Seikai no Monshou

I am a big Crest of the Stars fan, so discovering there is a new manga out there, and, who knows! - maybe a new anime, - I was very glad and interested to see what was done to one of the favourite stories of mine in this new adaptation.

So, first of all, the material, like previous versions, transmits the story from Hiroyuki Morioka's novels quite accurately. They swap some things here and there, but overall the chain of events is basically identical. Which is good - the storyline of the original is very finely crafted, and can fall apart if not handled with care. But this is the only thing I can praise this manga upon.

Artwork kills it. Destroys, eliminates, annihilates, burns to the ground and puffs up a huge mushroom cloud. You see, there's certain atmosphere to Crest of the Stars. It is a rather old-school work. it never rushes, it builds up slowly, it's rather scientifically accurate in its descriptions, and its fantastic assumptions are rather tame and in line with classic science fiction. This all creates certain tasteful atmosphere. Add in the themes of nobility, elegance, beauty in limitation - which is the foundation to Abh art, by the way! And this art takes it, looks at it, and says "Bah! Who cares! Giant robots with swords! UwU" and draws the scene like any other modern manga would be - exaggerated emotions, overengineered structures and objects, overblown special effects. Oh how this contrasts with the anime adaptation, which caught the tone and the ideology behind the style while trying to capture the details from descriptions given in the novels! Thin, slightly curved deadly in their elegance ships of the Empire were counter posed to clunky, simplistically shaped traditionally militaristic vessels of United Mankind. Even the most emotional of commanders would express their feelings with slight changes in facial expressions. Only Jinto and Diaho, the outsiders to Abh, were allowed to emote in full. And Diaho is a cat.

Cartoony expressions all the Abh characters do, ships turned into jagged monstrosities even Dark Eldar would consider ugly, and space battles visually looking like overblown Star Wars parodies on crack. Is the art well done on technical level? Yes, for the most part. But it is actively opposing the stylistic tone, the fundamental ideology laid within its own storytelling and even its own canon. For a visual medium, to allow such a brutal clash between the story and its visualisation is to kill it.

This manga is plain horrible. This manga is worthless. This manga is an artistic crime. It takes a fine sci-fi story and turns it into a bad fanfic. I am hugely disappointed. Please avoid this like a wildfire - better get your hands on novels, or watch the anime version from 1999.