Ever since I finished reading Pandora Hearts at the beginning of last year, I've asked myself if I'll ever find something that captivates me as much, something that resonates with me as much, and something that just blows me away as much as it did.
Now, I MIGHT be leaning myself a bit far out of the window, BUT I think I just found it. Is this really the one? Have I found it? After all this time?
Having said this, let's not waste any more time and get straight to the review (TL,DR at the end this time)
THE CONTENT:
STORY:
Tsubasa Reservoir chronicle takes the concept from Cardcaptor Sakura of "something worse than the world splitting in two" as its base premise: Forgetting everything about the one you care about the most.
At the beginning, it's a story about a guy and his companions travelling the multiverse to find and collect the memories of his most beloved, even if she will never remember him, while the mysterious villain watches over their steps from the background. (So basically, a lot like the inital first half of Pandora Hearts, but with a little more teen angst thrown into it)
But it's SO MUCH more than that. From the moment the journey starts we are accompanying our group of 5 into a plethora of wonderfully intriguing and captivating different worlds where in each one they are put in a particular situation they have to worm their way out of, finding a feather and getting to the next one. I am a bit surprised at how lighthearted it starts out tbh.
Every single arc and world, even if it initially doesn't seem all too interesting, manages to be incredibly well crafted and pulls a twist on you at the end that makes it absolutely worthwhile.
At around 90-100 chapters in, it begins to reveal certain characters' pasts, their motivations and what shaped them into who they are now, and for some time you'll ask yourself "am I still reading the same story?" because the further it goes on the more twisted and dark it gets with each arc, yet always with that small ray of hope still shining on, never to the point of the story becoming too bleak.
Ultimately, this is a story about choices and decisions. "What is it that I want to choose?" "How will my decision affect my future and the future of others around me?" "Am I willing to go so far to make this choice even if it might hurt others, even my friends and loved ones?" "Was the choice I made right or wrong?" "Is there even such a thing as a right choice?"
I believe CLAMP did an excellent job at getting through to the reader how heavy of a burden you carry, or how much of a toll certain decisions you made can be on you.
The story is twisted, dark, messed up, captivating and all in all just mindblowing in the best way possible, but yet it sill manages to carry out a romance plot that is so engaging that you just cannot help to root for it to come to fruition even if the initial base line for it is incredibly painful
Therefore from me, it gets a full score of
10/10
CHARACTERS:
Now, on to the heart and soul of this story: Its characters.
This is genuinely one of the most amazing ensemble cast I've seen in everything I've read. Period.
Every single character is incredibly well defined, has their own style and personality, goes through their own struggles and develops over the course of the story on their own, but also through the influence of the other characters around them.
MY GOD, Sakura's development alone is some of the best I've seen in the medium.
What impresses me the most, personally, is the fact that you can put any combination of 2 or more characters in the same scene toghether and still just KNOW it will be an amazing dynamic and conversation. Every single character has a unique relationship with each of their companions and they help each other develop and overcome their struggles.
After that, the next point on the menu of mindblowingness is each individual character's backstory.
Just when you think "I don't think anything this manga does next can top that guy's backstory", they pull out the uno reverse card and be like "HA, you thought, but how about you take THIS kind of pain next!?" and reveal another character's past that just completely recontextualizes every event prior to this point in the story.
All I can say to that is: The parents are Gigachads.
One last thing to look at, a thing that I usually don't really talk about a lot, or not at all, when it comes to characters is their design.
Now, the character design itself may not be the most special or unqiue thing and if you're like me you've probably seen a shit-ton of similar looking characters in other stories you've watched or read, BUT what stands out in this (as well as most other CLAMP manga from what I've seen) is the characters costumes and clothes.
If there's anything CLAMP knows how to do, it's FASHION. And if there's anyone in the industry knowing how to give every single character an incredible flair and style, then it is CLAMP. Just watch and read Cardcaptor Sakura to see that for yourself.
I've mentioned Pandora Hearts being my favorite story at the beginning and I wanna talk about a point in which these two are pretty similar. The main villain:
Both of these manga share a particular kind of villain, one of my personal favorite kind of villains, as their main antagonist: The one who manipulates everything and everyone from behind the scenes and makes themselves comfortable in it.
