Print Review: Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle volumes 1-5

Review Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle volumes 1-5Written by WarpshadowRating good/ very good

An adventure series with a few interesting gimmicks is what Tsubasa boils down to be. I give it a lukewarm recommendation.

Li Syaoran is a boy archeologist who is good friends with Sakura, the princess of the Clow kingdom. One day he takes Sakura to a ruin that he is investigating. There by unexplained phenomena Sakura's soul is fracture into feathers that are scattered about the cosmos. In order to return Sakura back to normal Syaoran embarks upon a quest. At his first stop he bargains for the tools he needs to span worlds but also finds two companions that will journey with him, the swordsman Kuro and the magician Fai D Flowright.

Tsubasa is a good manga for fans of adventure stories and especially for fans of the manga's creators, CLAMP. This is important because this series is littered with Cameo's from the creator's other works and anime adaptations of their works, which creates an amount of Crossover unheard of in manga. This is a shonen manga to the core as even the art style is more typical to the genre with rough, think lines. The general plot is picaresque but the mood of each location differs from the last so the idea of world hopping has a good deal of mileage in it. This is something of a specialty title but even if you fall outside of it's target group you may still enjoy it.