Manga Review: Code Breaker

Title: Code Breaker
Author: Akamine Kamijyo
Release: Weekly
Status: Ongoing
Genre: Shonen
Art: A
Originality: B
Story: B
Characters: A
Humor: A
Action: A

Impression: This series comes from the creator of Samurai Deeper Kyo, a series which I thought was overly dependent on “1-up”ing dues ex machina battles and was also unnecessarily long. Fortunately the battles here aren’t as bad or a long as they were in Kyo and I really hope he intends to keep it that way. The story is about a girl who witness a young man who transfers over to her class kill people using a mysterious blue flame coming from his hand. The young man is Ogami Rei and he works for a secret group within the government as the newest addition to a group special people with powers like him. Through a series of events, he now has to observe and protect the girl who is very odd and oblivious to the romance related misunderstandings by the people around the pair. What I like about this series is how the two main characters grow after meeting each other and how they interact with each other’s respective lifestyles. More often than not the results of these interactions are very funny and exhaustive for Ogami. I have to praise the author for developing the romance between the two in such a subtle and realistic(?) way. Love is not something formed from being impressed in several big incidents as games and most harem manga would have you believe but through a gradually expanding mutual understanding of one another and the author uses this so well that it feels absolutely natural for us to see Ogami care so much for Sakuranokouji later in the story, even to the extent of doing something incredibly humiliating to help her out. This manga is still just beginning though as we haven’t seen the main conflict and that the battles between the super humans are just starting but despite the likeliness of the author’s old habits coming back to haunt my enjoyment, I am looking forward to more great chapters from him.