Manga Monday-The Heroic Legend of Arslan Volume 1 Review

For a while now, my wife has told me about this great, 90’s anime she once saw that she wanted to watch with me, and it was on my list of stuff we’d watch together. Of course, said list is about five pages long, and we’re still trying to finish “Star Trek: The Next Generation” so it’s clearly going to be a while before I get to it. Then, for my recent birthday, a friend gave me Volume 1 of “The Heroic Legend of Arslan”, a fairly new series written and drawn by famed creator of “Fullmetal Alchemist” Hiromu Arakawa. When my wife saw it, she freaked out: it’s the same name as that 90’s anime. That’s because both this manga, the anime that just last year was adapted from it, and the anime series made in the 1990’s are all based on the same source material: a series of Japanese fantasy novels by Yoshiki Tanaka. And while I might cover either of those anime series in the future, right now I am covering the first volume of the manga by Hiromu Arakawa.

Arslan is the young prince of Pars, a large economically and militarily powerful country that recently finished a large war campaign. The young prince is learning how to fight as a soldier, as per their traditions, but he’s far from a master yet. However, when a new war starts with an enemy nation they had thought beaten, the Parsians are undone through treachery and unforeseen strategic turns which force Arslan away from his life in the capital and the battlefield as he tries to find a safe haven.

There are two different ways I want to approach looking at this manga: as its own story and as a work by Hiromu Arakawa. As its own story, this is a fairly good set-up, although it does have a few issues. Arslan has the right seeds for a good fantasy protagonist, though in this volume he doesn’t get to do very much, and as such comes off as a little bland. I’ve seen other fantasy novels that do a better job establishing their protagonist quicker, but in this case Arslan in passable. There aren’t a lot of developed characters at all in the volume, honestly, which is where it falls short a little for me, with many characters coming across more as stock archetypes, with the exception of Daryun. Arslan’s loyal knight Daryun is easily the most awesome character in the story so far, though that might not be because of the writing, which I’ll come back to later.

One thing that irritates me a little here and there are the invented words. Now, this was and in some ways still is a popular gimmick in the fantasy novel genre, where the author invents new words for a fictional culture/language in order to make it appear more fleshed out. However, in most cases it’s really just a character saying “It’s 30 dumas* to the battlefield!” with a footnote at the bottom telling the reader “*30 dumas is equivalent to 150 miles.” Does it make sense that fantasy cultures might have different units of measurement than we do? Of course it does. But doing things like this is both audience-alienating and pointless. In cases like this, the reader has to remember how much a dumas is if they want to translate what the characters are saying, and even if they do it, it isn’t as if they’re getting something incredibly engaging out of it. I know some people like fantasy stories inventing new words for “mile” and “general” and so on, but it’s definitely not my thing.

I’m a fairly huge fan of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga and both anime series, and I followed the manga as it came out for several years before it ended. Honestly, while I do like the story’s setting and find the ancient Persian aesthetic cool, Hiromu Arakawa’s art is about 85% of the reason I enjoy this story, at least up to the end of Volume 1. While Arslan isn’t written particularly well, Awakawa is able to draw him in such a way that his personality is clear and present on every page, and makes it easy for the reader to empathize with the young prince. The fight scenes are amazingly drawn, and Daryun’s feats in battle are so insanely cool that, when combined with his honesty, integrity, and loyalty to the main character, he became my favorite character fairly quickly.

I don’t know anything about where the story goes from here, not yet, so as a first volume of a manga series, I would recommend buying “The Heroic Legend of Arslan”. While the writing isn’t always stellar, the art is very good, and the world the characters inhabit is an intriguing one. It’s far from the best first volume of manga I’ve read, but it was still a pleasant little birthday treat for me, and I feel like if I had spent ten dollars on it myself I wouldn’t consider it disappointment. I look forward to buying and reading the next volume, and when I do I’ll be sure to write about it here. In the mean time, if my little review made you curious, you can find volume 1 on Amazon here.

#manga #monday