Faust 2

The manga was well-drawn, but I'm not familiar enough with illustration to properly evaluate it. I'll only concern myself with the short stories here:Magical Girl Risuka, NISIOISINA schoolboy sees some people fall in front of a moving bullet train and die. The time magician Risuka thinks magic might have involved, and the two decide to investigate.Wanders randomly for 72 pages. Nonsense plot, no theme to speak of, pseudo-intellectual characters portrayed as intelligent when they're actually confused. All conversations and actions lack context, and the whole work feels unfinished. I was left asking "Why did that happen?" and "Am I supposed to swallow that?" Risuka doesn't deserve praise just for being a creepy, gruesome mahou shoujo story. It didn't even deserve to be printed.If you're looking for something similar, but good, dokes did it right. Already seen dokes? Watch it again.The verdict: BAD--------------------------JagdTiger, Kouhei KadonoShe's a combat-ready synthetic human with a dangerous flaw: a heart.A good old anime-style action story. The glass cannon protagonist is adorable and she has a heart of glass to match.The verdict: GOOD----------------------------Where the Wind Blows, OtsuichiA newspaper from the future carries a very disturbing story for one particular woman: She will die by the hand of the man she loves.Cute coming of age story and a good one. The motif of communication begins with cell phones, becoming more and more impersonal until the main character has to deal with a person. An effective portrait of a very modern girl in her very tiny world.The verdict: VERY GOOD----------------------------Gray Colored Diet Coke, Yuya Sato (excerpt)Two teenage boys admire violence but never commit it. The difference between dominant "humans" and submissive, unthinking "nonhuman" tortures them. They know they are nothing. Then one of them kills himself.The value of this completely inward story is its pervasive sense of cognotive dissonance. Nothing happens in it - not really - The boys' above-average intelligence and below-average force of will makes them easy to believe and hard to care about. After his best friend dies, the MC still learns nothing and decides "I'll become something by the time I turn twenty." I don't have a problem with this form or character type, but it's degenerate compared to the masterpieces of the Showa period.The verdict: MEDIOCRE-----------------------ECCO, Tatsuhiko TakamotoIgnoring the nonsense supernatural frame story:A high school loser who wishes he could be a sociopath puts worms in a cute girl's shoes, simply because she is cute. Turns out she really is a sociopath.Another character study of extreme high school personalities. The most successful of the stories in FAUST 2 in that regard. Although this work is a mess, Takamoto creates a very memorable scene in Chie's secret room. Read it for that one defining spark.The verdict: MEDIOCRE.-------------------------------Reviews courtesy of strangemoe.net

I'll admit it- I only picked up the Faust books because Kouhei Kadono was one of the authors featured, and I'm a complete whore for his works.To my happy surprise, I found myself loving every story in this volume just as much as I did Kadono's. Magical Girl Ritsuka was my personal favorite. I love fantasy, and found the modern twitch on witches and wizards quite refreshing. NISIOSIN's writing was easy to follow and pleasant to read.I'm aware that Japanese light novels aren't all that popular in the US, but I'd recommend them to anyone with an open mind and a love of all things out of the ordinary.

Faust is a collection of awesome authors who publish short stories all collected in one volume. Volume two has different authors than volume one. Many pages but a quick read.

Why didn't this come out sooner???`Traditional' manga, for westerners, is packed with emotives, and cultural references we do not understand. As standard as the page explaining terms of endearment, and a sample of what the manga looks like in Japanese are, such features do not always make them easy for us.Enter Faust. As the name implies, this is something more. It is explosive, vibrant, larger than life, and yet so `literal'. For instance, Magical Girl Risuka by Nisiosion is incredible. If you can imagine MCSI (Magical Crime Scene Investigation), then you have the gist of this story. Time travel, personal vacuums, and blood sacrifice are all important themes in this mystery. "Jagtiger" examines the laws of robotics from a synthetic human/military standpoint. To kill or not to kill, that is the question. Time travel fiction is addressed cleverly in "Where the Wind Blows" by (Otsuichi/Obata). What would you do if you knew you were going to kill the one you love? Even the traditional manga in the back (front) of the book is outstanding. "Iron Man Military Unit" is probably the best illustrated fiction in the book, but the remaining stories also stand out too.This is the manga equivalent of Galaxy, Future, and Astounding all wrapped into one. This "Flight" of fantasy will take you beyond manga shores and fictional skies, your imagination will soar as boundaries blurr and manga fiction becomes fiction. Good literature is good literature, no matter the language or nationality.Faust proves that.[...]Tim Lasiuta

I love the different stories, my reason for buying this was to read the one by Nisioisin, which was fantastic as usual. My only problem with it is the fact that when it arrived, the binding was sort of damaged, though not too badly. Very entertaining, reccomend it to anyone who is looking for something with a different style from normal American books or is a fan of Japanese pop culture.