Elhanburg no Tenshi

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.

Elhanburg no Tenshi is a prime example of a manga with potential that wasted it along the way. We've got a medieval setting with a king, Madeth, and his loyal knight Lalvan. There is a mysterious angel that is said to be able to bless the king with fortune and loyal people. Sounds promising right? So where did it go wrong?

Storywise, we enter at a point where the two main characters seem to know each other for a long time and the retainer sees an angel floating above the king. From the synopsis, it is clear that only some people can see the angel of the castle. If the king is able to see him, he is usually blessed with fortune and a rich empire. However, only his retainer Lalvan can see the angel. So whenever he is alone with him, he asks why he chose the king, rather than him, even though he is smarter, better at swordplay, yet still feels inferior and jealous of the king. But because the angel doesn't speak, it feels more like complaining. This complaining and bickering with the king over his possible spouse leave him distraught. And eventually, he leaves the castle to live in some rundown village, days away from his liege. There is a little more to it, but this is the basic outline. The king also has some disagreements with his now wife, not wanting to admit that he wants what Lalvan has.
Then there are about three timeskips, completely unannounced and one might miss them when reading too quickly. Ths king has a son who looks just like him, he can see the angel too and he wants Lalvan to come back to the castle, but he refuses. Years later, when the son has become the king, there is a civil war. This seems like a good moment for Lalvan to attack the castle to see the king, but he actually walks right in. Madeth and Lalvan have a disagreement and yet he becomes the new ruler. Since then, he could not see the angel anymore.

When I was reading this manga, I was seriously wondering what the angel has to do with any of this. It is supposed to be the main plot device, but he hardly had screentime and didn't speak a word. It wasn't even exactly his fault that Lalvan and Madeth broke up, because they were jealous of each other before. He was probably the final straw that breaks the camel's back. Even so, his relevance to the story is so minor, he might as well have been replaced by an object and the result would be the same.

The artwork seems pretty promising from the cover and the chapter pages, but the rest pales in comparison to the attention to detail there. The angel looks drawn with sketch lines, giving a vibe of loose feathers and it's hard to tell if it's a male or female. Lalvan doesn't look older despite the timeskips, the son of the king and the king himself look so much alike that it was hard to tell who was on the horse after the first timeskip. And the biggest flaw in my opinion is the flower arrangement on the pages. This is customary for shoujo and some josei manga, but it feels so out of place in a serious setting here. The entire tension during a quarrel is ruined by placing some glitters and flowers over the page. Seriously? What was the author trying to achieve with this? It would be easier to draw backgrounds or extra panels.

The worldbuilding is also pretty much non-existent. We only hear some of the people's thoughts when Lalvan lives with them, but there is no clear depiction of the general world, no drawing of the castle the king lives in. Not even a note of a village anywhere. For a one-shot, this could be acceptable, but in multiple chapters, it feels like a lack of attention from the author. Or perhaps she wanted to focus on the characters. In that case, a second volume would have been better to improve on both of these points.

Conclusion: a promising cover that couldn't live up to its own expectations. This manga might have been better off as a one-shot, so the author wouldn't have had to drag out some discussions between characters. The angel is almost irrelevant to the story, so why make him the theme of the manga? And the serious tone of the discussions is lost from the floral theme over the pages. It feels so out of place that it raises questions why the author bothered to draw them. Such wasted potential.