Initially I did not like Fei-Wang Reed that much as a character for this kind of thing but in the end when it was revealed, or rather theorized what he ACTUALLY was, I began to see him in a much different light than what I thought before. Just like he said to Syaoran "He's the same". But I'll say a bit more to that in my personal section later.
For now, I'll leave this off and also grant TRC for its characters a perfect score of
10/10
Kind of bummed out that that one girl that's shown in every single world running (or sometimes flying) with bread in her mouth didn't turn out to be something bigger than just a fun background easter egg for people who inspect the details to look for every clue they'll get like me.
CONCLUSION/ENDING:
I am keeping this section the shortest because I do not want to spoil anything and I will go into it a bit more in the "personal section" later, but this manga hurts me right where it matters with its conclusion because it is a kind of ending I will ALWAYS absolutely adore: A bitter-sweet open ending leaving you with just enough to theorize on what is going to happen to our beloved characters next. (Well, putting the sequel Tsubasa World Chronicle aside for now)
9.5/10
THE TECHNICAL ASPECT:
ART:
The art is phenomenal. CLAMP have their own somewhat unique style of drawing their characters but I think they make it work out the best in this story compared to some of their other works (looking at you, xxxHolic and Code Geass).
It's not the best art I've seen around, by far not the best actually, but it has a certain magic that just completely pulls you into it and never lets you go until you've either finished it entirely or are too exhausted to even keep going. (Just me? Ok then, I guess)
If you've seen my reviews for Umineko (part 4 and 7) you'll know what I'm talking about when I say this.
The backgrounds are beautiful and manage to bring life into every single place they go to and make this whole manga just a beautiful sight to experience.
SLIGHT SPOILERS from here:
I gotta subtract half a point though because at some points it is very hard to tell what's going on in a fight scene. I have some problems with that kind of stuff anyway but then you throw in a fight where multiple version of the same character fight against each other while looking (almost) EXACTLY the same and I'm just like "uhm, wtf is happening guys?"
SPOILERS END
9.5/10
SIDENOTE: While reading I listened to the soundtrack of the anime adaptation for this (combined with a 10 hour loop of just Cicada sounds, please don't ask why) which just further proofs the point I've been trying to make ever since Madoka Magica that Yuki Kajiura is a literal goddess. 10/10 anime soundtrack. Right now, day 4 of writing this, I'm listening to the xxxHolic soundtrack, also very solid, OPs and EDs have no business slapping that hard.
So, finally we're coming to the most important part of this review
THE PERSONAL SECTION/EMOTIONAL IMPACT:
I've been planning on reading this ever since I've started watching anime and reading manga back in summer 2018-ish, MUCH longer before I even knew Pandora Hearts which is now my favorite story existed in the first place. So now with finally having been able to read it all I am just so excited that it turned out as good as it was.
Coming from the high of just having finished my previous CLAMP manga Cardcaptor Sakura (which, btw is also one of my personal favorites) I was IMMEDIATELY 100% attached to the main characters of the story Sakura and Syaoran. I know that it's not the same characters and just different versions of them out in the multiverse but that still didn't stop me.
Starting right at the beginning, emotional scene after emotional scene, no matter how small, got to me and put another dent in my already fragile heart. Even the supposedly wholesome scenes of the characters supporting each other were hard to read because of the messed-up-ness of the situation of Sakura not remembering who Syaoran is (not a spoiler, that's literally the premise of the story as I talked about earlier) and him just laughing off the pain.
As the story continued to go on, even in the parts or worlds that initially didn't seem that interesting, I could always hold on to the in-depth characterization everyone got and about halfway through I just KNEW that unless it managed to mess up big time this would become one of my favorites. And like I mentioned a bit earlier even those parts managed to make me completely love it by some kind of twist at the end of the arc. I can't really think of an arc that I do not like in this, and that is kind of rare, even for some of my favorites.
Every time the characters felt pain, I felt it too; every time they celebrated a success and could be happy (and very drunk lots of times), I felt their happiness too. It was just an incredibly engaging and captivating experience going through this whole thing chapter after chapter after chapter.
