isn’t there for very long before the kingdom is
attacked by enemy forces and Prince Van has to pilot the Escaflowne, which ends
up being some sort of fighting robot/suit (something vaguely similar to a
GUNDAM) called a guymelef, to try and fight them off. Things go spectacularly
badly and Fanelia is destroyed, a large number of citizens – including Balgus –
are killed, and Van’s mother is kidnapped by Dilandau, one of the enemy
leaders.
Van and Hitomi escape with the Escaflowne to the nearby
kingdom of Asturia, where they come across Allen Schezar, a knight, and are
taken in as prisoners. Van manages to convince Allen that he is the prince of
Fanelia and, after seeing what’s left of the Fanelian kingdom, Allen agrees to
help them track down Dilandau.
--
Alright, so I imagine that anyone who has been an anime
fan for any length of time (and/or grew up in the late 90s) has at least heard
of the anime Vision of Escaflowne. I
certainly have and I pretty much love it. It’s a very good fantasy series with
a good plot and strong characters. I count it as one of my favourite anime
series; and that’s the main reason as to why I just hate this manga adaptation.
I haven’t read beyond the first volume, and I don’t plan
to, so I might be wrong here, but this manga has basically nothing to do with
the original anime beyond the characters’ names and the bare plot (and even
that’s fairly generic). To add to my frustration it takes really good characters
and plot and dumbs them down. Severely.
Hitomi Hoshino (Kanzaki in the anime, but that’s really
just nitpicking I suppose) is a girl who uses tarot cards to tell love fortunes
for fun. The manga makes it seem like it’s just a hobby she’s just picked up on
a whim, while in the anime she has a deeper connection with her ability to use
her tarot cards and to predict the future in general. In the anime Hitomi’s
psychic abilities are ultimately what get her tangled up with Van and Gaea;
while in the manga she’s summoned to Gaea by Van and Balgus to help power the
Escaflowne. Hitomi now has to be in the Escaflowne with Van in order to power
it, and this could’ve been an interesting new element were it not just a reason
to have Hitomi transform into a nude, blonde, large-breasted battle goddess
thing for every fight scene (on that note, Katsu Aki is also the mangaka for Futari Ecchi, and I really shouldn’t have
been surprised at the sudden naked woman).
While Hitomi is in this transformed state she’s either
possessed or changed into (I can’t remember which, though it still confused me
when I did remember) the goddess-thing that is part of the prophecy that told
Van and Balgus to get her to power the Escaflowne. So Hitomi isn’t even a
strong character in her own right in the manga, she’s just a vessel for someone
who is. That is a massive slap in the face to the original Hitomi from the
anime, who does a lot more than serve as a power source for the Escaflowne
(which she doesn’t do in the anime).
Van Fanel is the prince of Fanelia and his most prominent
trait in the manga is that he’s short, and he’s got a bit of a complex about
it. Imagine Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist, only not funny and with little to no
personality. In the anime he’s a bit of a brat and he’s starting to take on
responsibilities he may not yet be mature enough to handle. In the manga he’s
reduced to one unfunny short joke with a bad attitude and he’s not really
mature enough to handle much of anything. The impression I got from him was
that he was kind of like an annoying-younger-sibling-to-a-main-character
character; and not even an entertaining one.
We don’t see much of Dilandau in this volume, so I can’t
tell exactly how much has been changed with his character. Although he does
seem to be less insane in the manga; overall not leaving much of an impression.
His character design is also a lot different; the thing readers will
immediately notice about him is his now darker skin tone, which leads me to
suspect that Dilandau and Allen won’t have the same connection in the manga
that they do in the anime.
Another change is that Van’s mother is alive in the
manga. I’m not sure why as she certainly doesn’t add anything to the story
other than providing someone for Dilandau to kidnap (which he does). She
doesn’t seem to have much of a personality beyond being a stereotypical benign
queen type.
Allen wasn’t in this volume for long, but from what I saw
of him he’s more or less the same as his anime counterpart.
The story so far is, as I said earlier, more or less the
same as the anime. There are a few small changes here and there but the main points
are pretty much the same:
Hitomi gets transported to Gaea > she meets Van >
Dilandau and his soldiers attack Fanelia > Fanelia is destroyed > Hitomi
and Van escape in Escaflowne > they wind up in Asturia and are discovered by
Allen
The art in the manga is completely different than the art
in the anime. It’s not just that the manga is drawn in a different art style,
but the character designs are completely different as well. The only thing that
makes these characters recognizable to fans of the anime is their names (that,
and I suppose that Allen’s design hasn’t changed too much, he still has the
long blond hair).
Also, and I’m not quite sure if this has more to do with
the art than the story, this volume was very confusing to read. It seems like
everything happens really fast and we don’t get any explanations for most of
it. It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember the art not helping at
all with the confusion. The action scenes were cluttered and if they contained
more than one guymelef it was hard to figure out who was who because the
enemies all looked the same and the only different one was the Escaflowne
(piloted by Van and Hitomi).
I can’t recommend this manga to anyone who is a fan of
the original series or movie. If you aren’t a fan I’ve heard that it’s a good
series if you like fantasy and adventure stories, but even then I’d just
recommend the anime (or a different manga altogether).
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