Justin: Childhood friends Kaguya and Himawari just so happen to be on a bus with their classmates as part of a field trip when suddenly, a monster appears! The bus is knocked off a cliff! When they each awake they happen to become embroiled in two different factions: The secret society Millennium, who the world at-large believes is evil, and Chaos Six, who secretly might be pushing the world to its destruction! A large game involving powerful figures surrounds each group, but these two girls — these childhood friends — are now on opposing sides and will determine the future of this world.
And it will be done in the most insufferably boring way possible.
Divine Raiment Magical Girl Howling Moon is a manga written by Kenji Saito (Trinity Seven) and drawn by Shouji Sato (High School of the Dead, Triage X). Immediately, you can expect massively endowed ladies (around 13-16 years old and a few adults) drawn in ridiculous angles and something entirely nonsensical to happen going into it. But these creators are taking the magical girl angle (so girls transform, power of love, all of that) and adding their own spin to it! If nothing else it’ll at least be entertainingly dumb right?
Not in the slightest. Aside from the general tits and butts that appear in this volume, the manga continuously shoots itself in the foot by not making it clear what type of magical girl story it really wants to tell. Is it aiming to be a serious magical girl tale (no)? Or is it trying (and failing massively) to poke some fun with the concept? You have these transformations that take decades on the page to display; you have the one character (Himawari) transform to such a degree that’s super genki and makes it feel totally at odds with what’s going on within each page; and you have the girls, after all is said and done, randomly go back to school somehow?
Because of this, you manage to get over 140 pages where lots of things can go down and not find anything remotely fun or entertaining. There are a lot of characters thrown into this volume that are hard to care about. The general story doesn’t evolve into anything that makes even hilarious sense. All I know is somehow we have a moment in this manga where there was a fight in a different dimension that turned into a bath scene that also got the main character’s boobs groped…I would say this is on par for the course, but it’s done in such a sleazy way that it seems hard to believe that got past approvals.
Soooo what makes this worth reading? Well, not much aside from the art. And I feel the art was way better in High School of the Dead (and made more sense). With so much inconsistency and just it being unmemorable (without, you know, counting these middle schoolers transforming and getting over-sexualized), Divine Raiment Magical Girl Howling Moon is just way too boring a read.
Justin’s rating: 2 out of 5
Helen: In a middle school field trip gone wrong, Kaguya finds herself captured by mysterious forces who say they are trying to protect and save the Earth, but Kaguya only knows them as terrorists! Behind the scenes, Earth has turned into a battlefield between two alien forces and the side Kaguya has found herself on is the side that truly wants to save the planet, but the other side has twisted the narrative so the general public thinks the opposite. To make matters worse, Kaguya’s friend Himawari was also captured but by the other side and now both of them have sworn to become magical girls to fight for the other’s sake, even though it might end up killing them both in the process.
Some anime and manga fans are probably tired of hearing this but the dark magical girl sub-genre isn’t actually very new, no matter what marketing material for the latest edgy series you might read says otherwise. Series like Uta Kata came out years before Madoka Magica really popularized the sub-genre and even before that many magical girl series, just like children’s novels from the 1900s through post-WWII, often had a dark, unsettling undertone to them as well as serious stakes. Likewise, having magical girls age up as a part of their transformation sequence is also a classic magical girl trope; it doesn’t see as much usage these days (or when it does it’s often fairly subtle, like the main trio in Hugtto Precure) but it’s also a classic part of the magical girl repertoire. However, having Kaguya and Himawari transform from their middle-school aged selves into bodies with figures that could not be achieved without plastic surgery just feels like an icky, bad-faith take on the trope.
Rather than calling this series “edgy” I’d rather call it “skeezy” and I’m not sure that’s the precise tone the creators were going for (although they have also created Trinity Seven, High School of the Dead, and Triage X). Having magical girl series where there are characters on both sides isn’t new. I can even think of at least a couple where it turns out that the main character has been on the “wrong” side all along (saying which would be major spoilers) so I can’t say that that aspect of Divine Raiment Magical Girl Howling Moon is new either. Rather, it feels like the creators went down a list of tropes you would find in an “edgy” series and tossed them all in; we’ve got “over-sexualization of minors,” “characters who would do the wrong thing to save the other,” “manipulative shadow agencies,” and even “aliens without morality pulling the strings!”
It’s the reveal that the aliens fighting it out for Earth’s fate are doing it on a whim, or rather that one said “instead of destroying the Earth outright let’s have a game” that was the last straw for me (although the “plastic surgery titties” were already pushing me pretty close). It just feels so try-hard, like the creators can’t otherwise trust their own writing and characters to engage the reader and instead they have to keep upping the stakes instead. I don’t know if it feels more lazy or just bad but I do know that I won’t be sticking around for more.
Helen’s rating: 1.5 out of 5