Review: CORRECTOR YUI

 Remember when the internet was still so much of a novelty that you could create an entire series about a magical girl fighting evil on the internet?

CORRECTOR YUI (Korekuta Yui), based on a character created by Kia Asamiya with story and art by Keiko Okamoto.  First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 2002.

PLOT:

In the far-away year of 2020, the world is more connected than ever through computers.  One of the few people who isn't is Yui Kasuga, a schoolgirl and wanna-be mangaka who cannot seem to comprehend the first thing about computers.  Yet it is she who is chosen by Ir, one of eight sentient guardian programs to be their champion.  They were sent out by their creator to stop Grosser, a supercomputer who has gone rogue and seeks to take over the world.  It's up to Yui to become a digital magical girl to stop Grosser's minions, find the other guardian programs, and save both the real and virtual world!

STORY:

Corrector Yui is very much a magical girl story of its time, for better or worse.  It was created at a time when the internet was still novel, virtual reality was one of the big buzzwords of the time, and you could just shamelessly copy Sailor Moon wherever possible and call it a day.

If only Yui were half as interesting as Usagi.  She's a nice enough teen, but the one interesting thing she has going for her (her interest in making manga) is dropped almost instantly.  All that leaves her with is her inability to understand computers and her crush on an extremely bland college-aged boy named Shin.  One of those becomes a tedious joke with repetition; the other is both boring and discomfiting due to the age gap.

I realize that a lot of 1990s magical girl series took their cues from Sailor Moon, but it's almost shameless how much Corrector Yui apes its story formula without capturing any of the charm.  Ir is clearly meant to be an analogue to Luna, with his animal-like design and tendency to lecture.  The battles are pure monster-of-the-week fodder, based around a single theme that usually ties to a head-smackingly obvious moral.  Said monsters are usually possessed or controlled by the villain's four cackling minions, while the main villain hides away.  It's so blatant that I'm shocked that Okamoto didn't have Yui cry out "In the name of the internet, I will punish you!" every chapter.  The one mildly original idea here is that Yui gains new powers by absorbing the guardians as she finds them, even if Pretear would employ a similar idea in a better fashion just a few years afterward.  

ART:

Okamoto's art is cute and crisply rendered, but there's little to be found here to distinguish it from its many contemporaries.  Her character designs are precisely what you would expect from a late 90s shojo manga - saucer eyes, slightly bobbleheaded, with plenty of cute femme fashion styles.  She doesn't bother much with detail or screentones, a choice that certain keeps the pages and panels fairly tidy but also means that there's nothing particularly fanciful or flashy about Yui's magical girl battles.

The only thing that's a bigger let-down is the cover art.  Either Tokyopop received no promo art to use from the licensor or they were just lazier than usual, because it's literally just images copied from specific panels or splash pages that have been digitally colored.

RATING:

When it comes to internet-based superheroes of the late 1990s, the superior choice is obvious and it's not Corrector Yui.  It barely does anything with its digital premise, and it apes Sailor Moon so blatantly and regularly that you'd be better off just re-reading that series instead.

This series was published by Tokyopop.  This manga is complete in Japan with 5 volumes available.  All 5 volumes were released and are currently out of print.