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Zodiac P.I
(click the pictures to enlargen them) And here comes what once was my all-time worst manga ever read. For now it has lost the questionable honour to another title(s), and I hadn't even read it in a long while until I stumbled into it again in a library. I have to admit that it's not quote ~that~ horrible, but still belongs to my bottom tier. The story tells about Lili Hoshizawa, a girl whose speciality is making horoscopes that are surprisingly accurate. But she has a secret alter ego - she's also Spica, a legendary detective! And she's not just an average detective, she has a magical ring that houses the chibi Zodiac spirits! So when someone is murdered, Lili consults her ring and gets a clue in the form of the victim's horoscope for that day ("beware of leaving the house, you might see someone's dark side! A long thing object will reveal the secret!"), which will help her solving the mystery! At the beginning of the story her old childhood friend Hiromi Oikawa transfers to her school. He is of course into detective stuff as well, and the duo ends up inspecting cases together. When the mysterious rival Sirius appears things get more complicated. Ummmm... okay. I really like Detective Stories (I'm a big fan of Holmes, Poirot, Marple and Monk, and Detective Conan is cool too), but this just doesn't work. I have always found all this Zodiac stuff a waste of time, but okay, astrology genious is a fun and original idea for the lead character. But with the murders? How can you take anything seriously when Spica's solution method is getting predictions from chibi spirits? And the thing is that she never understands their clue and it's only revelealed afterwards ("oh, when the crystall ball showed my face it meant that the culprit used a mirror! Now I get it!"). What I look for in a detective story is how the intelligent detective collects the clues and figures out the solution themselves. But ms. Spica gets a divine prediction from the Zodiac spirits? Urrgggh. The murder cases aren't all that well written either. 
Zodiac P.I. also suffers from the common shoujo protagonist problem: The heroine's personal achievements aren't all that good when the lead male is around. Lili has to be saved more often than she should, and she needs help in her detective business as well. If Spica is such an amazing and well known detective why does Oikawa figure out the culprit at the same time, without the help from a magic ring? And was it really necessary for the heroine to need saving in the very first chapter? In the last arc she totally loses it and needs encouragement (or saving) from Oikawa like, five times. Okay, relying on your friends instead of trying to do everything alone and the power of love are fine messages, but I'd find it preferable if the heroine could get more chances to shine without help of from her boyfriend. Also, while outside the magic ring and zodiac spirits the manga had been pretty conservative about magic and you could easily ignore their existence altogether. But then the grand finale introduces some weird hypnosis-by-reflecting-light-with-jewels technique that feel ~very~ out of place, when all the other crimes had been normal stuff without any supernatural (or pseudo-scientific) approach. I found the grand finale the weakest of all the cases, in addition to the insane hypnosis angle it had awesome DRAMA with the main character's family relationships, and I couldn't care less about it. Now that I think of it, the last volume had very little to do with the original detective story idea; there were very few instances that required any deduction and most of the content was just your average shoujo drama with a distressed but ~very determined~ heroine and her boyfriend. The main character is pretty uninteresting. She does have a backbone (which kind of crumbles a bit as the series goes on), but personality-wise there's very little that sets her apart from the sea of other shoujo heroines. She's very very energetic, she even jumps out of windows (why is it that every shoujo author must always do the "see my character is this awesome she just jumped out of the window!!!" Is there a rule that you can't think of any original way to introduce an energetic character?)! But she's not very smart, she's bad at school and her only good subject is gym! Naturally the male lead is super smart to compensate. The male lead also has a stupid quirk: She has had bad experience with girls, so he developed an allergic reaction that his face becomes all spotty if a girl touches him! Naturally the lead male turns out to be the main character's childhood friend. And not only that, he's a FORGOTTEN childhood friend too! Luckily Lili remembers him in the first chapter so we don't have to waste any time on "ooh, there's this boy in my past with whom I fell in love~~ but Oikawa is stupid! Wait what, Oikawa is that boy! Zomg!". We do, however, waste time on "Zomg, Hirorin says he has a crush from his childhood! Who could that possibly be!?!?". And Lili ttlly has ~nothing~ to do with the aforementioned bad experience with girls that lead to the allergic reaction! 
Also, when "Spica" appears to declare who is guilty, all Lili does is change her clothes. She doesn't hide her face in any way. And yet nobody recognises her. What? Okay, this is manga and I'm not supposed to care, but I still find it awfully lazy from the manga author. When Lili brilliantly sneaks into a piano institute she at least has glasses for her disguise. This I can stomach; sure you can't really fool anyone with just glasses I can accept it in a manga. And for example if a magical girl transforms her face hardly ever changes, but that's magic so it's ok if nobody gets that Usagi is Sailor Moon even if the face is identical. But as far as I know there's no magic involved with Spica, so my reaction is "that's idiotic" when Oikawa can't recognise that Spica is Lili when she stands in front of her. 
The disgusting Zodiac spirits deserve a special mention. I don't like comedic chibi mascots, and it doesn't help that there's 13 of them (Gemini gets 2), all of whom have a stupid one-joke quirk. Every time Spica needs help from her magic ring we have to waste a couple of pages in a pointless ritual, because none of the spirits naturally gives clues to their master right away. No, they have to dance flamenco or peek Lili's panties or be flattered into co-operation first! All of them only appear once in the story so that we get all Zodiacs covered, but after introducing their HILARIOUS quirks they only in the extra stories which is a good thing but makes them pretty pointless at the same time. Also, one little thing that really irks me. Spica's motto is "You get a hundred million light years of bad luck if you lie to the stars!". Protip tho those who have managed to avoid this spectacular bit of info: a light year is a measurement of length, not time. It always bugs me when people use it when they mean "a very long time"... The volumes had some extras to those who care; there were a couple of four-panel strips, character profiles and an extra story on the main couple's past. Plus at the end of each volume there is a short joke comic on the Zodiac spirits, which as an avid hater of the chibi mascots I naturally hate. But I guess it's a good solution not to have them that much in the main comic and have them separated to the extras, that way it's easier to skip them. Dress-uppability-wise Zodiac P.I. belongs to the boring "negligible" category. Or actually I'm not all that sure; the Spica outfit and Lili's disguises might actually give enough material for a nice mini game, but I cared so little that I have very little memory of what they wore.
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