Books: Hoshin Engi Vol. #2

The second volume of Hoshin Engi continues everything that got started in the first volume: a fast-moving and wildly colorful story based, however loosely, on a Ming-era Chinese classic novel. There’s been any number of manga adaptations of classic Chinese literature, and from what I’ve seen they typically just take the bare bones of the original material and drape a far more outlandish story around it.

Hoshin Engi is no exception, and while I confess I haven’t read the original story, I’m not sure the vast majority of people encountering the manga in English for the first time will have, either. But does it matter? Not really, since the point of Engi is to give us one wild bit of adventure after another, and in that sense it succeeds completely. Like the Dragonball sagas (also adapted, in however loose and open-ended a fashion, from Chinese mythology and fantasy), it gives us a hero and a spate of villains with powers far beyond the human norm, and watches them collide.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.