World Famous Comics: Battle Vixens, Vol. 9 (Battle Vixens)
Battle Vixens, Vol. 9 (Battle Vixens)
By: Yuji Shiozaki Publisher: TokyoPop Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: TokyoPop Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 168 Publication Date: September 13, 2006 Release Date: September 05, 2006
Great series, crappy translation This is a great ecchi series, featuring lots of hot women fighting nearly naked. I love it! Need I say more? The plot ranges from ok to good, but is rather confusing because
(1) Yuji Shiozaki (the mangaka) has a very limited repitore of character designs--the only way to distinguish a lot of the female characters is by what they're wearing or their hair-style, since almost all the women have identical faces. (The same goes for men, to a lesser extent.) Also, because there's no color in manga obviously, you can't even use stuff like hair or eye color to tell them apart. Seriously, if you read his other manga (like Battle club), a lot of the women look like clones from this series.
(2) All the characters and schools have very forgetable names. After reading 9 volumes, I can only remember a couple of the names in fact. This manga is supposedly based off of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but they screwed up all their names by taking the Japanese pronunciation of the kanji rather than the Chinese one (which are also their well known English names), so that Cao Cao becomes Sou Sou, Guan Yu becomes Kanu, Liu Bei becomes Rubi, and Sun Ce becomes Hakafu. The translation also does absolutely nothing to clear up this misunderstanding--the original Japanese readers would have easily understood the name-switch, whereas English readers are puzzled. Even in the character's historical biographies (which are included as extras in the manga), the translators insist on using these incorrect names, and refuse to even mention their correct names.
Seriously, talk to most English people who read this manga, and they will have no idea what is going on.
Unfortunately Michael Leib's "translation" or "adpatation" seriously sucks. He seems to believe that he has to insert the stupidest jokes in every text-bubble. Throughout all the hardcore action scenes and emotional death-scenes Tokyopop's translation is cracking lame jokes! Seriously, you'll enjoy the manga more if you DON'T read a lot of the text-bubbles. Furthermore, a lot of the non-joke text is poorly phrased and down-right insulting to the English language.
I give the "translation" a -5 out of 5 stars. I'm all for supporting mangaka and buying their books, but when a manga is this heavily edited, you should just download some fan-translation for free on the Internet instead, if you can find one that is (which I can't). Oh and when Tokyopop printed this volume, the ends of the pages got cut off, so a few of the text bubbles are only half there. Nice one Tokyopop.
Anything Goes Trivia
Last Kiss
Megaton Man
Trevor
