Are you tired of wall after wall of pretentious text?
Do you just want to know if you should read the darn thing?
Me too.
It should be impossible to establish the characters, set up the plot, tell a good story, and reduce me to tears in just 52 pages, but Yuusha Goikkou no Kaerimichi managed to do so. If you’re in the mood for a beautiful story with beautiful artwork, do not skip out on this one.
The name Yuusha Goikkou no Kaerimichi is too long, so I’m gonna call it Kaerimichi for short.
One-shots normally don’t have amazing plots because of the limited amount of panels. But this one manages to tell a simple but emotional story that also puts a unique spin on the setting of a generic medieval fantasy world. The general premise is that a band of heroes is journeying home after their battle with the demon lord. In my opinion, it’s best to go in completely blind and I don’t want to deprive you of that experience. So even though I really wanted to sell you on Kaerimichi by talking about more specific plot details, I’m going to stop here.
Surprisingly, the story is not rushed at all. It was paced well enough that I wasn’t bored, and I actually knew what was going on because it progressed at a speed I was able to keep up with. New information is revealed gradually in the form of hints that you have to make guesses about, which also helped me want to keep reading.
I was really impressed with how much I got to learn about the different characters considering the length of the manga. To be honest, everyone except the protagonist was underdeveloped. But the main character was fleshed out with a clear backstory, personality, and motivations for doing the things she does. She’s really likable and I got attached to her quite quickly, which allowed the emotional moments to hit harder.
The art is great. There’s no other way to put it. Lines are clean, there’s enough detail to make the world and characters not seem plain (but not so much that everything starts to blend together), the shading is really well done, and objects will often poke through the panel borders to give a sense of perspective, scale, emphasis, or just for a bit of variety. I’m especially impressed by the landscapes and environment, which clearly had a lot of effort put into them.
The cherry on top of the art are the coloured pages, which totally didn’t have to be included but they were anyways because the creator, Ryouji Hirano, is just awesome. And they are beautiful. Each one is watercolour (or at least it looks like it) and manages to pack in so much colour and detail while remaining coherent. They’re used sparingly but effectively to show changes in place or to add extra emphasis to something.
If you want a super quick read that hits different, hit this up. I had to reread Kaerimchi to write this review, and it still hurt the second time. It also puts a great spin on the overdone “defeat the demon lord” plotline by only focusing on the journey home.
This is possibly the best one-shot I have ever read. Looking at the grades I gave the different sections, I gave two scores of Great and one score of Good. If that’s not enough to get you to try Kaerimichi, just know that it’ll take you the same amount of time to read this as it does to watch an episode of whatever mediocre show you’re watching right now. If you’re ever in the mood for a hidden gem, why not give this a shot? A stranger on the internet said it was good, and when have they ever been wrong?
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