Im: The Great Priest Imhotep

tl;dr: A manga with a pretty solid first half that becomes an incoherent mess. This manga is about the great Egyptian high priest Imhotep, AKA Im, reawakening in the present in order to deal with false gods known as the magai. It starts off with him appearing in modern Japan and helping a girl named Hinome with her magai problem and then basically just crashing in her house while he deals with other magai, as he has nowhere else to go. This part has a large focus on the effects magai have on people and is essentially a bunch of short stories about people overcoming psychologicalbarriers to grow as people. The writing isn’t particularly amazing, but it deals with its subject matter decently enough. Furthermore, the comedy is pretty great and Im being such a weirdo is hilarious. That’s only the first volume though, and in the second it transitions into focusing on a more serious overarching plot regarding Imhotep’s background including where the magai originally came from and Im’s relationship with his best friend Djoser. The set up regarding the overarching narrative is pretty solid here, though the focus is heavily on Im’s relationship with a new team he’s working with, the Japan chapter of the Amen Priesthood. Due to various circumstances relating to both Im and their backgrounds, they originally all hate him, and Im accepts that he deserves to be hated, but over time he manages to bond with them and in turn helps them go through character growth as well. The action improves a good deal and the battles are pretty solid. The general pacing is pretty good too. Things start going down very quickly about half way through once the story shifts to being set in Egypt. The plot becomes a complete mess. It’s clear that the mangaka didn’t have an overarching view of where to take the story or at the minimum was never able to stick to it for extended periods. It’s very disorganized and has a terrible sense of flow. Characters pop in and out in a way that feels kind of weird and makes characters feel inconsistent and hard to get invested in. As such the myriad of emotional beats that are centered around investment in characters just don’t land. There’s an attempt at trying to show that every single character including every single villain is actually a good person, but it really just doesn’t work for some and feels really forced. Foreshadowing that felt like it was going to be important turns out not to matter at all. Past plot devices are forced into fitting into the mold of new plot devices in ways that are incredibly inconsistent tonally and thematically. There are explanations given that it doesn’t make any sense at all to not have had explained earlier. There’s lots of info dumping that ultimately doesn’t even matter. Mechanics relating to action that were developed earlier are dropped and the action just becomes random powers that do random things whenever they need to. And all of this leads up to an ending that’s complete nonsense and not at all satisfying. I would also like to note that the use of Egyptian mythology and history is pretty half assed. Like it’s not as bad as Yu-Gi-Oh for example, but it’s not much better. It’s all fiction anyway so it’s not like it matters that much and it even gives a plot reason at the end for why things are so different from our understanding of Egyptian history/mythology so I’m not viewing this as a detriment. I still thought I should mention it as if you’re considering reading this solely for the Egyptian aspect it’s definitely not worth doing so. The art is okay but not that great. The style looks pretty nice in color but the black and white feels like it’s really lacking in personality to the point it’s kind of dull. Design wise the use of Egyptian aesthetics was decent, but beyond that it was pretty lacking.