The fifth volume of this series however begins in a more casual manner with the First Homework miniarc. Tantei Gakuen Q seems to be going the way where they have many different length arcs to variate the flow of the series and to avoid exhaustion similar to what you often see in Detective Conan (although no Conan arc is as long as the Kamikakushi Village case). Even though this series is created by the Kindaichi Shounen authors who shine more with their longer stories, the short 3-chapter cases have been pretty decent in this series as they are used in interesting ways as transitional stories. There was a 3-chapter build-up arc to the Kamikakushi Village case for example, and also a miniarc to build up to the longer final exam case in the first volume as well.
First Homework story takes place for the first two chapters of the fifth volume. We get to see a little bit of slice-of-life with our main character Kyu and his mother as they figure out that Kyu seems to like his classmate Meg romantically. In the color pages Meg's hair is always drawn as pink but apparently it's actually brown. It might be the same with all of the characters in this series as Kyu is colored with dark green hair and Ryu has purple-ish hair in color pages, but in reality they could be black and yellow or something. I've always wondered about how in the world do these characters who are supposed to live in real world have these anime colored "natural" hair colors, but apparently they're just colored like that by the assistants of the shounen magazine or something instead of being the actual canon, real colors.
Now, in the Dan Detective School the most prodigious students, our main characters, are in the Q-Class which is the highest tier of classes in the school. It's the class where everyone else wants to get into. However, the A-Class of DDS has managed to do more than the Q-Class in terms of solving mysteries. In DDS there are constant power struggles between the A- and the Q-Classes in which the A-Class students aim to take the place of the Q-Class with better achievements. There are other classes in DDS, but the Q Class is the only class being primarily taught in the old school building which was the legendary detective Dan Morihiko's old detective agency headquarters back in the day.
The rivaling A Class consists of following students (we're apparently missing the fifth for now):
1) Sakurako Yukihira who wants to become the successor of Dan Morihiko as the best detective in Japan,
2) Goda Kyosuke, also known as the Puzzle King,
3) Shiramine Hayato, an expert on magic due to his father being a magician,
and a certain clown university student whom Megumi knows.
But this power struggle between the students of A and Q Classes is used as a way to create stakes in the story. The characters, especially Megumi, always wonder about how well they'd be able to do against geniuses of the rivaling class.
The First Homework case
The First Homework case in this volume is quite short in of itself but it's somewhat intriguing because it's unusual to these detective fiction stories and because of how the homework has to do with Dan Morihiko's past as Dan gives the Q Class a task to take home with. The Q Class has to figure out this case - this first homework - or they might be demoted to A Class.
The task has to do with Dan's time in his detective office (which is the old school building) with his assistant, two years after the office was built. A woman came to the office and asked Dan & his apprentice to help her with an inheritance property embezzlement situation between her and her brother. The woman, her brother and a 3rd witness measured a piece of land to split for inheritance. The full length of the land is 50m^2 and put in half it's 25 meters for the brother and 25 meters of the land for the woman. However few years later the part of the land she got was only 23 meters. So the question is how did the brother trick the woman to measure the land wrongly, or did something else happen for the land's size to become smaller?
The answer to the First Homework is whatever, it's not something one can really come up with even though it's a fair guess to make (I guess), but the case itself is used to develop Meg to become more like a real detective who tries to solve cases without asking for help as she gets over the fact that she was useless during the Kamikakushi Murder Case.
It's nice to see that TGQ has such strong overarching plotting, things do not reset so far case by case unlike in Kindaichi, etc.
After School Danger case
The second case is merely a chapter long but kicks off with some mystery about Ryu going on in the backgrounds; Meg thinks that she's met Ryu before or something like that, but she has a photographic memory, so how come she doesn't remember Ryu perfectly? Also, Ryu lives with a woman who was allegedly given a duty to protect Ryu by Ryu's grandfather, and he'd joined the Dan Detective School because of some mysterious mission he has to deal with. It's presented kind of haphazardly and so far I don't really care about Ryu or his mystery as it doesn't feel planned to perfection so far, but hopefully that will change. Most importantly the authors need to make Ryu a better character. He's only been shown as some über genius almost on par with our main character Kyu but also with countless other skills, but also a gary-stu that can do anything isn't an interesting character type to me (which is partly why I'm kind of on the edge about Kyuu's character especially). I'm interested in learning more about him because of this lack of character so far in the story.
