Ewan’s story continues as the castle continues to flood and the mysteries surrounding the other captives and contenders for the throne continue to pile up. Things are going to get very serious in this third volume.
Review:
We once again have to thank the cover for showing us a major plot twist and also giving into the cliche that crazy people all lick things. I don’t know why this is such a common trope in manga and anime but I find it quite odd that the only way that some people feel they can immediately show us some character is disturbed in some way is for them to stick their tongue out and lick something. Bonus points if it includes blood.
Now that I’m done critiquing the cover art, how was volume 3? Actually pretty good. There’s a real tension in this story with the time pressure of the castle filling with water and the characters facing traps and getting progressively more injured as their journey continues. It might be a contrived reason to have tension but it has been pretty affective throughout these volumes and volume 3 really escalates things.
Ewan continues to be interesting enough as the protagonist, but like it so many stories with large casts, the support cast here are eclipsing him. He is reactive to situations he knows nothing about whereas the other characters have come in with motives and knowledge and their decisions and actions are a great deal more interesting. Ewan also gives in to the protagonist cliche of just being really nice and somehow that’s enough to get everyone on side in a way that only ever works in stories. I’m feeling in the real world Ewan would have been swimming with the fishes already.
Despite that, the end of volume 3 was a little disappointing. It just felt kind of cheap giving away the clever plots and traps to face off against a clearly disturbed player in the end. Admittedly, his motive and backstory were interesting enough and certainly the cliff-hanger ending makes you want to immediately read volume 4 (and I certainly did and will be reviewing next week) but it was probably the first real moment in this series where I’ve thought it was just a little bit silly.
That said, we’ve got political intrigue, severed heads, helpful mice, and traps galore so this third volume will certainly keep you on your toes as you continue to move through the labyrinth with Ewan and friends.
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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Looking forward to your thoughts on the final volume!
Next week. Already drafted and ready to go.