By Dustin Cabeal
You didn’t think I would be back for this, did you? Well, me either. That’s not to say that there was something amazing that happened in this volume that hooked me, just that it arrived for review and I reviewed it. All of the problems I had with the first volume are here and present again. Okay, that might be unfair because there were some improvements, like the pacing. On the flip side, all of the characters are even dumber now.
I never read Death Note, Hell I didn’t even finish watching the last few episodes of the anime. I did enjoy the cat and mouse aspect of the story, though. The entire time you’re waiting to see if the dude gets caught or if he’s smart enough to get out of this situation that he’s put himself in. There’s a back and forth with that because if he were smart enough the first time, then the story would just be over.
Platinum End is trying really fucking hard to have some strange cat and mouse element to the story, but messing it up to the point that it’s unbearable to read. Metropoliman dominates most of this volume. He can’t get any of the other god candidates to come out of hiding and fight him, so he sets up a really stupid trap. You can tell that the creators put some thought into this trap and thought it would be interesting and clever, but it was apparent how it would turn out from the very beginning.
The characters that were picked to be “God” all seem dumb. The only intelligent one is a sociopath that’s willing to murder in front of a huge audience and spout off the entire rules to the game on TV. What’s worse, is that the angels that are guiding them are all incredibly dumb, with the exception of the main dude’s angel. She at least shows up at one point and stops him from doing something stupid, but this only made me question why the fuck she didn’t show up when he was stabbed with the red arrow in the last volume? There’s no consistency to the characters, and the main dude’s angel is trying to turn him into a killer… which didn’t make sense for either of them. That and the common factor in picking everyone might be suicide.
“Hey you were going to kill yourself, wanna be God?”
Yeah, don’t get anyone emotionally balanced for God or help any of these characters with what’s eating at their soul. Nah… just make them kill each other. This story is beyond dull.
The art is not bad. No surprise there. The angel’s designs are all very annoying because they only work in color. The rest of the time it’s like a Shojo kiss scene, but it’s their clothing. Otherwise, the art is just good. It’s not striking, and it never grabs you with its beauty. It feels much like the story in that it’s just going through the motions.
Whereas the first volume of Platinum End was really bad and made me never want to read the series again, the second volume was so ho-hum, predictable and boring that I have a new reason never to read this series. If you’re enjoying it, good for you, but for the life of me I can’t find a redeeming quality of the story, the characters or the art and for that reason, I’m done.
Score: 2/5
Platinum End vol. 2
Writer: Tsugumi Ohba
Artist: Takeshi Obata
Publisher: Viz Media