GTO: The Early Years If your familiar with the Great Teacher Onizuka manga/anime, then you'll probably enjoy this little spin off series based around the teen years of Onizuka and Dahma. It's pretty simple when it comes to plot, which basically involves the two delinquents trying to lose their virginity and through a series of drastic action, hilarity ensues. If you liked the original series, then I'm sure you'll enjoy the quirky humour and the delinquent high school badassery that follows the main characters around. It's fun to read and I'd recommend it if your looking for a few chuckles.
Paranoia Agent A psychological thriller that takes a variety of characters from all walks of life and entwines them into a local phenomenon that delves into each characters deepest problems and how they react to the world under different circumstances. It has such and interesting plot and I find it really hard to stop myself from reading until the early hours of the morning. The characters are what makes the show, at first they all seem kind of normal, but as you start to see what happens behind closed doors, their real characteristics and problems start to open up and it's sometimes frightening. The main plot line involves a series of attacks from an unknown delinquent that the media have named 'Little Slugger' and it follows two detectives are in charge of finding out how the attacker is and how all his victims are connected to each other. Paranoia Agent was made to twist your perspective of how people are when alone and how certain people react to certain situations and it succeeds on both accounts. If your into thrillers that need a little bit of brain power to get in to, then highly recommend this series.
BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad BECK is special. It's special because it breaks away from a lot of stereotypical elements that hold most manga back these days and actually delivers a real story, something that I can relate to and hope to achieve. I loved BECK, I've read thousands of books, watched hundreds of movies, played hundreds of games and I've seen the ending to TV series that have lasted decades, but BECK is my favourite. It's a story about a young guy who's lost in his own boring little world, he then one day meets a guitarist who changes his life forever by introducing him into a new world of friends, music and love. Slowly, a band begins to emerge out of this friendship and they spend the series trying to become a popular rock band in Japan's underground music scene. This all sounds simple, but it's really not, the driving element in BECK that makes it special is the relationships the lead builds up with all the characters, real relationships. They don't involve crazy love triangles, mass betrayal, knife fights in the alley, they're just real relationships involving believable characters in a real scenario that many people wish they could be apart of. You know how people want to be Superman? Well, they're crazy, because it's impossible, but what BECK did was show me a realistic story that I wish I could be able to tell about myself. I won't go on, but I will say that BECK is probably the most under appreciated manga in it's respective medium and it upsets me that many people won't be able to appreciate how special it is. I thought I might as well post some of my thoughts from my now dead Manga recommendation thread.
Bet with Conegamer and AussieGecko that the PS3 will have more exclusives in 2011 than the Wii or 360... or something.
