Customer Reviews

Death Note, Vol. 12

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Let's just get this strait... Death Note has never been an action manga. What action there is has always been the direct result of characters enacting a careful strategy. Death Note has maintained it's ingeniously balanced tension by having characters constantly trying to outTHINK one another in order to gain a strategic upper hand.

That being said, this final volume is the perfect and perfectly consistent climax to the story. Yes there is a lot of dialogue in this volume, but that dialogue is an integral part of Death Note, and removing it would remove everything that makes it great in the first place. You can't expect characters to enact a carefully, near-insanely granular strategy and then throw it all out the window and instead vie for a high-speed car chase or gun fight.

If you've made it this far into the series and have hated it, you will probably not like the ending any better. If you've made it this far and loved it, if you are consistent, you will most likely be satisfied with how the series ends. It's the culmination of everything that makes Death Note the most original manga out there today.

Well, the Death Notes series is finally complete. I will try to hold back the tears. This series has been amazing. It is so original and I feel lucky to have come across this series. The story is so action packed and very well planned.

Now to Volume 12. Beginning right from where 11 left off, we are thrown into action. And just from the very beginning you realize that this book is going to be a perfect way to end the series. You realize that they aren't going to let you down at the very end.

Now, I will tread lightly as to not give even a hint to how the book ends. We all know what the book is supposed to cover which is the final battle. A head to head match between Light and Near. And this is definitely what this book is about.

This book answers all the left over questions and it provides a good ending (one in which isn't how I wanted it to turn out-- I hope that doesn't give anything away).

Now if you have not read the rest of the 11....why are you reading Volume 12 reviews?

If you have read all the other 11....why are you reading Volume 12 reviews? You should not be wasting time debating on how others view the book. =D You need to finish the series after coming this far!

It may just be my imagination but it seemed that the drawing in this book was more polished and pretty than the other books. This is probably because it is the last book?

Great book, Good End, Best Series.

I really enjoyed this last book I thought it had a good ending. I can see why some people didnt enjoy it but if they had ended it a different way people still wouldnt be happy with it.So my suggestion is read this book!!

I had a horrible night's sleep after reading this volume. I knew how it was going to end because, unfortunately, I read a blog where someone completely spoiled the ending for me...or so I thought. Even knowing, or thinking that I knew, what was going to happen; I was still shocked by this ending. It was disturbing, very graphic and completely satisfying. I have never been so shocked but so happy with the ending to a manga series.

Okay, I do have one little gripe about how rushed the Mello-Takada situation was handled but the rest of the volume more than made up for it.

If you stuck it out for all 11 volumes of this series and found after L's murder some of the volumes were a little slow (I've heard that complaint); your patience will be rewarded. If you gave up halfway through the series for the same reason, volume 12 is more than enough reason to pick this series back up and read it to completion.

I can't really say anything else without spoiling the ending for everyone so...just read it! It is worth it!!

I was so worried that this was going to end without the proper ending of the main characters' fates and instead decide to end on an ambiguos and philosophical play on morality. Instead, we see a beautifully taunt discussion of morality amidst a showdown between all of the key players. There are some surprising deaths and there are some satisfying ones. This did not end at all as I expected (positive ending that I thought nor a far less cool ending I feared would happen) and that is a GOOD THING. I'll say it again...got any friends who are not into manga? Do like I did with two seperate gf's throughout this last year-introduce them to Death Note and watch as they become amazed a comicbook..much less a Japanese one can inspire so much interest, obsession and glee. Death Note..you will be missed!

As Deathnote Volume 12 opens, Mello has just kidnapped Kiyomi Takada, the official mouthpiece of Kira and Light's girlfriend and only love. At least that's what he keeps telling her. Mello's interference disrupts the carefully laid plans of both Near and Light, but the two decide to go on with their face to face meeting in a couple of days anyway. Both of them are so confident in their own intelligence that nothing can dissuade either of them into thinking the chips will not fall on their side. Near believes he can finally pin Light down as Kira with indisputable evidence and Light thinks that he will finally eliminate the last vestiges of L's legacy and the Japanese Task Force orginally formed to catch Kira.

If you're expecting a great finish to a great series, you're going to be disappointed in this last volume. Most of the climactic scenes consist of talking, talking, talking, talking, talking.....and MORE talking. The artist Takeshi Obata seems hard pressed at times to make room for his art with all the philosphizing that goes on and explanation of motivations. Frankly, you get bored at just the moments that should have been the most satisfying as the characters launch epic spiels to their own godlike oracular takes on predicting every action of their adversaries. With all the suspense that Deathnote has accumulated over 12 volumes you would expect a big payoff at the end of the series, but in reality, it ended up being one of the worst installments yet. The art was great as usual, but the writing suffered from way too much dialogue, going far beyond the range of an already talky manga. Overall, Deathnote was a great experience to read that was marred a bit by a mediocre conclusion.

