Ginta Toramizu is a slightly below average hyper school kid whose only claim to fame is his continual dreams about another, magical, world. He spends so much time talking about this that he is the butt of jokes from most of his fellow students and his mother despairs of him. This all changes when a magical door appears, a door into the very realm he has been dreaming of. Without hesitation Ginta steps through...

MÄR (Marchen Awakens Romance) is a shonen anime show directed by Masaharu Okuwaki from the original manga by Nobuyuki Anzai. Volume three covers episodes twenty-seven to thirty-nine spread across three discs all with a choice of English or Japanese 2.0, with optional subtitles. The only extras you get are four trailers on the first disc, but then given the amount of episodes on offer it would be disingenuous to complain about the lack of extras.

On the plus side the series has some great animation which combines the show's ethos of melding action with comedy. On the down side there is a bit of the old Naruto creeping in here with a lot of exclamation marks in the ever growing titles, and over half the titles including "Vs". For example episode thirty one, 'Shadow Battles! Gargoyle Vs Dark Gargoyle'. So this is pretty much a show which lurches from one fight scene to another under an increasingly flimsy narrative. That said, it's still a lot of fun to watch as the show does not take itself too seriously.

In these three volumes, Ginta, now fully immersed into the fantasy world, is in a struggle with the chess pieces. The deal is that should the chess pieces win, then everything Ginta knows and cherishes will be destroyed, and if they loose they will leave and never return. What follows is a series of trials for our young hero as he battles ever stronger chess pieces.

So far the show stays on just this side of interesting, however, whilst this sort of repetition will appeal to Bleach and Naruto fans, unless the story proper gets going it will suffer the same fate of endlessly repeating itself.

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Charles Packer