It got to the point where I had to literally watch a cute-girls-do-cute-things show right after to calm my feelings down a bit ("Is the order a rabbit?", surprisingly a REALLY fun show so far, shameless pandering to the kind of weeb who's a little too into CGDCT-stuff for comfort, so basically to me.)
One of the big things I wanna adress is the fact that people often talk about how confusing and hard to follow this story is, but to be honest I do find it quite easy to follow, not predictable (they always pull some kind of unexpected twist on you that you never could've guessed in a lifetime) and didn't have any real problem with how much of a "mind-fuck" this manga is.
IS WHAT I WOULD'VE SAID IF THE LAST TWO VOLUMES DIDN'T EXIST, because oh boy does it get complicated and twisted.
I was having zero problem following the events as they unfolded and as twist after twist came shooting at me until a certain point in the second to last volume revealed the mangas main plot twist to me: The meaning of the very first pages of the very first chapter. That was the point where my brain just decided to turn itself into emergency mode, and I had to quite literally read every chapter that followed at least twice to get everything that I was seeing. I had no problem seeing what happened, but taking it all in is where the hard part set in and my brain just noped out entirely.
That said, in the end, everything managed to make sense and wrap up nicely for the aforementioned bitter-sweet open ending which just left me with a feeling of complete emptyness that I haven't felt in a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time, the last time being after finishing "Hibike Euphonium" at the beginning of 2020. So this story managed to do something none other, not even my favorite story ever, has managed to do in the last two years.
And that fact alone makes it a worthy contender to stand on the same heights as the aforementioned favorite Pandora Hearts.
I briefly talked about the similarity between Fei-Wang Reed in this as a main antagonist and the main villain of Pandora Hearts, but the reason Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle falls juuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a little short of actually managing to reach the same height as Pandora Hearts in my book is because the latter handles its plot and development around the main villain in a MUCH MUCH better way. That is not to say that Tsubasa doesn't handle it well, it does, really well actually, or that Fei-Wang Reed is a bad antagonist because quite frankly, the concept alone of what he is if he actually is what our characters theorize at the end is incredibly intriguing and opens up tons of possibilities, it is just that the main villain in PH was handled so well that every other villain almost pales in comparison to them and they're what I consider one of the best written fictional characters ever.
I've found a guide online and have been reading this in tandem with the xxxHolic manga because the two are connected and I definitely think you should check out xxxHolic too if just to see another side of the events transpiring in this manga, and to get more of that sweet Sakura character development. And to know what's been going on with Watanuki (the main protagonist of xxxHolic) because he shows up in Tsubasa a lot later on.
I've been somewhat put on a mission by my brain halfway through this story to read EVERYTHING CLAMP wrote that has any kind of connection with Tsubasa, no matter how small it is, and even if it's just a version of a single character from another story. So far I've figured out that "X", "xxxHolic" (obviously) and "Chobits" definitely belong to the ones I should read.
Now letting one of my longest reviews yet (among the ones I wrote on here and just for myself too) come to a close I'll just leave it with a small fun fact about something I said not too long ago:
About two months ago I messaged a friend that 86 (aside from Pandora Hearts and Shinreigari) was the best thing I've watched and read this year, last year, and probably for the next 2 years too. Welp, guess I was wrong because THIS, right here, is peak fiction. I'm actually kind of floored by just HOW good this is. It's been a long time since I gave something a full full 10 points. I'll be giving this a re-read soon after finishing some other CLAMP mangas just to find more details and see if it actually manages to catch up to Pandora Hearts.
This review is now 7 days in the making and finally finished.
TL,DR: This, right here is peak fiction. If you want an engaging and captivating tragic tale with loveable yet deeply complex characters, great fantasy and world building with a fantastic conclusion, completed by a well-developed and well-realized romance subplot, all while building/keeping up and developing a mindblowing mystery in the background, then here you are exactly right. Seriously, read it, it's a masterpiece. If you want more reasons, read the essay above. Here, you'll find a Sakura that is not useless, the very opposite of useless in fact. This is actually a shounen where the word "unique" is quite fitting.