Review: SEVEN OF SEVEN

There are certain people in Japanese media who are just as adept with anime as they are with manga.

Today's review is not an example of that.

SEVEN OF SEVEN (Shichinin no Nana), written by Yasuhiro Imagawa with art by Azusa Kunihiro.  First published in 2001 and first published in North America in 2003.

PLOT:

Nana Suzuki is a shy teenage girl who wants nothing more than to be with her crush Yuichi.  She wants this so much that she makes a wish for it at night on a weird crystal she got from her father.  Little does she know that this crystal is indeed magic and it splits her into seven different versions of Nana with seven different personalities.  Now it's up to the original Nana to keep her splinter selves in line before they ruin her grades, her crush, and her life.

STORY:

There are some things that Yasuhiro Imagawa is very good at.  He's great at directing high melodrama, and bombastic action.  He's a great storyboard artist.  He's good with mecha and retro properties.  Something he's not so great at is writing, and that goes double for stories about girls.  That makes it all the more baffling that he chose to write something so light-hearted and girly, and doubly so that it turned out so boring.

The big problem with this premise is that Nana doesn't seem to have much of a personality to begin with.  You have to wonder how deeply she was hiding all of these different facets of herself to be so invisible before.  But now she's stuck with a half-dozen clones of herself with one-track gag personas: Sassy, Grumpy, Weepy, Brainy, Sexy, and Ditzy.  The only thing that they share beyond Nana's appearance is that they are all deeply annoying.

You can tell Imagawa was already running out of steam after a few chapters.  That's around the point where Nana stops trying to hide her many selves and the plot proceeds to run through the usual array of seasonal and generic high school plots.  There's a Christmas story, a New Year's story, a hot springs story, and all of them are as forced as they are unfunny.  It doesn't help that they all revolve around Yuichi, a boy with all the charisma of wet cardboard.  Somehow this personification of beige not only has seven version of Nana chasing after him, but also a trio of mean girls.  It's still not enough to save this story.  I can only hope that the anime Imagawa eventually produced out of this idea was better - it certainly couldn't be worse.

ART:

Where Imagawa has many credits to his name, this is apparently the only manga Azusa Kunihiro ever worked on and it's easy to see why.  The character are exceedingly bland, with cutesy round heads, short stocky bodies, and big simple faces.  The only thing he seems to commit to is the fanservice.  There are panty shot galore in this volume and the quality of the art goes up the more than the panels shift down.

RATING:

There was no need for one Nana, much less seven, and definitely no need for Seven of Seven.  It's a lame plot that swiftly becomes nothing but a vehicle for cliches and panty shots.  It was a waste of time for the creative team and it would be a waste of time to hunt this release down.

This manga was published by ADV Manga.  This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes.  3 volumes were released and are currently out of print.