Claymore


The anime adaptation of the manga ends in Chapter 50, if you want to switch from anime to manga, it is best to start with the war in the north, as the differences to the manga already appeared there. The last 3 or 4 episodes of the anime were not canon.


Claymore is a manga that actually surprised me in a positive way, not only in terms of the main story itself but also the fights, representation and implementation. If you are looking for a good Dark Fantasy (in the direction of Berserk), you will certainly find it here. Just as interesting to see how well the drawing style of the Mangaka had changed between the first chapter and its last, the level of detail was massively increased.


But where it shone positively manga, it also cast a shadow. And unfortunately, this contains a number of negative aspects that tripped the title itself.

First and foremost, the main story (especially the background of the claymore and organization) was quite subtle and it was also built solid. What the problem with this is clearly the consecutive fights that I could almost call story blockers. Story-relevant opponents well and good, but so often an irrelevant monster appeared, which was simply thrown into the story to hold the reader off for another 8 chapters. This was a massive problem, especially from Chapter 120. In general, you could have left out the last 3 Awakened Beings and changed the main story for the antagonist a bit, but NOTHING would have changed in the end result. However, these 3 have almost a total of 25 chapters which made it very annoying and destroyed the tension enormously.

I have little complaint about the final finale, it wasn't perfect, but a satisfactory conclusion for the plot and the main antagonist.

Unfortunately, the anime had screwed up the plot armor from fight to fight, whereas so many characters died at the beginning, there were almost no deaths towards the end, although the opponents were around 50-500 times stronger than the claymore themselves.

There was also a big problem with the characters. There were some backgrounds, but the characters mostly stayed flat until the end. You can get them absolutely zero sympathies no matter how you take it.


Story

The basic idea and the setting are very interesting and it stayed that way. Likewise, the resolution to the story and the background for everything has been quite solid. Unfortunately, as I said, there were too many story blockers that had no relevance. Even if you skipped some of these chapters, you would hardly notice any difference. Unless a new character is introduced again who has no personality or background.

The closer you got to the semi-finals, the more complicated everything got. New characters appeared one after the other, and so did the enemies. It wasn't confusing, on the contrary. It looked irrelevant. You just wanted to know how the main story of Clare would go on, instead, you had to deal with any other fight for another 10 chapters.

The irony is that the opponents that were not story relevant actually had longer fights than the relevant enemies. That surprised me, among other things.

But apart from the weak story blockers, the main plot had a subtle implementation. Even if a lot would have to be repaired.

Drawing/illustration

The drawings were quite meager at the beginning but meager on average. But this improved quite quickly and the drawing style of the characters became more and more high quality, as well as the representation of the environment, fights and monsters more and more detailed. Towards the end, I have to say that some of the monsters were extremely cool in design.

Characters

The focus was never on the characters and that is an absolute fact. Inserting backgrounds is not a feat and it doesn't help a character become immediately noticeable. They lacked a great deal of personality and character. There were 1-2 CLaymores that actually had some personality. The rest were copies with different hairstyles.

At least one has to make an effort with the antagonist to the end and make it appear understandable. As a result, she didn't seem as flat and monotonous as the other characters.

Conclusion
Claymore is undoubtedly a very interesting and promising work. And by far one of the weakest 7/10 ratings I could give. The manga had many qualities, but these were often undermined by a lack of creativity and incorrect implementation.

At least I am glad that the implementation of the main story was saved.