Kino's Journey: The Beautiful World

If you want the TL:DR then don't read this, the light novels may be better, I don't know but I do know that this manga isn't good. This won't be written in my normal style because I don't think this wreck of a manga really warrants my usual style of in-depth review. This manga seems rushed. Really rushed. There are emotional scenes that fall entirely flat because there is just not enough build up to make the reader care, including the end of the manga itself! The manga obviously has to cut some stuff but it feels like it's cut so much that it lost anyweight the actually good portions may have held. There seems to be original material here, as in the manga changes the plot of certain stories. Each volume starts with an expert of the light novels involving one of the stories adapted in the volume. Sometimes these experts seemingly hint at entirely different stories than the ones shown in the manga. This seems to imply that the author came up with different plots with the same basic premise than the light novel. I did not like these plots, frankly some of the small excerpts I read seems like it would be more interesting than the direction this manga went with. The main character doesn't have any character growth, namely because she lacks any real personality in the first place. As an anthological type of manga, with only one consistent character, this hurts my enjoyment of this manga a lot. There are some cool ideas here, the "land of ships" was quite an interesting idea even if the end was complete emotional whiplash and comes out of nowhere. The problem is, as mentioned before, how rushed it is. There's just no time to breath. Good ideas and poor execution is even worse than simply being bad in my opinion. I'd like to believe this is simply a case of bad adaption because I have heard very good things about "Kino's Journey". Suffice to say, this has been a real disappointment. I'd like to suggest reading the Light Novel instead, or I'd read it myself and check the differences (see if it's truly a case of bad adaption). I’d like to but the light novels (other than the first) were never officially translated to English so guess this is the best we're getting. Really disappointed with this one. At least the art was good, some pretty cool set pieces too. I'm sad that this is the only review "Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World" has received on MAL (at the time of writing anyway) but I have to be honest and this was simply bad.