Akaboshi: Ibun Suikoden: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes (Patreon)

Manga Details

• Ah-kah-bo-shee, Ee-bun (similar to the oo sound in hood) Suey-ko-den
  • Akaboshi literally means “red star/planet”
  • “Ibun” means something like “differing account” or “side story,” meaning that they aren’t going to be strictly following the plot of the original Water Margin story.
  • Suikoden is the Japanese name of the Chinese novel. It is written as “water-vicinity-legend.” Apparently another English title for The Water Margin is “Outlaws of the Marsh,”
• Akaboshi: Ibun Suikoden
• Author: Amano, Youichi
• Author’s other works:
  • Over Time - The start of WSJ’s baseball curse, a very real thing that exists. Think Hikaru no Go or Field of Dreams or Angels in the Outfield, but it’s about a dweeb baseball player haunted by an awesome baseball player classmate of his
  • Art for stealth symphony - Maxybee loves it
  • Ana no Mujina - Supernaturally-powered con-man helps cops punish the unpunishable or something
  • Examurai - Crappy future-set fantasy story starring some of the many members of Japanese boy band Exile
  • Mist Gears Blast - A video game tie-in for a live service phone game that didn’t last the year
• Assistant for Hideaki Sorachi (Gintama) and Tohru Uchimizu (bunch of flops)
• Run dates: May 18, 2009 to Nov 2, 2009
  • Replaced Bokke-san
  • Replaced by Neko Wappa which was made by the Kaiju 8 dude
• Chapters/Volumes: 3/24

About the Manga

• Plot
  • Taisou is a lazy asshole with a big fuck off sword and he lives in ancient China which is apparently an awful place to live. After getting a piggyback ride from some bandits he’s stopped by a young girl who claims to be a member of the “Taiten Gyoudou” the honorable thieves who want to overthrow the Song Dynasty I think. The governor of the village where the little girl lives, aka the “Chi-ken” is just comically evil and kills people while raising the taxes on the starving town. Thankfully tho, Taisou saves them by lighting his sword on fire and running around because he is actually “Falling Star Taisou,” a member of the Taiten Gyoudou. There’s 108 of them which is a significant number in Buddhism, David. Taisou and the little girl then aimlessly walk around until they find a monk who is also in the Taiten Gyoudou. We learn about the evil king who actually looks sick as hell, and that they need to gather more of the 108 to fight him. Taisou sets his eyes on Oushin who’s like a famous karate instructor for the military or something. Oushin refuses to betray his country, but then the government shows up and is so comically evil that his adoptive son Rinchuu decides to help Taisou while Oushin helps his sick mom escape. We meet more of the Taiten Gyoudou but they don’t really matter because Rinchuu and Taisou beat up a guy who thinks he’s his own famous grandpa.
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  • Taisou, Rinchuu and the little girl meet a woman named Kosanjou who wants to be protected but is like immensely strong and of course hot. The boss of the Taiten Gyoudou slaps Taisou and then hugs him cuz he’s a creepy dad I guess. The Gyouradous wanna invade a castle and take it over as their base, so the main characters try and infiltrate it but they’re stopped by the gatekeeper: a fry cook with a shit ton of knives. They gotta do a test where Taisou, Rinchuu, and Kosanjou are all in shackles while fighting a bunch of other dudes who aren’t. They beat them by riding piggyback on each other. But anyway the other test is that Taisou has to fight the fry cook and Rinchuu has to fight two guys, one of whom is just fat Luffy. Rinchuu and Taisou loses but the frycook thinks he’s too adorable to kill so he says Taisou wins. Turns out the guy who runs the castle has evil ink mind control powers oh no! And also? He’s evil!!!!!!! He gets help from some really tough and weird bad guys who may work for the bad government and brings them into the castle to kill all his followers for some reason I don’t know. The bad guys start to win for a bit but then the good guys arrive on a boat and wouldn’t you know it but the tide starts to shift.
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  • The bandits start to realize that maybe their boss is evil but then he unleashes a really cool looking magic ball of ink that brainwashes them into forgetting about it. And the super evil bad guy squad all use their ban-ki’s, shifting into their final forms! One of them even tells Taisou that he has a secret hidden power of the stars that he didn’t know about even though he’s literally called Falling Star Taisou and has magic powers. Don’t worry tho because thankfully the strongest Taiten Gyoudou: a Tao priest who gets lost and blows soap bubbles uses shampoo magic to undo all the mind control and erase the battle’s tension. Taisou was able to take a short nap when he got protected by a bubble and when he woke up he figured out how to unleash his secret powers so he does it and his sword looks cool. Then the bubble priest faces off against the evil ink guy and tells him that he taught the guy who taught him, and the bubble guy easily wins. Taisou goes flying off somewhere but just happens to land in front of the ultimate evil king. Taisou has a flashback where we learn that the king ate his dad and Taisou gets knocked into a river. Then some people find him and ask them to join him I think and the manga ends.
• Characters
  • Taisou Hyoudou(Thai-sew)
    • Eboy
    • Kicks people in the assholes
    • Treasured sword Fukuma No Tsrugui
    • Doesn’t give a fuck about anyone
    • Power of friction
    • Master is a baby tiger
  • Pikachu girl
    • Wants to do good but seems useless?
  • Rinchuu [reen-chew]
    • Swordsman
    • Treated like shit
    • Was a beast now a human
    • Rival guy
    • Makes vacuums
    • 
      