Death Note has been an incredible ride. In this final volume in the series, the writer Tsugumi Ohba resolves the cliffhanger from volume 11, and proceeds to the final showdown between Near and Light in a secluded warehouse. The writer does a wonderful job in tying together the behind-the-scenes actions taken by each side, as hinted in the previous volume, to set up the showdown, and one side conclusively triumphs over the other. And then---finality.

Death Note is an intense, original, detective type story that manga lovers and non-manga readers will appreciate. I highly recommend it.

This is the best series in the world! Although that may sound somewhat immature and over reaching it is the truth. Although I hate how this is the end, I have always and will continue to love this series.

If you are an L fangirl, like myself...you probably struggled through the rest of the series as much as I did. I admit that the plot moves a little too slowly, but the end of this book finally forces Light to explain himself.*SPOILER* I enjoyed his monologue, but I enjoyed it even more when he gets shot 8 times. Anyway...if you truly like L...I think you'll be happy to see him avenged.

With the last volume now published, "Death Note" promises to become a US pop culch icon as an existential and symbolic masterpiece, filled with complex meanings to be disinterred from its form and narrative. Which is great for manga fans, but in the end "Death Note" is a flawed masterpiece at best.

Even the review essay on Salon magazine (dated 7/26/07) points to sharp differences between the first ("L") story arc and the subsequent story arcs. Story arc #1 (about L) is tense and sharply edged; we enter into Light's battle with L like following a grudge match in tennis, chess, or the Japanese game of Go. Because Light is young, he does not have the power of the state, its police and military machinery, or its wealth, behind him. Implausibilities evaporate because we accept the game.

But the second story arc(s) is/are different. By now, Light *is* established. He is no longer a lone teenager, but a potentially very powerful police officer, his father a very high ranking officer himself with contacts at the Ministerial level, his wife one of the shrewdest and most ruthless killers imaginable as an ally - and Light and Misa have the gods if not on their side, certainly not against them. Now the story enters not the realm of grudge matches between brilliant teenagers, but the domains of world politics and history. The reader starts the later story arcs knowing - or it's something we *should* know - that Light has been cast as a new Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, or Tokugawa: a UNIFIER of first an Asia and then a world torn by crime, war, and corruption. (American readers who do not know who these three are will, I suspect, misunderstand the context and subtexts of "Death Note.")

By comparison to these three men (and to Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Tamurlane, or even Napoleon), Light Yagami is a piker and a rank amateur. Empire and the enforced peace and unity it brings are bought by mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. Here, I suggest, Ohba, Obata, and certainly their editors at Shueisha faced a choice: to bring Light and Misa's story to its logical conclusion - the birth of a new Asian empire unified under Light Yagami, that is, under *Japanese* rule - or to keep the story at the level of a teen-age thriller, a game played for not for its Imperialist and supranational implications, but only as a simple tale of why Crime Never Pays. They opted for the second, as the last volume of "Death Note" proves.

To say that the denouement of "Death Note" is "simple" will irritate some readers, who, like myself, are impressed by the clever plotting and intricate webs of bluff and counter-bluff played out by Light and his opponents. But it is nonetheless a simple story: ultimately, Light is nothing more than a Bad Person who Kills People. So the political and moral implications of Light and Misa's role were jettisoned and the story remains on the level of black-and-white morality.

Somewhere in Volume 7, there's a comment that now L is dead and nothing stands between Light and victory, and therefore the world is on the edge of a new dark age. That theme too was jettisoned, and the real moral issues are set aside. Empire-building means killing people by the hundreds of thousands. But instead of grappling with those issues, Ohba, Obata, and the editors at Shueisha opted for a conclusion that does not wrap up questions so much as sweep them under the rug. Frankly, I was disappointed that Ohba and Obata did not (or were not allowed) to grapple with the idea of modern empire. My own guess is that Light would eventually have been betrayed and killed by one of his own officers, just as happened during the unification of Japan. But as the story is now, we have voodoo dolls and more intellectual grudge matches instead of an existential and symbolic masterpiece about the possibility of empire in a modern world and about the morality of killing in the name of such an empire. Ultimately, "Death Note" avoids all the hard questions and in the end fails to become the masterpiece it could have been.