魔法騎士レイアース 新装版 1

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.