After school. Meg, Kyu and Kinta decide to visit Meg's house that's on the 12th floor of a building. Meg lives with her 19-year-old sister, but when the group gets to the apartment, Meg's key doesn't fit in. It's the right key, so one theory is that someone might've pick-locked the door and messed with the insides of the lock.
We get to see that the DDS badge contains seven different kinds of lock-picking tools that one could use to pick locks, but Kinta still manages to brute-force the lock open even with those. There is some interesting kind of quick double trick in this thievery situation that deals with our main characters thinking how the culprit might want to think. Basically, the culprit created a certain diversion and tries to use that to escape. Very basic, yet clever. I like how there are different "tricks to hide tricks" in detective fiction, shows how flexible the authors minds can be.
After the culprit is caught Kyu suspects that the thief may have been trying to test out Meg's photographic memory ability. Then later on, we get to see a scene where the thief has beat up the cops that took him in and we get to see that the woman who's taking care of Ryu was the one to order this mysterious man to test out how strong Megumi's memory is - and after the case she deems it as far too dangerous and plans to get rid of Meg "for Ryu's sake". Whatever this "getting rid of" and "for Ryu's sake" actually mean, we'll see some other time.
Murder in Spirit Summoning case
The next case, Murder in Spirit Summoning, is the main case of volume 5 and it introduces us to the concept of occultism. However surprisingly it's only a medium-sized short case of four chapters packed full of ideas. This is an interesting volume from these authors as it handles three full cases and one case that goes over to volume 6. Historically Kindaichi cases span over one volume in length, and Tantei Gakuen Q already had two massive cases in the 3rd DDS trial case and the Kamikakushi Village Murder Case, which were basically Kindaichi cases. This time however the 5th volume is kind of like a Detective Conan volume, the first case is fairly short as it's only two chapters, the second case of the volume is just one chapter, and the main case - this case - is four, and the final case of the volume goes over to the next vol. It's very varied and manages to keep it fresh, and surprisingly enough, it all flows very nicely in an overarching manner. One can feel things develop and move forward from one case to the other. It's honestly great to have series like this. I'm interested in seeing more of this type of writing from the series.One thing to note is that there is noticeably more substance in the some of the chapters of Tantei Gakuen Q than Kindaichi so far.
Anyway, the case opens up with our main character Kyu sleeping in his normal school - as apparently he goes to another school than just DDS; while he goes to DDS for most of the series he still attends a normal high school - and his classmate, Ichinose Kaoru (14) decides to ask him for some help regarding a supernatural talent called spiritual summoning. At the end of the week an expert on summoning spirits of the deceased will arrive to Kaoru's home to call for her late mother's spirit. Apparently one can call upon these spirits and order them to talk to others via writing.
Kaoru's mother, Ichinose Hanayo, had deceased in a plane accident half a year prior, and while Kaoru isn't superstitious she's still thinking that the spirit summoner might be legit because that expert carried a request letter which was written in Kaoru's mother's handwriting - the handwriting was even taken to be analyzed by Kaoru's elder brothers. The mother's request according to the letter was to ask the spirit summoner to summon her spirit to be summoned if anything ever happens to her.
A while back there was a spiritual summoning meeting in which Kaoru's family met up with the summoner. In that meeting this person started to talk in the mother's voice and did very odd things that made Kaoru's uncle and other family believe that the summoner is legitimate. Kaoru's problem is that she wants Kyu to come with her to the next meeting as the summoner will reveal something related to Kaoru's mother's will - and her family is filled with anxiety as they're worried the revelation might have anything to do with inheritance shares. Kaoru feels that something bad is going to go down in the next meeting, and for that, she wants Kyu, a student also part of the famous Dan Detective School, to expose the summoner for the fraud she is.
By the way, I find it funny that we get to learn that Kyu is very scared of ghosts in the build-up to this case.
Once again, Kyu, Kinta & Megumi are the only ones that want to head over to where the next case awaits while Kazuma & Ryu want to sit it out, however their teacher Dan Morihiko decides to make this Occultism Case the next school work of the entire Q Class. We get to see more of Dan's assistant Nanami this time as Nanami's job is to indirectly supervise the Q Class. It's interesting that we get to immediately hear that Nanami's job is to disguise as one of the participants of the spirit summoning event. We also get to hear Nanami and Dan talk about something called "Meiosei" and its return, a bit of foreshadowing towards the upcoming overarching storyline I assume.
