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(4.08/5)Classic Fantasy
Wow, I really enjoyed this! I didn't have much exposure to CLAMP or their works before starting this with a book club, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. What I got was a fun, beautifully-drawn tale of three girls carried off to another world, summoned as mythical warriors in order to defeat evil and bring peace back to the land. The premise is a classic one, and I'm happy to say that, at least for me, the characters' colorful personalities and the classic shoujo art style merge together great with the story, leading to a fun, adventurous read.
The girls have a great dynamic with each other, and the side characters, though they might only (so far) be around for a chapter or so, have great chemistry with the girls and a lot of personality in general. The art is really expressive with this, which helps a bunch as well.
This is a pretty easy manga to read; the most difficulty a reader will likely bump into is the series' fondness for made-up fantasy vocab, often combining kanji for a particular meaning and assigning unrelated katakana for pronunciation.
I ostensibly bought this for the Learnnatively book club, but because I have zero impulse control I tore through it anyway, and I have to say I'm glad I did. The only thing I really knew about Rayearth is that there's a very expensive Sega Saturn game based on it, and now that I've read and enjoyed this first volume, I think I need that video game (thankfully Japanese copies are much cheaper).
I'm not sure how early or late in the development of the Magical Girl or Isekai Genres this is, but I did find it refreshing that there are quite a few spins on the typical Isekai formula and in some ways it feels more like a classical Superhero origin even if the plotline is deliberately structuring itself like a JRPG game. I liked that instead of one individual getting whisked to another universe through a random, usually fatal encounter, it's actually a group and they seem to have been specifically selected. That core question of "why these three?" isn't answered in this first volume, but it's a fun question to chew on. I feel like it's got something to do with their names maybe, each of the main trio is named after one of the elements, Hikaru (light), Fuu (wind), and Umi (sea). Have these three been destined the whole time? Were they the best people available at the moment? It's fun to speculate.
The core trio is very fun and the personalities play off each other well. Hikaru is perhaps a bit dense, but she's eager to help, Fuu is logical and caring, but sometimes too logical and can kill the mood, and Umi is sort of the audience stand-in who's just weirded out by everything going on and plays the straight-man to the other two. The side characters all have entertaining quirks and there's a great streak of (occasionally dark) comedy, but you still take the kingdom-folk seriously as capable members of this other society. The artwork is also excellent with fantistic layouts, composition, and action and even scenes where the characters are just standing around discussing things are visually interesting. The character and monster designs are also fantastic and the faces are wonderfully expressive.
In terms of language level, this felt just right for me and I was able to jump in easily, but there were still some good challenges to throw my brain at. It's maybe a bit more advanced than Super Mario-Kun but it also doesn't rely on nearly as many puns and wordplays so perhaps it evens out. The series does an interesting thing where fantasy words are made out of Kanji rather than katakana, which is quite unique. You can generally grok the meaning of these words based on the kanji used, but the pronunciations given in furigana are way off from how you'd expect the kanji to be pronounced, apparently since that's the pronunciation in the fantasy world's language rather than Japanese. It threw me off a bit, but it's interesting and fun. The trickiest bit for me was probably the scene where the girls visit the Kingdom's armorer, who likes to troll the trio by speaking very circuitously and dancing around the point she's trying to make, but when I slowed down and really pored over it, I got the gag and it was more of a "fun puzzle" than an annoying frustration. Language nerds will also likely have fun with a scene near the end where the characters discuss what honorifics they want to use with each other and if it's okay to call each other on a first-name basis, which is a very Japanese conversation to have and I'd be interested in seeing how they translate this in the English versions.
Overall, I really enjoyed this first volume, I'm invested in the story, the world, and the characters, and I love the artwork. This is the origin story volume so they don't make a ton of progress on their journey, but I like the setup and where it seems like things are going so hopefully the rest of it has a good payoff.
Not CLAMP's best work, but easy Fantasy
I was very underwhelmed by this, compared to the other CLAMP works I'm familiar with (Tsubasa and xxxHolic manga/anime, and CCS anime). While the main trio are enjoyable enough, the side characters are pretty terrible. I find it hard to believe that they're this bad at communication and preparation, when this isn't their first rodeo with the whole magic knights thing, nor with their rivals. All of the side character interactions take like 2-3x as long as they should b/c the side characters either can't get to the point, are bickering with the girls, or the girls have randomly gone off on some tangent. Whatever humor is provided by the interruptions is detracted from by their frequency. Unlike other CLAMP stories I've gone through, where things are long-winded and abstract, but have some depth, things just felt very shallow in this story, in general.
Anyway it wasn't all bad. Like I said, the trio themselves are (mostly) enjoyable (I find Hikaru the most relatable/exciting). The battles are enjoyable enough, the artwork is gorgeous as ever, and when they're just journeying on their own, it's perfectly fine. As another review mentioned, the fantasy vocab here is given with a katakana reading (what the characters are saying) above the kanji (semantic meaning) - which is great, and it's definitely worth paying attention to. I'm glad that by the end of the volume it's finally(?) getting out of the setup phase.
Anyway, given its level I think this is a good early fantasy manga (particularly if you like 90s 少女), even though I didn't find it particularly interesting. I'll give the next one a chance tho.
Update: having finished all 3 volumes, while I can't say I didn't somewhat enjoy myself, I'd really only recommend this series to: 1. People who really love light shoujo, with little romance. 2. People looking for an easy fantasy read. 3. People really interested in seeing what CLAMP's early works were like.