Juunikyuu de Tsukamaete
Zodiac P.I.

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Zodiac P.I is a magical girl detective manga series by Natsumi Ando. Lili Hoshiwaza is thirteen-year-old girl who moonlights as “Spica”, a private detective who solves cases that the police find difficult. She comes from a long line of astrologers and uses astrology to foretell people’s future.

The characters were pretty decent and fairly likable. They are typical Shoujo characters you could see in any other Shoujo romance and this series has quite a bit of it. The comedy was cheesy with Lili’s love interest Hiromi being allergic to girls. He is her childhood friend who returns after spending several years in school abroad.

Lilli ... summons Zodiac Spirits using the power of a special ring that was left behind by her mother. The spirit summoned depends on the case, the date of birth of the victim, and the timeline when the crime occurred, to try and piece together what happened. These Spirits have their own personality traits respective to their zodiac sign.

The art was very nicely drawn and the character designs were superb. While the atmosphere was dark and mysterious, it also had that Shoujo feel good upbeat style. The manga is about 20 chapters so the pacing was pretty fast.


Overall, its an okay story.

Well, believe it or not, this is the first manga review I’m doing and I don’t often read that much manga, but not that this is a foreign concept to me considering I watched a lot of anime that has a manga either was released before or after the anime has even aired, although I’m told a lot that if said anime ends, just read the manga although the only time I ever did that was after watching Battle Angel Alita and I happen to like that manga more than the OVA and as for the manga I’m about to review, there was something about ... it that did drew me in……more likely a few things that drew me into this.

Lili Hoshizawa is an ordinary girl… except she can tell the furture with the Star Ring, given to her by her mother, which calls on the help of Astral Spirits. With the help of the vitim’s Astral Spirit, Lili solves numerous cases with her partner, Hiromi Oikawa. This story is about a girl named Lili Hoshizawa who can see into the future. She uses her powers to solve crimes under the name Spica. Her old friend named Hiromi Oikawa helps Lili with all of her crimes. One good thing about this book is that it gives educational things about astrology.


Here’s the thing that I never saw in a manga or an anime before…..a detective using astrology and the zodiac signs to solve cases. I must admit, I was liking (actually, I was loving) that whole aspect with the storylines of different characters doing these crimes, although I like that some of the culprits aren’t always the people who does it for the sake of being evil and yet those people happen to exist there but still, their stories did caught my attention for a while.

I find the characters in here to be highly likable but also in the sense of fucking weird. There’s the main girl, Lili (or Spica), a very high-spirited girl who shows her intelligent side whenever she’s on the case and she does have her sweet side and her hard-headed side (Well, she is an Aries, as it mentions there) but it often involves her and her childhood friend Hiromi Oikawa, who returned to Japan after studying criminal psychology in America. He is the straight guy (normal one) in the manga but has a weird allergy of being allergic to girls and he gets rashes everywhere when he is approached to one. The one character I happen to find very interesting is Sirius, A P.I. who was testing Spica and happens to be more like her once you get into the manga more.

As for art style of the manga, I find some of the work very well-detailed but there were some images and speed lines that I couldn’t make up when reading it but at least, it didn’t hurt my eyes and left me confused. All in all, the art style is fine here.

FINAL VERDICT: Even though the manga is only 4 volumes, I got to say that I really liked the work. It combined the detective genre with the elements of astrology into something that was worth reading. I’m surprised nobody has made this into an anime series….or at least an OVA. Yeah, I would make this an OVA since it feels more appropriate.

Story: 4/10

I think that this series, first and foremost, would have benefited from being longer. There was a cute idea for the plot, but I think it could've been better executed if there was more time TO execute it. For being a mystery / detective series, the cases were all really rushed, and only extremely surface level explanations were ever given for how the crime went down.

The story was so rushed, in fact, that the skip between some panels was so jarring, and it was difficult to follow what was going on. I feel like some important contextual information was missing, just because ... there wasn't enough time in the series to draw it all out properly.

The story itself was also pretty basic. Pretty much every twist is either easy to guess because of how simple the story was, or almost nonsensical because of some of the stretches that were made for the executions of the crimes and detective work.

That being said, I do again think that the story had potential, and I think it could've been a great story, though still basic to a degree, if the series had been stretched out a bit more. I don't think the series needed to go any further than where it ended, I just think each scene needed to be stretched out a bit more.

Also a bit of a side note, some very basic information was inconsistent, but I don't know if it's a fault of the author or the translator. I did read scans of this online, but it seems like the person scanned the official English translation by tokyopop for most (but not all) of it, so I'm not sure where the error occurred. The main character was mentioned at one point to be an aries, and then at another point she was said to be a taurus, and she had three different birth dates listed that I saw. Seeing as astrology is a major plot point, it seems odd to me that more attention wasn't paid to that?

Art: 7/10

Okay, I will admit that I am a bit biased here because I personally really like pretty shoujo art styles, but I did enjoy the art in this manga. It isn't anything TOO fantastic, though, and there are definitely some anatomy issues and issues with panels being cluttered / the sequential timing being off (as discussed in the "story" section). But it definitely is pleasing to look at for the most part, and it's pretty nostalgic as well if you're a fan of 90's-00's shoujo styles.

Character: 6/10

The characters in this series didn't really have much time to be properly fleshed out (again), but most of them are trope-y enough that you can get the gist of their character without too much information from the manga itself. I do think that they did a decent job though considering the limited series length, but I would probably say that the main characters are likeable but average, and pretty much everyone else is pretty forgettable.

Enjoyment: 7/10

While I did have a lot of issues with this series, I do think it would be a good read for either a younger audience, someone who's just looking for some 90's-00's shoujo nostalgia, or if you're just going into the series not expecting too much to begin with.

Conclusion:

This manga felt very very rushed and not fully fleshed out. It never really got any deeper than the surface level plot and characterization that you would expect, but I did enjoy the series nonetheless. If you just want to read a cute shoujo manga, it's definitely worth a shot.