Manga Review: Lost+Brain

Title: Lost+Brain
Author: Yabuno Tsuduku, Ootani Akira
Release: Weekly
Status: Finished
Genre: Seinen, Psychological
Art: A
Originality: C
Story: B
Characters: C
Humor: B
Action: B

Impression: This is about a young high school genius who is basically perfect who feels that everything has become boring and that people are weak so learns the art of hypnotism to enact his plan for his ideal world. It’s basically a rip-off of Death Note only instead of sure-kill notebook, the guy uses hypnosis to get people to do what he wants. The main character himself is what you get when you combine Light’s assholeness with Lelouch’s Geass so it’s very, very hard not to call him a rip-off. I swear, it’s very hard to like this manga and its main character since the story runs too similarly to a certain cult hit and the main character isn’t even given a scene for the readers to sympathize with him. Sure the hypnosis could have been very interesting but the way that it’s explained in the manga is rather superficial and most of the aspects are introduced in quick succession of each other making it sound very bland. If the story and characters were taken in different directions I’m sure it would have been much more well received. Hopefully there won’t be anymore manga trying to rip-off classics so obviously like this one did.