Arata Primal: The New Primitive

A manga about Arata, a teenager born with a strange aura that causes electronics around him to break. Unable to use modern technology, he’s learned primitive survival techniques that end up saving the day when part of the town is time warped into the primeval past.

We’ve discussed this manga on Darfox Dabbles.

This series is A LOT. It’s overly dense with the plot narrative. There are multiple mysteries on why everyone was warped into the past and why Arata can’t use electronics. Arata himself doesn’t have any social skills because he was derived of human interaction due to his strange condition. There’s plenty of shonen dramatic moments where he learns to grow as a person and learn how to interact with others without being awkward. But all of that is pretty cliche stuff which didn’t really impress me. Nothing here in this series was really unique besides the primeval era survival themes and even that isn’t that different from other survival stories you’ve seen before. Katsutoshi Murase‘s art is good but that ends up being moot because the story Daisuke Oikawa has written isn’t engaging. Everything was needlessly complicated and since this series was canceled the final chapters just dump all the lore on you. When I read it my eyes glazed over and I just flipped to the happy ending to be done with it.

Available to read on MANGA Plus.

~dakazu