Most manga and anime titles may start out a little nonsensical, but then everything clears up once the battles start. Every plot can be followed as long as you have flashy fights, but once in a while you end up meeting an exception. That would be 07 Ghost, a series that never bothered to clear itself up and instead it ends up just as convoluted as it originally started. I don’t mind complexity, but most of 07 Ghost was simply padding and distracted you from the plot and the art did not help with this either. A lot of the characters looked similar by the end and there were also many time jumps between the past and the present to keep you guessing. The only other series as confusing as this one would be Pandora Hearts and even that one started to make some sense towards the end once the climax of the series happened. 07 Ghost can’t really say the same nor was the character cast quite as good.

Well, there was once a slave who was forced to serve in gladiatorial fights, but he finally escaped one day. He was placed under the protection of a few shinigami who work under divine powers. They are very powerful and intend to protect him. To provide some more context thanks to Wikipedia, Teito had escaped along with his friend (Who died shortly afterwards) and then took sanctuary inside of the Church where the bishops protected him. In case you have not suspected yet, the bishops are the shinigamis and even the villains do not dare to attack the Church…yet. Teito is the chosen one and he has “The Eye” which means that there is another person living inside of him who aims to protect Teito at all costs. In order to fulfill this objective, he is given great levels of power. The enemy country wants this power so they can blow people up. The villains are already on the brink of taking over the world so obtaining the eye would mean Game Over for all.

The series could have been a lot better, but again, the plot makes no real sense at times. It’s like the author is just trying to stay afloat in the popularity rankings and adds as many interesting plot ideas as possible, but with no way to sew them all together. With series like Naruto and Bleach, the plot is so simple that you can read it while half asleep. With Ghost, you’ll want to re read and re read, but there is rarely time for that sort of thing. Instead, you just roll with whatever’s happening and just hope for the best. Perhaps you can still enjoy the fights if nothing else.

Also, being convoluted is not necessarily the same as being intricate. Death Note, Hunter X Hunter, One Piece, and Liar Game are intricate. Those series have been well thought out in advance and are able to add in dozens of characters or lines of logic without leaving the reader behind. It’s easy to see where the series are headed at all points. In particular, Liar Game was always able to think of incredibly complex games where many different plans would be implemented only to have someone else counter it. It was like a real life version of Chess although I’ll discuss it more in an upcoming review. In 07 Ghost, it’s more like the author had a vague idea of what he wanted to do and then filled the story with so many pointless details that you ended up losing perspective of the actual plot.

As already mentioned, the art is pretty iffy during the battles. Whenever an action scene occurs, you’ll have to strain yourself to keep up with what’s happening. It doesn’t help that the “magic” in this series is all water color based so everything’s dripping across the pages. It’s hard to even tell what kind of spell is being used as a result and it’s probably the worst depiction of magic that I’ve seen in quite a bit. Many of the characters look very similar so good luck keeping up with the names by the end of the series.

However, the art can be downright great when it comes to scenes without any movement. I actually had a decently tough time choosing the images for this review since there are so many good ones. The author knows how to draw a visual that you’ll find exciting to look at. It helps that the true Shinigami forms that most of the characters have can be quite good and a lot of the weapons are shadow based so those are epic as well.

Perhaps that’s the most frustrating thing about the series and why I cut it so much slack on the premise of possibly enjoying it more a second time around. If you can get through all of the fluff and the unnecessary side adventures and plots, you’ve got a real good story here. Seeing the death gods choose who goes where and Teito trying to escape from his past are two plots that can certainly work well. The main villain was pretty intense and there were many parts that showed some promise throughout the series. Give the title better artwork, erase a few characters and this could have easily been a great title. Of course, you could fill a book series with the amount of what ifs that you encounter in life.

