Ouroboros: Keisatsu wo Sabaku wa Ware ni Ari

tl;dr: A manga about a police officer involving a core plot and various side cases that is mostly pretty well written, though the core plot seems to drag on towards the end. This is a manga that is described as and has covers the make it seem like there are two main leads, Ryuzaki and Tatsuya, though I don’t think that’s really the case. Rather, I think that Ryuzaki is the clear protagonist, and his two partners, Tatsuya and Mizuki, are both equally important. The overarching plot is centered around Ryuzaki and Tatsuya as in their roles of cop and yakuza respectively they search for thetruth behind what happened when they were children when their foster parents was murdered and the murder was covered up by the police. This core partnership is where the name of the manga comes from and is one similar to incredibly close brothers, though ones that are keeping their relationship a secret. However, this is only part of the story and just as important is Ryuzaki and Mizuki serving as police officers and dealing with various crimes that essentially serve as side cases. Their partnership is somewhat opposite to the one between Ryuzaki and Mizuki in that it’s one that’s right in the open and that slowly builds into a reasonably solid romance. The manga starts off mostly focusing on the side cases aspect to the story instead of the overarching plot. While doing so, it fleshes out a lot of characters quite well and develop thier bonds. Mizuki especially gets especially strong development seeing as she’s usually the other lead in these portions. The dynamic of Ryuzaki being a police officer that can also rely on the help of a big shot yakuza is quite satisfying at times, and also allows the narrative to flesh out the bond between the two even during the side cases. Ryuzaki himself is also a really interesting protagonist, in that despite seeming kind of dopey is quite capable both in terms of investigative and combat abilities, but even more importantly he is shown to be incredibly empathetic compared to other police officers which allows him to deal with certain crimes and save people that otherwise may not have been able to be saved. I felt that these cases were also generally pretty well written with good variety and paced pretty well with a good build up. Though it should be noted that the cues and foreshadowing hinting at things are pretty similar across cases and the ending to cases are pretty much always the most cynical way things could reasonably go, so eventually cases do start getting incredibly predictable. There’s also some surprisingly decent comedy during these portions, though it’s not really a focus. For the majority of the manga the narrative focuses on these side cases and thus the overarching mystery moves at a snails pace. That’s not a bad thing though, as the side cases are solid and move pretty fast and thus even if the overarching mystery is moving incredibly slowly the pacing doesn’t seem to be slow. Furthermore, these portions are really good for getting the reader invested in all the characters that’ll be important for the overarching plot. There does come a point about 3/4s of the way through where things change in a pretty big way and the narrative focuses all in on the overarching mystery. Surprisingly, it’s at this point that the pacing starts to seem slow. The overarching story overall I feel has too many twists and false leads, and when it reaches the point that it’s being focused on completely that makes it feel like the manga overall is kind of dragging on. Still, in the end it manages to a reach a pretty great ending. I felt that it was somewhat rushed in some regards and it would have been nice to see the effects that the events that occur during the ending have on society overall beyond just a short info dump in the epilogue. But in terms of how it handled the main characters I felt it was an ending that fit the manga really well and was one that I was pretty satisfied with. As some general notes, this manga also goes very in detail on the police of Japan, of Tokyo in particular, so it might be a good a window into looking at that. I say might, because I’m not sure how accurate it is. General themes about police corruption and the role of police in society were a pretty heavy focus and likely exaggerated for plot reasons, but the concepts are pretty universal and their implementation was solid enough so that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the more nitty gritty information aspect which it also seems to try to get quite detailed about at times. I came in with essentially no prior knowledge on the subject and nothing stood out as seeming obviously wrong. However, over the course of the manga it also talks about a bunch of random other things, such as references to literature or scientific explanations for why things occurred, and a lot of those are just blatantly wrong so the research surrounding them was definitely lacking. These incorrect aspects are just minor things that were basically just window dressing and didn’t really matter all that much and it’s probably likely that the material relating to the core subject matter is more accurate, but just something to keep in mind. The art was decent enough, in that it was pretty realistic in terms of style and decent quality, so it worked well with the type of story it was trying to tell, but in and of itself I found it kind of boring and not particularly nice or interesting to look at.