Trigun

Rating 4/10 For BOTH Trigun and Maximum. Trigun is a disappointment. The manga keeps letting itself down at every turn. Here's why: Setting: Trigun's setting is similar to Cowboy Bebop, with mankind having populated another planet far away from the ruined earth. However, Trigun does absolutely *nothing* with this environment. The planet is a sand ridden landscape and gives off a wild west feeling, and is intentionally designed to look uninhabitable for story reasons, but it makes everything look the same, bland and boring. Not only that, but Trigun never stops to explain locations or simply walk around and take in the sights. Every single location has only onepurpose, to set the backdrop of whatever fight happens there. There is practically no explanation behind the social structure of the world, the people living and working there and what kind of troubles they encounter on this hazardous planet. I'm pretty sure we don't even know the planet's population size, the planets size itself, how many moons and suns it has, and just where exactly the planet is in the universe. Trigun just doesn't respect its' setting, and completely ruins the intrigue by ignoring the basics of environmental storytelling. Unlike media set in our present reality, media set in fictional settings NEED to explain how they work. Because there is no prior knowledge going into this unlike how we know how our present earth functions. There are a few great shots of vistas, but the fact that Trigun ignores them completely alienates me from the world. Art/structure: Trigun's art is fine, with some actually great art here and there. However there is a massive problem with how the art is presented. Many, many times when reading the manga, there are panels where I need to stare at the art for a few seconds before actually noticing what has been drawn. Many doubles takes have happened due to the art's horrible composition, there's just simply too much going on and very poorly laid out on the page, causing confusion and making my eyes hurt. This is a problem with many manga with guns, but Trigun is unique in having this problem with a greater magnitude compared to something like black lagoon, which had a simpler art style with bolder lines and cleaner layouts. This is a 90's manga so there's an endearing drawing style and emotes, with similar era humour. The character designs are top notch for the most part, and actually have visual story telling within them. Another issue with this manga is speech bubbles. Many times you just DON'T know who is supposed to be speaking, leading to even more confusion. One of the biggest issues with this manga is the official English release version I read. The official English version does NOT translate sound effects at ALL, not even a little text box underneath the SFX explaining what it is, they don't even bother putting them below a panel or anything. This is extremely lazy and while I DO know hiragana and katakana, Japanese is NOT my first language and I'd much rather have the sound effects be in English. This issue must be even more apparent to people unlike me who DON'T know Japanese characters. This is inexcusable because the English version releases YEARS after Trigun ended, so there is absolutely no excuse for this lazy official version people pay for. (SPOILERS) There is also an issue with the main villain being the twin brother of the main character, so fights between them compound the previously mentioned issues even more (end of spoilers) Story: An absolute mess. It's a revenge story. But the main character is a pacifist. With a large overarching message about the value of human life. Pretty standard, however the manga spends far too much of its time on story, constantly rushing along to the next plot beat or fight with no In-between time to worldbuild or even for exposition. Leading to a very empty narrative. The time skip is practically useless as nothing happens in between, unlike one piece, everyone remains the same more or less. Take it out of the story and nothing would change. There is no character development, and when characters change, they don't do it because they had been built up, they do it for plot convenience. Leading to some of the biggest ass pulls in the manga. There are a few decent moments here and there, but for a manga that sacrifices everything else just to get the villains and heroes to collide as much as possible, as fast as possible, it's extremely bland, predictable and cliche. There is also a humour issue, like Demon slayer, where the tension is completely revoked, e.g being a severely injured character in one panel having their face exaggerated when touched by someone, usually with "owowowowowow!" which takes away from their supposed injuries. Overall: This was one of the most boring manga I have ever read. It has some incredible character and gun designs, Vash in particular, however the manga is let down by poor art composition, a cliche bland story, and forgettable characters with no natural development in a boring planet that's only there to provide a backdrop for the mediocre and boring fight scenes devoid of tension.

I never watched much of the anime series. But I can tell it's a good one by reading the manga. The original Trigun manga has only two volumes which is a bummer, but it continues in a series called Trigun Maximum. This manga series tells some of the journeys Vash has had in the anime. The stories in volume one have some great moments most of which are humorous. However in the volume two, Vash is more seroius and there aren't many funny moments in it. So that basically takes away some points. But the characters are still great at least. If you like theanime series, you might like the manga version. Or maybe the Maximum version of the manga. Whatever you choose is up to you. Read it and see for yourself.

I've heard only great things about the anime, so I was really looking forward to the manga. Unfortunately I was only disappointed. Before I get into the spoiler-heavy critique of the plot, I'll start with an overview of the other aspects. The art: The art style is a bit of a hit or miss. There are some panels that are truly gorgeous. But most of the action sequences, and even some non-action, fall under the somewhat common 90's manga trope of messy to the point of being hard to follow. The characters: Vash is interesting, or at least has the potential to be. He's a seemingly easy going character,flaunting a message of 'Peace and Love' and refusing to take anyone's life even despite being classified a 'localised disaster' level threat and being hunted by people who want to do just that. He has the air of someone with an interesting past, and the story scatters little elements about what happened to him before the big reveal in volume 2-3. The companions he gains are good enough to provide some fun conversations and switch up the mood of the action, while having potential for interesting developments themselves. Now onto the story. Because as I mentioned, we do actually get Vash's backstory revealed. Or at least, the big event that has caused a lot of his issues and motives in the present. Unfortunately, this is only one of my many issues with the manga's story. The writing rushes through the reveal so fast that I hardly found time to care about what was happening, let alone fully understand it. The reveal of what happened to Rem was mentioned so abruptly and concisely that I had to re-read it to even realise that they had just disclosed what had been the big mystery of the plot up till that point. The introduction of Knives in the past was glossed over so little that all we knew about him was 'that one evil thing he did' and the fact that he and Vash used to be some kind of friends. This meant that when he showed up again, what was meant to be a rivals-with-history dynamic fell flat for me. This dramatic reunion between them, when their revealed backstory seemed so rushed, only made the confrontation feel dull. It would have been better to leave it all unknown so that the mystery of their shared past pushes the story forward instead, rather than reveal it in such a lackluster way and rush through their reunion after. Or at least lengthened the story to give it reasonable time to build all its pieces better to make for more impactful storytelling. Outside of the reveal and reunion, a rushed pacing is a recurring issue in the writing, though that's when it was the most evident. Perhaps this is only meant to serve as a prologue to Trigun maximum so I'm being too harsh on it. However, I'd still rather review this as independent from maximum since it stands as a story on its own. And, on its own, it didn't give me a whole lot of drive to read maximum next, even with the new pieces of information it introduced at the end to re-ignite its mystery.