Cast of Characters for Murder in Spirit Summoning Case include:
Ichinose Tomohiko (Kaoru's eldest brother, 22),
Ichinose Akihiko (Kaoru's second oldest brother, 20),
Otaguro Tamotsu (Head waiter, 52),
Kusaka Sachiyo (Kaoru's aunt, 35),
Kusaka Shohei (Kaoru's uncle, 40),
Nabeshima Sayaka (Secretary, 26),
Asakura Kosei (Spirit Summoning Expert),
Fujisawa Hiroshi (Asakura Kosei's assistant, 28),
and of course Ichinose Kaoru herself.
For the spiritual summoning ritual everyone is to gather around the summoner - Asakura Kosei - in a room while holding hands. The idea behind gathering in a circle is to not allow the spirit to run away. The room itself is pitch dark except for just one candle that the summoner brought into the room. Eventually the summoner will blow the flame out until there is no light in the room, and as that is done weird noises start to arise from all the material in the room; chairs, containers... then the summoner will suddenly start to speak with a voice similar to the deceased. Then, after the spirit summoning meeting a notebook that's on a table in the corner of the room will have handwriting of the deceased that's written seemingly quickly / in a hurry.
This time however the noises seem to be made in pain in the darkness. All of the suspects have gathered around the spirit summoner, except they're all seemingly holding hands with the DDS members, so when the stabbed body of the spirit summoner happens to appear after the lights get turned on, you know we've got an impossible murder on our hands. Was it actually the spirit of the deceased that brought down their wrath upon the summoner? Or was the culprit a human?
It's cool that we get to see Ryu ever so slightly actively affect this case with his intellect and instincts by the way. This story is kind of basic at first but we get this nice situation where the story isn't just a generic murder as our DDS members also play a quick role in this story and its case-only characters before the murder happens.
Anyway, this is a hard case to rate. I didn't really expect it to be anything special as I saw it to be only four chapters in length, and the set-up with the bloated amount of characters for such a short case did take my interest down by quite a bit, but they ultimately actually do manage to make good use of the large case cast as objects rather than characters. The case started mostly quite basic and bland but the answer is really well crafted - in fact it was almost too over-the-top for a medium-length short case; it's hard to take in and it could have been an emotional rollercoaster in a longer case. I didn't suspect this type of answer to this case as this kind of suspect is actually kind of rare in these detective manga series. The explanation portion is easily the highlight of this case, though perhaps the murder weapon was a bit too lightly presented (I recall them mentioning about it but I don't see many noticing it, even though it's supposed to be in front of our eyes at all times). Other than that we get some interesting insight into a mysterious organization named Pluto who apparently came up with this murder trick - so this organization is going to be the overarching villain of this series similar to the Men in Black in Detective Conan, except here they seem to be able to powerfully hypnotize people somehow in this series.
In general the tricks and treats in Tantei Gakuen Q have been surprisingly high-quality consistently I'd say, as in the experience of the writers really shows when they are able to come up with these crazy answers for seemingly normal situations, however, too much craziness for every single case could end up being to this series' detriment if they let it go out of hands. Regardless, TGQ really feels like a good mystery series so far (and a bit like Ace Attorney as well with the 'crazy' aspect of the answers in the cases). The authors are basically putting a lot of variety to the table and using their best ideas so far. The grand answer to the Kamikakushi Village Murder Case didn't impress me because I had seen a similar trick before so I knew of it beforehand, but this time I was quite surprised. In this case the culprit can also actually be logically pointed out, but that requires some thinking on the facts they present (I didn't really bother much trying to remember all these different names).
The volume ends with the first chapter of a story named Q vs. A which seemingly deals with the Dan Detective School's two main rivalign classes, the A Class and the Q Class. But more on that in the next volume review.
Volume 5's occultism case dare I say ended up the strongest of all the cases so far despite requiring a bit of suspending one's disbelief to completely swallow, I think. The way that the murder was arranged also is a great and even somewhat epic introduction to Pluto's skills at crafting crazy murder methods to clients. I think I might have more motivation to keep reading this series in row again with the villain organization Pluto being introduced. I'm quite happy how much the authors able to tell in these chapters compared to Kindaichi stories by the way. Oh, and Dan Morihiko's assistant does seemingly say something akin to "Pluto has begun to move in the shadows once more", so I wonder if this organization and its key members was stopped in the past or something? Hypnotism might be too powerful of a plot-breaking ability though as they could just seemingly hypnotize everyone who came after them, so let's see how it's handled in the future. Hopefully the villain members are entertaining, similar to the Black Organization members in Detective Conan.
No comments:
Post a Comment