Review: ARATA THE LEGEND

 A new year means it's time for another round of Dealer's Choice, where the only theme unifying the reviews is their refusal to fit into most of my usual themes and my desire to talk about them anyway.  We're starting off with yet another Yuu Watase title, but this one is a little different from the rest.

ARATA THE LEGEND (Arata Kanagatari), by Yuu Watase.  First published in 2008 and first published in North America in 2010.

PLOT:

Arata Hinohara is a miserable teen who is bullied and shunned by his classmates.  Arata Hime is a restless young man forced to conceal his true gender in order to take over his family's traditional role as a magical protector of the land.  Things go badly for this Arata right away, as the princess he's tasked with protecting is brutally murdered by one of her twelve generals.  Arata is framed for the crime and tries to flee, only to stumble through a tear in time and space so he can switch places with Hinohara.  While Arata Hime adjusts to modern Japan, Hinohara is stuck in a strange world as a fugitive for a crime he did not commit with only a serving girl to guide him and a mystical weapon said to possess the power of a god.  It seems that the only way Hinohara can get home is to survive long enough to clear his counterpart's name and save the kingdom.

STORY:

Oh man, Watase's really stretching themself here.  This time they made a manga about a BOY transported to another world!

All joking aside, while Watase might be drawing inspiration from a very familiar well of inspiration there are a lot of differences to be found here beyond the fact that it's a shonen manga instead of a shojo.

They do their best to established the Aratas as characters and their respective dilemmas before the switch, although most of those pages are dedicated to Arata Hima.  Arata is your standard shonen hero: loud, careless, klutzy in the sort of way that can lead to a bit of fanservice, and oblivious to the servant girl/Childhood Best Friend(tm) Kotona who adores him.  Hinohara has a lot more going on internally, although it's unclear at this point why he's being bullied.  He's a good-looking dude and a talented athlete, but because one dude decided to make it his life's work to harass him Hinohara has a lot of pent-up anger and a keen sense of justice.  It's a lucky thing for him that he hid in the alleyway with the dimensional portal instead of just a dumpster!

After the switch, the situation is reversed.  Arata basically disappears from the story save for the odd moment of fish-out-of-water comedy, while Hinohara takes over as the lead (even if everyone in this new world perceives him to look like their Arata).  This allows him to put his hero complex and slow-burning rage to good use, and conveniently he's the only person who can properly wield Arata's magical MacGuffin weapon.  I do hope that Watase gets around to developing the supporting cast in later volumes, as thus far they're pretty one-note.  It's really bad with the villainous Kannagi in particular, who is pretty much just a caricature of evil.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how well Yu Watase takes to shonen.  You'd expect them to struggle a little after making shojo manga for over two decades, but from what I can see here they've taken to it like a duck to water.  That being said, Arata the Legend is only a serviceable shonen fantasy.  There's a lot more energy and anger present here than in Watase's various takes on Fushigi Yugi, but it's going to take some time for them to flesh out the rest of this cast and bring the story to a point where it can achieve its full potential.

ART:

The artstyle here is very much in line with Watase's other works from the 2000s such as Alice 19th.  The cast share some surface similarities with previous characters from previous works, they do put more effort than usual into the details of the costumes, weaponry, and backgrounds of the alternate world.  In comparison, the "real" world is more lightly sketched.  Their panels tend to be small, but the pages are composed in a quite orderly fashion.

RATING:

As much as I might rib Arata the Legend for riffing on some familiar ideas, it's off to a decent start here.  Yu Watase's art continues to improve with each new series they make and the two leads contrast  quite well.  If they can put some work into building up the story and the rest of the cast, it could turn into something great.

This manga was published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 24 volumes available.  All 24 were released and are currently in print.