Hit the “Random” button and see what comes up! In this feature, we take a look at whatever manga the Random Number God decides to throw at us and find out if it’s worth your time.

This time: Kataribe no List, by Fujiya Izuco

Kataribe no List starts off like any other number of typical, cliche manga. Bored, generic, mostly good-hearted high school student who wants a quiet life with no trouble, suddenly finding himself in possession of a magic artifact… And it sort of stays that way. I’m not going to lie and say that this manga has a super amazing start and blows all your expectations of how a story should begin out of the water, or anything like that. It is a pretty well worn setup.

So yeah, our hero Akitsune accidentally switches bags with a strange little girl named List, and finds himself with a magic wristwatch (labelled Aschenputtel – perhaps better known as Cinderella) that can turn back an object’s personal time by 24 hours. He is summarily ambushed by a strange man with a magic item of his own: a piece of chalk (which he calls Wolf and the Seven Young Kids) that can cut things apart, and although List comes to the rescue in the nick of time, Akitsune is forced to turn the watch’s powers on himself to heal his wounds. He recovers, but since he wasn’t in possession of the watch 24 hours ago and Cinderella is a bit of a clingy lady, it fuses into his skin.

Long story short, there are some 200 incredibly powerful magic items scattered across the world, all which were discovered by the Brothers Grimm, who based their world-famous fairy tales off them. List’s duty is to track them all down and seal them away, removing their danger from the world. And since their appearance can morph to match the current era, this is no easy task; especially since now there’s a time limit. Aschenputtel‘s marks are slowly crawling up Akitsune’s skin, and he will undoubtedly die as the infection progresses.

So, in typical manga fashion, they meet up with other people who have found some of the Grimm items, and commence the quest to find the item that can save Akitsune’s life and recapture the rogue Grimm Fairy Tales, while dealing with a shadowy organization made of people with their own Grimm items… yadda yadda yadda, you see where this is going already, it’s a friggin shonen battle manga.

Verdict: Not Grimm At All
I may not have heaped the praise on this manga just now, but I actually think it’s quite good, despite the basic intro. The art is crisp and looks good, the writing is quite solid, the powers are creative and varied… for something that’s basically set up as a generic shonen manga, I’d place this rather high up the list (see what I did there?). Also, special credit to the scanlators of this one: they keep everything clean, and go the extra mile to include lexicon pages that summarize the Grimms’ Fairy Tales relevant to each chapter. Give this one a shot if you’re looking for something a little bit off the beaten path.