Millennium Snow

Reviewed by Chris Hori
August 13, 2007

Artist: Bisco Hatori Author: Bisco Hatori Publisher: VIZ Media Genre: Shoujo, Supernatural, Romance Website: Click Here

Chiyuki Matsuoka is a high school student who suffers from a complicated heart condition which includes daily life-threatening heart attacks.  Tōya Kanō is a vampire who will live for a thousand years.  However, he refuses to drink the blood of humans as he does not want to burden anyone else with what he believes is his cursed lifespan.  Satsuki Akiyoshi is a wearwolf who wishes he was human, and not the monsters he believes himself and Toya to be.

Millennium Snow is the first work by Bisco Hatori, better known for her popular series ‘Ouran Host Club’.  Millennium Snow was originally run in a Japan Shojo monthly magazine and was recently licensed by Viz Media in the US.

The manga is a fairly standard shojo (girls comics), where the emphasis is on the interactions between the three characters rather than action.  The story revolves around the three main characters, each seeming to want what the other characters have.  This in turn allows the characters to get a different look at themselves to understand their own situation.  The series is fairly light-hearted with comical moments, and with most of the interactions taking a playful attitude.

The manga consists of two volumes.  The first contains character introductions and sets up the interaction between the three main characters.  The story flow in this volume is good, as all the characters have understandable motives and they seem to each play their parts appropriately.  In addition, the art style is consistent.  If you are a fan of bishonen (pretty boys) then you will be happy here.  Without spoiling the story, you learn about Chiyuki, Toya and Satsuki and watch as the three characters learn to interact honestly with each other.

In addition, at the end of the first volume, you get an extra bonus manga story that is a very cute read, though has nothing to do with Millennium Snow.  If I rated this series on this volume alone I would have given it 8 out of 10.

The second volume however was very disappointing.  The art style is slightly less consistent here, with variances in the way the backgrounds and characters are drawn.  This could be attributed to the fact that it was the artist’s first work.  In addition, where the first volume felt like a real story, with each chapter having some importance to the ones around it, the second volume feels like the artist had a bunch of chapters lying on the floor and then slapped them all together to make a book.  The first two chapters have little reference to the previous book, and would not hurt the story if they weren’t there at all.  The ending of the book goes back to something that pertains to the main story. However, that’s it, which leads to my biggest complaint and cause for the low rating.

The story simply ends.  There is no resolution, no conclusion.  The final pages of the second book bring a close to that particular chapter, though by no means does it resolve anything that was developed in the first book.  It has been stated elsewhere that the work is unfinished, and currently on hold while Ouran Host Club is being worked on.  More annoying is the feeling that the second book didn’t accomplish anything except take up a few chapters and made me buy another volume.  Perhaps it was partially my fault for not checking online to see that Millennium Snow was not finished and had no plans on being finished, but I felt the first volume had potential, and the second was a horrible disappointment.  This volume gets a 4 out 10 rating for poor story composition, inconsistent art, and overall just not building very well on what the first volume started, thus the overall average of a 6 out of 10 rating.

If this story was continuing on, I would say check it out, but unless you are a hardcore Bisco Hatori fan and need to read everything she has ever put out, then there is no reason to pick up Millennium Snow.  If you read and liked the first volume, then all you have to look forward to is a sub-par second volume and no plans for any type of conclusion.  In some ways that’s worse than simply not liking the first volume.  The only reason this was made into a manga was to cash in on the success of Ouran Host Club.  If you really want to read her work, then pick up Ouran Host Club which is still going strong.

More Images :