Welcome back to Manhwa Mondays. This week, a comic I enjoyed quite a bit: the fantasy/comedy LAST FANTASY by Creative Hon and Yong-Wan Kwon.
This was a comic I didn't expect much of, to be honest, and ended up enjoying quite a lot. The premise is very simple: in a world very much like a classic RPG (role-playing game) video-game, powerful, but amateur sorcerer Tian and his best friend Drei adventure with spectacularly-bad, usually hilarious results.
I'm a sucker for RPGs and likewise for comics that have the same oeuvre and since this was clearly a parody of sorts of Final Fantasy, one of the best video-game franchises of all time, I had to at least read the first volume. I ended up reading the entire five-book series.
I don't need to go into many details regarding plot, but let me just say if anyone has ever played an MMORPG and been in a bad--nay, terrible--quest or even EXP party, this book is up your alley. The first volume very much captures what it's like to having a raging idiot in your party (Drei) and it's pretty damned funny from the outside.
Tian is actually fairly competent, and quite powerful, if mostly-untrained, but his best-friend/adventuring partner's ineptitude more than torpedos their chances for success time and again. In fact, Drei frequently blows their chances right from the get-go: drinking health potions cuz he's thirsty, wasting all their money on novelties, tripping clearly-labeled traps, slaughtering friendly dragons who wanted to help them, etc etc.
It's pretty great.
About halfway through the series, the book does shift tones, becoming more serious as the pair get involved in a fairly in-depth storyline involving defending a town from a villainous group who may or may not have connections to Tian and Drei's past (which they'd like some answers to, naturally) and it seems to be leading the series down a path I would have enjoyed reading. Unfortunately, as soon as that storyline ended so, too, did Last Fantasy.
I've mentioned before that Korean publishers seem to give creative teams a chance to end a low-performing series rather than simply canceling it, and that's clearly what happened here. At the end of the last storyline, which by no means actually closes out the series, the book abruptly concludes when we're shown that a bard has been singing of their adventures to a group of children, but decides it's past their bedtime and promises to tell them more later. There had previously been no indication of such a storyteller in the series, so it was a pretty lame ending, but I suppose the creative team felt they had to do something to give it some manner of closure (very little, truthfully) while still leaving the door open to possible future stories.
Considering this was Creative Hon's, the "writer" (actually a collection of three writers working under a pen-name), first comic, I can forgive the lameness of the ending because the rest of the book is great. If they have published more comics, I'm not aware of them, though I'd be glad to give them a try if I ever find any.
Likewise, artist Kwon did a commendable job with his duties. The art falls somewhere along the borderline of generic-fantasy-art and generic-comedy-art, but he did a good job matching the tone to the scenes and his action sequences are surprisingly clean and easy to follow compared to many manhwa I've read - which tend to toss a bunch of action into a huge panel or double-page spread and leave the reader to try and sort it out.
All told, this is was a fun book and if you see it, don't hesitate to give it a shot.
I'm a sucker for RPGs and likewise for comics that have the same oeuvre and since this was clearly a parody of sorts of Final Fantasy, one of the best video-game franchises of all time, I had to at least read the first volume. I ended up reading the entire five-book series.
I don't need to go into many details regarding plot, but let me just say if anyone has ever played an MMORPG and been in a bad--nay, terrible--quest or even EXP party, this book is up your alley. The first volume very much captures what it's like to having a raging idiot in your party (Drei) and it's pretty damned funny from the outside.
Tian is actually fairly competent, and quite powerful, if mostly-untrained, but his best-friend/adventuring partner's ineptitude more than torpedos their chances for success time and again. In fact, Drei frequently blows their chances right from the get-go: drinking health potions cuz he's thirsty, wasting all their money on novelties, tripping clearly-labeled traps, slaughtering friendly dragons who wanted to help them, etc etc.
It's pretty great.
About halfway through the series, the book does shift tones, becoming more serious as the pair get involved in a fairly in-depth storyline involving defending a town from a villainous group who may or may not have connections to Tian and Drei's past (which they'd like some answers to, naturally) and it seems to be leading the series down a path I would have enjoyed reading. Unfortunately, as soon as that storyline ended so, too, did Last Fantasy.
I've mentioned before that Korean publishers seem to give creative teams a chance to end a low-performing series rather than simply canceling it, and that's clearly what happened here. At the end of the last storyline, which by no means actually closes out the series, the book abruptly concludes when we're shown that a bard has been singing of their adventures to a group of children, but decides it's past their bedtime and promises to tell them more later. There had previously been no indication of such a storyteller in the series, so it was a pretty lame ending, but I suppose the creative team felt they had to do something to give it some manner of closure (very little, truthfully) while still leaving the door open to possible future stories.
Considering this was Creative Hon's, the "writer" (actually a collection of three writers working under a pen-name), first comic, I can forgive the lameness of the ending because the rest of the book is great. If they have published more comics, I'm not aware of them, though I'd be glad to give them a try if I ever find any.
Likewise, artist Kwon did a commendable job with his duties. The art falls somewhere along the borderline of generic-fantasy-art and generic-comedy-art, but he did a good job matching the tone to the scenes and his action sequences are surprisingly clean and easy to follow compared to many manhwa I've read - which tend to toss a bunch of action into a huge panel or double-page spread and leave the reader to try and sort it out.
All told, this is was a fun book and if you see it, don't hesitate to give it a shot.
RSS Feed