Manga First Impressions: Psycho Buster

Alright, straight from the file of "I read it online so why the hell not?" I bring you, dear reader, my first impressions of the manga series "Psycho Buster". So far I've only read the first 10 chapters (maybe 2 full volumes?) so please keep in mind that a lot of this is just my "knee-jerk" reaction to this series so far.

The story revolves around four "prodigies" (the translation's term, not mine) who are on the run from their handlers, called "farmers". All four of them have some kind of psychic ability and their leader, a powerful clairvoyant, predicts that they must entrust their fate to someone named "Kakeru". Kakeru turns out to be just a regular high school student: he loves video games and has absolutely no extraordinary attributes. After being attacked by the "farmers" shortly after meeting the 4 prodigies, Kakeru decides to help out where he can and, specifically, to protect the lone female in the group who he quickly develops a crush on. At first, Kakeru seems to have no power himself, save for extraordinary luck. For example, when the chief antagonist is about to shoot him in the head, the bullet is deflected by a piece of falling debris as the house begins to collapse, but only in the villain's vicinity. A couple more lucky breaks and his own quick thinking helps Kakeru protect his new friends from some of the psychic soldiers the farmers send after them, but apparently there is a deeper secret that Kakeru unknowingly hides: one fully known by the clairvoyant and eventually the villain.

This is honestly about as far as the story gets in these first ten chapters (with some minor omissions on my part) and the audience is given a glimpse of the true power that Kakeru holds. The problem is it doesn't make any sense. Now although this series is licensed in the US, I first ran across translated scans of it online so that is what I'm reading. The site that hosts these scans has occasionally had problems putting pages of the different series in their proper order, so I don't know how much of my confusion is due to the translation, possible order mistakes, and how much is the actual plotting. The way the power manifests itself seems to disregard ordinary notions of story flow and no explanation whatsoever is given beyond "it happens". I can't go into details without giving away spoilers so you'll just have to read it for yourself and see what I mean. Maybe in subsequent chapters this will be explained, but for me the discontinuity was almost enough to make me put down the series and stop. You want to entice the reader with mystery, not beat them in the head from behind with a seeming non-sequitir.

The art style doesn't have anything particularly unique in it but the characters are all well drawn, the action scenes flow well and are smartly choreographed and the characters are distinct enough so that mixing them up is a non-issue. The "wtf" moment about Kakeru's power aside, this seems like an interesting series and I will be following it, if only to see if the explanation they concoct is sufficient to explain what happened in chapter 8. :-p

-ZK