Teito’s a decent main character, but he doesn’t have a lot going for him that other heroes don’t already possess. He’s a decently nice guy who wants to move past his shady past of being an assassin. Throughout the series he tries to find out more about those days and his plot is similar to Cammy’s from Street Fighter. When the third eye is activated, another being from inside of him takes control and he’s easily one of the best characters in the series. Probably second to Ayanami. He can fight and “Shadow Teito” never backs down from a fight. It’s a shame that he’s not immune to telepathy though as that trick seems to always work against him. There’s another angel being inside another kid who ends up fighting Teito at one point, but it’s a plot that never really went anywhere or it simply wasn’t as developed as it could have been.

Frau’s the main character of the bishops and is arguably the strongest one. He wants to help Teito on his quest and is typically proficient at just about any activity. He’d be a great character if not for the completely unnecessary trait of him being an immoral guy…even though he’s a Bishop. That doesn’t even get brought up all that often so there was really no point to including the trait. Still, it’s there and Frau quickly died as far as the character roster went. The other Bishops are around and they get to fight once and a while, but none of them ever got a big role. Still, there was a big twist involving the true mastermind behind the whole series that was fairly neat.

Ayanami is the main villain of the series and he’s easily the most interesting character. At times you do wonder why he’s doing what he’s doing, but then again, does a villain even need a reason sometimes? He has some faithful followers and it’s hinted that he wasn’t always such a bad guy. He has a lot of abilities and he’s one of the only characters who can hold his own against a Bishop without actually being one of them. He’s also fairly cunning and was able to trap Teito in a realistic dream which completely simulated the real world except for the fact that Teito was on the villain side this time.

The thing is, Ayanami’s a villain, but most of his underlings don’t even know it since they operate from a government base as well as the school next door. In fact, Teito becomes friends with quite a few of the characters there during that time until he realizes what has happened. Ayanami’s abilities are difficult to explain as you would expect from this series, but at the very least they all look pretty cool so that’s got to count for something right?

Most of the other characters are around, but they don’t have a lot of presence. Teito has a best friend, but he dies almost immediately in volume 1 and for the rest of the series we just have an animal who was named after him. It’s hinted several times that he could be the reincarnated form of the friend, but it could also just be Teito being desperate for a friend and just hoping that this is the case. That is also hinted at several points in the series. Other characters can be a little annoying like a little orphan that Teito took care of for a while. He certainly didn’t add anything to the series, which you could say about a lot of the characters.

The series was long, but you couldn’t really get invested into what was happening due to the lackluster characters and the artwork. Technically, a lot of the plot revolves around the fact that two countries were at war way back in the day and after one of them lost, the government took control and Ayanami is one of the corrupt heads who leads them. There’s no political intrigue to really speak of and that’s a shame since I always love to see politics in these kinds of things.

Not that most people really care about the power levels, but I wouldn’t say that the characters are all that strong in this series. Some of them have a decent amount of magical power at their disposal, but I wasn’t overly impressed with any of the speed feats that were shown. These guys may be around Kenshin level and slightly higher, but considering that they’re death gods, you’d expect them to be a little more impressive. One of the bishop’s had string abilities which were impressive. If only he was physically able to keep up with his opponents, he would be a very strong fighter. At the very least, the Bishops have a decent amount of immortality, but it’s not quite legitimate compared to most immortals.

It’s also worth noting that this series did a really good job of avoiding the fanservice trap. I can’t think of any scene that featured any. Granted, it’s been quite a while since I read the series (This review’s been on the backlog for a while) but if there was any, it was very slight. That’s another positive for the series and it’d be good if more titles could follow this one’s example.

Overall, I can’t say that I enjoyed 07 Ghost all that much. None of the characters were very inspiring and the whole series was very confusing. That being said, I’ll give it some props for still being fairly interesting and I do think that it would be considerably more entertaining with a re-read, but you would need to have all of the volumes in front of you so that you can marathon it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s really the only way to get the maximum amount of enjoyment from this. The only series that’s more confusing than this one is Pandora Hearts and I personally think that 07 Ghost is better, but it’ll be interesting to see if any other titles can surpass those 2 someday. If you want a very convoluted story, this one’s up your ally. Otherwise, I’d recommend going for an action that’s not as all over the place like Heroman!

Overall 6/10