I thought I was just getting another magic school variant with title. Instead I ended up with one of the ripest, most ridiculous pieces of garbage I've reviewed on this site in a good long while.
PSYCHIC ACADEMY (Saikikku Akademi Ora Bansho), by Katsu Aki. First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 2004.
PLOT:
Years ago, Ai Shiomi's older brother Aura saved the world with his incredible aura elemental powers. In the years since, the Psychic Academy was formed to train other children with aura powers. Ai is getting transferred there, although he maintains that he couldn't possibly be worthy of such a place. The only bright spot is a chance for him to see his childhood friend Orina once again.
It turns out that Ai is more powerful than he thought. This gains him an ally in the form of the gruff bunny-like creature Buu, but also serves to antagonize the fire-wielding top student/resident tsundere Mew. He's going to need that power when his protective older brother/former Savior of the World becomes his homeroom teacher and a rivalry begins between Orina and Mew.
STORY:
I knew I was in trouble with Psychic Academy from the start when the first page delivered the text equivalent of the Star Wars prologue crawl. Normally this sort of thing isn't necessary because it's expected that the mangaka will deliver this information through such daring techniques as "naturalistic dialogue" and "context clues." Aki instead chooses the path of redundancy, laying out the same information that the reader would get not just from the story but also the back-cover blurb just in case the world's dumbest mouth-breather misses the nuances of the plot.
Oh what a plot it is! Mostly it's yet another magic school harem series, but this time it's taking its cues from Love Hina instead of a light novel. That means that the titular Psychic Academy is basically the same as a Japanese high school and that most of the plot revolves around your typical harem hijincks. It doesn't take long for Aki to position Ai in a romantic rivalry between Orina and Mew, complete with all the angry misunderstandings and accidental boob gropings you would expect from such an arrangement. Aki's only real twist is to make the girls roommates, which mostly serves to add additional fanservice moments while the two girls privately obsess over him. It's not like the two have any character to speak of beyond their designated character types.
As for Ai himself, he's a sad-sack who never misses an opportunity to grumble about how he has no powers and everyone is going to hate him because he's not like his older brother. It's clearly meant to make him sympathetic, but he does so often that it becomes irritating even before it turns out that he is secretly the Special with the most powerful aura powers of them all. True to form, everything ends up revolving around him. All the girls are interested in him to some degree, he gets a special magical mascot character to boost him up and spell things out for him, and his extremely chuuni older brother is little more than a plot device there to keep this very lousy, predictable plot going.
ART:
I wasn't particularly impressed with Aki's art when I reviewed his take on Escaflowne, and the five years between that manga and this one hasn't done much to improve it. It's still aggressively dated, although his linework is a little more delicate and varied here. This is especially true of the character designs, with their massive eyes, cheekbone hatchmarks, and the fact that their massive, floppy hairstyles so often cram their features as far down their face as possible. That's not even getting into the outright derivative ones, such as the gym teacher who is clearly a knock-off of Naruto's Rock Lee.
Then there's the costume designs! I barely know where to begin between the school uniforms for the girls (which somehow manage to be skimpy, blousy, and bizarrely strapped down all at once), Aura's get-up (which also involves a bunch of straps, a tie, and random bits of armor including a metal codpiece), and Mew's battle suit (which looks like she's trying to cosplay as Legato Bluesummers while covering her top in nipples). It's all so hideously busy, clearly designed more to show off the curves of the girls than anything else.
I will say that he's improved somewhat when it comes to action. He's made good use not just of splash pages for impact, but also strong poses and smart use of vaguely magical beams and bursts that emphasize the strength of their attacks without obscuring them. He also makes good use of screentones, in that they're mostly used for texture on the outfits and only selectively for backgrounds. It's not enough to save the art from its other failings (like how similar all the faces look or how he draws boobs like bags of sand), but it's something.
PRESENTATION:
I have to ask: how the hell did someone like Jan Scott Frazier end up translating this piece of shit?! Frazier was something of a legend by this point, as one of the few Americans to actually work on anime in Japan during the 1990s. This is only one of two titles she translated for Tokyopop, but it's hard to assess how much of this text is her work and how much of it is from Nathan Johnson's adaptation of said translation. Therefore I don't know who is to blame for the barely translated, overly long nonsense "aura" titles that the students take on or why Ai's little bunny companion talks like an old-timey prospector.
This series (at least, its first two volumes) were also packaged with DVDs of the Psychic Academy ONA. You can only imagine how good it is, considering not just the quality of the manga itself but the fact that it was one of the first ONAs ever, made by a dying studio who were previously responsible for Slayers, Lost Universe, and that terrible Genma Wars anime I reviewed a while back.
RATING:
This series was published by Tokyopop. This series is complete in Japan with 5 volumes available. All 5 volumes were released and are currently out of print.
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