Montage

tl;dr: A thriller manga with a good plot full of suspense, but awful and nonsensical characters. The plot of this manga revolved around a real-world incident where a thief or group of thieves managed to steal 300-million-yen. To this day, no one knows who was responsible or where the money went, which makes it a great premise to center a manga around. The incident happened in 1968, but the manga takes place in 2010 with flashbacks throughout the period in between. As such, the focus isn’t so much directly on the incident itself, but on the aftermath and wide-reaching effects. More specifically, the focus is onYamato and his adoptive sister Miku who end up getting pulled into things when their parents go missing and their investigation leads them to investigate the 300-million-yen incident. However, this catches the eye of some very dangerous and powerful individuals who wish to stop them through any means possible. The actual mystery regarding how the 300-million-yen robbery played out and the conspiracy involved there was pretty well written. Since it’s based on a real-life incident that has a lot of conspiracy theories there was probably a lot to pull from, and the mangaka did a good job in terms of execution. How the main cast slowly pieced together what happened was handled pretty well and was pretty interesting. The cat and mouse games at a smaller level were also pretty interesting. Overall, the plans characters carry out are a lot simpler than most manga which makes at least this aspect really easy to follow. As such the focus is much more on being a thriller than a battle of wits, and the manga is good at keeping a fast-paced sense of suspense so it handles that pretty well. The area the manga fails completely is its characters. It seems to try to give everyone a complicated background, and a lot of them end up completely stupid. A lot of these characters start off as mysterious, and their further characterization is inconsistent with how they were portrayed early on. If you trying reading the first few volumes after finishing the manga, you’ll spot loads of instances of characters behaving in ways that that are bizarre based on what you learn about them in the future. The complicated entangled web of connections between the main cast is also overtly convoluted. And as that’s the core for character’s motivations, this results in a lot of the manga just seeming like random nonsense where it isn’t clear at all why characters are doing what they’re doing. This applies to pretty much everything that happens during the the final stretch of the manga, which made the ending pretty unsatisfying. Pretty much all the romance in this manga is terrible too, especially the main couple. By the end of the manga, it was kind of hard to stay invested in anyone to be honest, which made most of the emotional beats fall completely flat. The art can be great at times but for the most part it was only okay which was disappointing. The character designs are pretty typical modern designs without anyone really standing out. The first fan translator was pretty solid but the second, who did the latter two thirds of the manga, was pretty bad.