  • Kosanjou [ko-sahn-joe]
    • tsundere
    • Sensitive about her boobs
    • Is gentle…or is she
    • Likes burgers

Why it failed

• So much text and I have 0 idea what the point of it is
• It really shows how bad this is when it has a high quality translation and still makes no fucking sense
• Does this series have a plot?
• The humor is not funny like the monk hair
• Everything is so tropey but it feels like it's playing it straight
• There's no sense of traversal it feels like they're teleporting everywhere
• This is a great example of having 0 fluff actively can hurt a story
• These pages are so fucking dense it’s like trying to fit 1.5 pages in
• This series just throws characters at you, kinda reminds me of bleach
• An “exam” arc, really?
• The star system is so dumb it’s just oh they have some vague magic with no rules to it
• Teh training arc is so lazy, wow only 3 people can pass and there’s 3 of them crazy
• The manga legit gives up on trying to explain the magic and just straight up has magic
• There is no world building at all
• Even though the art is well drawn it is laid out like shit and extremely difficult to follow
• Unbelievably bad tonal whiplash.

What it did well

• Art is solid
• Historical china is a fun setting
• Cool character designs
• Art is sometimes legitimately fantastic
• The gag cutaways are sometimes cute and a little funny

Where it could have gone

• Turn this into a video game with 107 bosses
• Actually this Is just dynasty warriors
• Make this a pulp parody wink at the camera or something
• Legit make this a ripoff of shaman king, have it be a tournament and have some fun flashbacks during battles or something. Pretty much Record of Rag did this much better

Misc Thoughts

• B U D D H I S M
• Eboys
• The whole “letting them capture me cause it’s convenient” trope I feel I haven’t seen in a while
• Sword looks like rising sun flag
• Maxy Bee thoughts:
  • Based on Water Margin, one of China’s four great classical novels. You may recognise it as also being adapted into the Suikoden series of JRPGs. There is some debate among eastern and western scholars as to what four should be considered the four classical novels, because there’s six common choices, and scholars seem to hate just including all six, but Water Margin is always in there, along with Journey to the West, which of course inspired Dragon Ball, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, the tv show Monkey, and just about everything else ever. I’m more of an ‘Investiture of the Gods’ person, so have no care for which four of the six get the most praise.
  • A very pretty comic lacking a lot of clarity and much in the way of panel to panel storytelling. Busy.
  • The scans are dogshit low quality stuff that make it look worse than it is (as was the way back then), but it is still quite hard to focus on.
  • Between this, Stealth Symphony, and the baseball series Over Time, I’m under the impression that Amano really likes wide and varied casts. He enjoys doing character design work for more than the actual comics part of his job.
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Final Verdict

• Six Word summary
  • Community
    • Duderocks: Just play Suikoden by konami instead (it's also based on water margin)
    • Orange: 108 devil fruits to rule china
    • Yeti: Claustrophobic comic composition creates complete confusion
    • Twolfwood: The mangaka doesn't understand friction sawing
  • David: Manga that 10-86’d any good ideas
  • Jordan: damn that is some gorgeous trash
  • Guest:
• Flop or not
  • This is horseshit, go watch G Gundam
  • Read Grappler Baki it’s like the inverse of this
• Is this the best/worst series we’ve talked about