Out of the three great Key anime (I refuse to acknowledge Little Busters until a, it gets more popular, and b, until I've actually seen it), general consensus seems to be that Air is the weakest of them, with me agreeing to that consensus. Sure, it's still good and all, but doesn't pack as much of a punch as Clannad and Kanon. The anime either needed to eb longer, to give Kanno's and Minagi's arc more background and to develop its rather tacked-on backstory even more, or it needed to be shorter and a more focused story concentrating only on Misuzu and chopping out the badly written past. This is the route the Air manga decided to take, and despite its shorter length and taking out most of the main plot points not related to Misuzu, it managed to be less focused somehow. Shall we take a look?

For those of you who are unaware, Air is about a man called Yukito who is a traveler relying on his magical puppet show to make money. When he stops in a small town, he encounters a girl named Misuzu and befriends her. However, everything is not what it seems and it could be that Misuzu has ties to one of the reasons why Yukito is traveling in the first place.

Despite its shorter length, a good amount of the early chapters is just fluff and events between Yukito and Misuzu to set up their relationship. However, these scenes never come off as more than moe fluff, and while they do set up the characters well, it could've been done in a much shorter time. And eventually, the plot does start, and its not a very good attempt. The whole mystery seems tacked on as it lacked the foreshadowing the anime has. The supernatural setting comes very sudden about halfway through. I hate to compare, but the anime could get away with it as it had already set up everything was not what is seemed in Minagi's and Kanno's arcs instead of feeling tacked on like it does here.

Talking about tacked on, the way Air handles its ending is terribly. While I originally disliked the arc in the anime that went to the past to set up its backstory more, without using it as a transition, the final part of the manga, the Misuzu and Haruka part, feels so tacked on it's not funny. For the whole manga Haruka was barely even there and we barely got to form any attachment to her, so seeing as the final arc concentrates on her relationship with Misuzu, it almost feels like a different manga entirely. And the whole thing just sort of, well, ends. It ends right before the final scene of the anime begins, the scene that everyone remembers. This wouldn't have bothered me, but they did everything else exactly the same, and without the ending the anime has, the final major development feels really useless and just an attempt to try to get some semblance of drama. Due to this, the whole thing feels unfinished and like it needs one more chapter.

The characters also suffer. While I have no problem with them turning Kanno and Minagi into minor characters, it did bother me that they slightly hinted at their backstories, but never revealed them, meaning that they feel like incomplete characters and people new to Air would be confused and turned off. The main two, Misuzu and Yukito, are fine though, exactly like they were in the anime.

The art is, well... It's okay. Misuzu's typical design is rather generic, but in the later chapters when her hair blows in the wind, it looks really neat and almost like her hair is really blowing across the page. The only other mentionable thing is they changed Minagi's design so much if I didn't know this is Air I probably wouldn't been able to tell it was her, she looks so different.

Air still manages to keep the bare amounts of the story we know though, and people who never watched the anime wouldn't be totally lost as it does explain all of its plot points rather well, with perhaps one big exception in there, but that didn't make much sense in the anime either so I suppose I can kind of forgive it. It also doesn't do anything that bad either, it just sort of feels very incomplete, like it needed just a few more chapters to become brilliant but it didn't get those chapters. If you've already seen the anime, then don't read this unless if you're a hardcore fan (which means you've probably already read it), and if you're new to the Air franchise, then just skip this and watch the anime instead. At the end of the day, I don't recommend this.