Princess Resurrection

This anime is about Princess Hime and her entourage as they deal with various supernatural phenomena. Her followers include the werewolf Riza, the vampire Reiri, and android Flandre, her younger sister Sherwood, and her blood-servant Hiro. Hime has a very cold demeaner, but she’s pretty smart and has a very commanding presence. Riza is incredibly prideful and somewhat battle crazy. Reiri on the other hand is mischievous and pretty lazy. Werewolves and vampires are sworn enemies that are fated to never get along, but despite constantly being at each other’s throats they seem to actually get along quite well. Flandre is part of an overpoweredandroid series that can only say hooba (fooga in the Japanese version). Sherwood is super enthusiastic about their family’s noble duty, keeping track of supernatural wildlife, and is constantly going on expeditions to research new or unknown beings. Almost all of them are interesting enough characters that they’re enough to make the story engaging. The big exception was the arguable protagonist is Hiro. I think it’s very arguable because he is technically the one from whose perspective the story is primarily told. However, he really doesn’t do much. A blood warrior is someone that dies but is brough back through the blood of a royal, in Hiro’s case Hime. He’s immortal now so long as he continues drinking Hime’s blood. However, the only other ability he gets is the ability to detect when Hime is in danger. Other than that, for the vast majority of the story he’s a completely normal human. As such, his contribution to things is simply taking hits for Hime, which is important as he’s saving her life in these cases. But also, pretty boring. His personality is also really flat with essentially no development so that doesn’t help him much either. This manga is listed in places as having a harem or romance, but it really isn’t at all. Though Hiro is surrounded by a bunch of girls, there’s like a few panels per girl where they show some interest in Hiro, and then it’s never brought up again. It’s not even a slow romance or subtle romance. It really doesn’t feel like there’s any at all. As a result of all this, despite being quite prominent, Hiro is underdeveloped as a character to the point that it kind of feels like he’s dragging down the rest of the cast. The structure of the manga is short stories, usually only a single chapter, that show the various incidents that Hime gets involved in. These incidents generally involve some sort of supernatural mystery or fight against some sort of supernatural being. However, this isn’t really a mystery manga or action manga at all. The solution to the mysteries is generally some new supernatural phenomenon that only really matters for that story. The fights also don’t really have any depth or complexity to them. The manga is also okay with straight up skipping the climax of these, meaning, it’ll build up to a big fight, and then just skip to the aftermath. Ultimately, it feels more than anything the manga is focused on establishing horror and mystery vibes and atmosphere. And due to the fast pacing and the heavy variety to the supernatural phenomenon, it does an incredibly good job of that. However, things do get repetitive eventually, at which point the manga starts getting pretty dull. This may not have been as much of an issue for those reading the manga as it released, but binge reading it it definitely felt like it was dragging. The majority of incidents that Hime gets involved with have very little if anything to do with any overarching plot. However, there is an overarching plot involving a fight for the throne and the secret background of Hime’s family. There were certainly some very interesting aspects to all this. But overall, this story was badly told and came to a pretty half assed ending that left a lot unresolved. I think one of the biggest issues was the pacing. The story tries to keep every incident confined to as few chapters as possible. So there would be a bunch of chapters that don’t advance the overarching plot at all, and then a chapter that advances it a lot in a pretty rushed manner. And then a bunch more that don’t advance it at all. Things did speed up eventually, but it still felt really haphazard and jarring pacing wise. There is a sequel series so maybe that resolves things better, but I can’t say I was all that satisfied with the ending to this one. The art was a mixed bag. The quality is definitely good, barring some rough edges towards the beginning. The environments and monsters were also well designed and helped considerably in establishing atmosphere. The character art I wasn’t as much a fan of. The character designs themselves I feel were somewhat boring for the setting and premise. But more so than the designs themselves, I feel it wasn’t really using them all that well. There wasn’t really much art that made them look beautiful or eye catching, and though there was a lot of art that was meant to look cool, it was all of Hime and was mostly very similar so the effect wore off pretty quickly. tl;dr: A manga with a mostly interesting cast and a pretty good sense of atmosphere, but pretty weak beyond that.