3.5 stars
Rivia and Kuifa are addo (wielder) and sayabito (sword) who travel the land searching for unregistered sayabito, human weapons tightly bonded to their wielders. Their goal is to register and protect vulnerable sayabito who lost their wielders in a great war. Though they have different approaches, they share the common goal of carving out a life in peacetime.
Human-looking weapons? Sign me up. As with most first volumes, there is a lot of setup in this volume but the chapters are longer and I enjoyed learning what a sayabito and addo are. There is a surprise twist with Rivia and Kuifa that I didn’t see coming and that surprise really made me happy. Obviously, there was going to be something special about these two but I didn’t guess what that specialness was. As the story continued, I really enjoyed it. I liked seeing what happens when a sayabito loses their addo and how it affects them. Rivia and Kuifa are complete opposites but they manage to work together in harmony.
The colored pages are really well done and I love it when that gets added to a manga. It brings it to life a little bit. I did have some conflicting feelings about the drawings. Some scenes are well thought out and others feel like very little time was put into the page or panel.
The reason I didn’t give this four stars is because I had a hard time with the speech bubbles. It is really hard to tell who is talking sometimes. There are a lot of speech bubbles just floating instead of being attached to the person talking. I think that needs to be fixed in order to make the manga more readable.
Overall, I like the manga and want to continue, I just hope the artist improves as we go along and the speech bubbles are more clear about the speaker.
Thank you to NetGalley and Kodansha for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Spellbound Reviewer 