Well we’ve fin­ished trans­lat­ing 1st vol­ume and it’s a sum­mer anime, so here’s the review!

Siko­rsky really isn’t the best illus­tra­tor, but he gets better.

I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly impressed by Cam­pi­one! when my friend first dragged me onto the project, its first chap­ter open­ing up like a typ­i­cal harem romance-comedy and the sec­ond fea­tur­ing a clas­sic shounen contemporary-fantasy bat­tle. But I was promised GAR enough to slay gods and the mythol­ogy to come along, so I kept with it, and for once I was taught not to judge a book by its open­ing chap­ters either. It’s still a harem series, but when author Taket­suki Jou decides to fight blas­phemy with blas­phemy, lead by a male com­pa­ra­ble with the demigod heroes of Greece and a hero­ine that manip­u­lates every­one (espe­cially her team­mates) under her fin­ger­tips, this becomes quite the cre­ative endeavor into mythol­ogy — of Heretic Gods.

Fans of mythol­ogy, of super­pow­ered GAR leads, of a harem that just might actu­ally work? Well this is the story for you.

Kusanagi Godou is a high-school boy whose great­est wish is to peace­fully enjoy his life, except by a series of coin­ci­dences and plothax galore he ‘acci­den­tally’ slays the Per­sian God of War, Verethragna, and becomes the 7th god­slayer resid­ing in the world, usurp­ing Verethragna’s ten incar­na­tions as his own power and ascend­ing to divin­ity where no mor­tal man can hope to touch, thus for­ever doom­ing his life to chaos — this is where our story starts. Sounds famil­iar enough to count­less light novel adap­tions out there?

That lasted until he met the war maiden of Greece, Athena, and dis­cov­ered just how many gods he truly faced in the form of a sin­gle Heretic God — gods angered by the mythol­ogy that mankind choose to con­strain and defile them with.

But aren’t mythol­ogy praises to the gods? Yes, but that’s only when you limit the scope to that of a sin­gle cul­ture. In the words of author Taket­suki Jou:

To regard for­eign gods as evil spir­its, demons, and mon­sters to be van­quished by one’s own gods; such exam­ples are plenty. It really is blasphemy.

Caught as the only Cam­pi­one who stood between Athena’s wrath and human­ity, Godou stepped up to the plate to con­front the maiden of war, the gor­gon of snakes, the mother god­dess of earth, and etc… all her other incar­na­tions dif­fused or adapted across cul­tural, his­tor­i­cal, and geo­log­i­cal bound­aries — ori­gins well researched and explained, albeit cre­atively bent at times. Fac­ing an end­lessly pow­er­ful foe, Godou is armed with not just hot­blooded shounen deter­mi­na­tion but also enough adapt­abil­ity and under­stand­ing of his oppo­nent to make even Sun Tzu proud (some­thing quite rare in ani-fandom); not to men­tion faith in his fol­low­ers (aka harem).

[Ike Masato] ‘The red devil’ indeed…

Erica Bland­elli, his part­ner and leader of his com­pan­ions, is a piece of work. This self­ish ojou-sama is not only a dar­ing fighter wor­thy of stand­ing besides a demigod, but is ‘gen­er­ous’ enough to prod Godou to seduce other girls with party poten­tial for his harem. The fine print? She has to be num­ber one, and she will bully, manip­u­late, and black­mail the other girls (and Godou) to ensure her absolute domin­ion. The rea­son this harem may just actu­ally work isn’t because of the Emperor, but because the Empress rules it. She might send shiv­ers down your spine, but she won’t leave you bored.

Unfor­tu­nately for her, Godou, as main male leads always go, is denser than a black hole. For­tu­nately for her, he attracts girls like one as well (to be fair, so did the other demigod heroes of mythology).

Thus begins the story of Godou and his party’s (mis)adventures in defeat­ing the trouble-making Heretic Gods. It’s not deep, it lacks cen­tral themes out­side mytho­log­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions into the ori­gins of blas­phemy, but for those who roll along with keep­ing an open mind, you might just learn some­thing inter­est­ing about cul­tural exchange while hav­ing some fun~

P.S. This is in no way a vote of con­fi­dence for the anime; I don’t trust Diomedea when it comes to adaptations.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Light Novel Project and Project
• Fate/Zero Light Novel Review: Sur­pass­ing Originals
• Bun­gaku Shoujo Light Novel Review: Sui­ci­dal Mime, Matryoshka Literature

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2012 at 16:58 and is filed under Anime, Light Novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.