BAKEMONOGATARI
STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
2
RELEASE
December 4, 2006
CHAPTERS
41
DESCRIPTION
The first part of the Monogatari Series.
There’s a girl at their school who is always ill. She routinely arrives late, leaves early, or doesn’t show up at all, and skips gym as a matter of course. She’s pretty, and the boys take to whispering that she’s a cloistered princess. As the self-described worst loser in her class soon finds out, they just don’t know what a monster she is. So begins a tale of mysterious maladies that are supernatural in origin yet deeply revealing of the human psyche, a set of case files as given to unexpected feeling as it is to irreverent humour.
(Source: Kodansha USA)
Note: The English release and the JP ebook edition have Bakemonogatari split across three volumes, instead of the original two volumes.
CAST
Hitagi Senjougahara
Koyomi Araragi
Tsubasa Hanekawa
Meme Oshino
Shinobu Oshino
Mayoi Hachikuji
Nadeko Sengoku
Suruga Kanbaru
Karen Araragi
Tsukihi Araragi
CHAPTERS
RELATED TO BAKEMONOGATARI
REVIEWS
RayRaivern
90/100A spoiler free review of the Monogatari Series. A set of stories which makes up an overall story.Continue on AniListThe Monogatari series is a set of stories which makes up an overall story.
And it is this overall story which is highly praised as the Monogatari series.First, I should give my ratings of all the stories individually presented in the Monogatari Series: First Season.
Bakemonogatari: 7/10
Kizumonogatari: 9/10
Nisemonogatari: 8/10
Nekomonogatari: 9/10Now to critique the story, characters, and writing style.
The individual stories can be divided into parts of 2 types.
Idle Conversation, consisting of Araragi talking with a girl over idle matters.
Action, parts that progresses or brings an end to the story; consisting of fight scenes, Oshino Meme giving lectures, and resolution to the story.The main problem I had was with the idle conversations. The silly conversations Araragi had with the other characters; on some parts I couldn't fully grasp the joke because of its cultural nature, and on others I simply couldn't find it funny; most of the word plays also turned out a little stale.
An important thing to note here is that I believe these problems mostly arose because I read the translated version (the official English one). As people often say, "The Monogatari series can never be properly translated"; the intricate word plays of the Japanese language that Nisio Isin does and the cultural parts of the book are what makes it so difficult to translate.
But as I kept reading and reading, the silly jokes and unique conversations that Araragi has with the character started to grow into me; and I ended up liking them by the end of the 5th book.Now the best part of the Novels, the action parts.
Monogatari series has some of the best fighting scenes I've read. They are very well portrayed, and has the perfect pace and intensity.
Oshino's lectures can sometimes get a bit confusing because of all the cultural and language parts (Kanji characters and stuff), but overall they can be understood by the end.
All the stories itself here are good. Some of them can be very simple, but its the simplicity which makes them good.
It's easy to get confused and question the past of some characters, that's because the novels are not in chronological order. You shouldn't think too much about the parts that you don't know, and enjoy the main story that the book is telling, because little by little the series reveals everything.All the characters here are unique in their own way and most of them are pretty interesting.
It's a character driven story, so you can expect there to be good characters. And by the end you could find a character you very much like. (Meme's my favourite so far)And lastly, I presume you already probably know, Monogatari has very good writing.
No problem with the conversations and understanding who's talking when (as with a lot of other Light Novels).
Also uh, I'll add that the translation was done really well too; I didn't find any grammatical problems or weird lines.MikeSlav
75/100A perfect introduction to a very long seriesContinue on AniListI'm going to try to be spoiler-free for anyone potentially wanting to get into the light novels like me, considering that this is the first entry in the series.
The Monogatari series is a very, very long series. For anyone trying to get into it, you better be ready to invest at least a couple of months to read all of it, and that's only if you plan to binge it. Also, if you don't like reading books, because that is quite literally what light novels are, then do not bother. Though if you do manage to get through Bakemonogatari, then you've already read one of the longest parts of the series.
Bakemonogatari, and the entire Monogatari series, is from a first glance, a light novel about some guy meeting a bunch of girls and then getting into a somewhat ridiculous amount of lewd, fanservicey moments. And yeah, that is essentially a big part of it, and a big part of the appeal of the series.
Apart from that though, Bakemonogatari is a light novel about a bunch of people, who through an encounter with a so-called aberration/apparition/oddity (depending on the translation) - basically a monster (hence the title, with ''bakemono" meaning monster) - end up with pretty major problems in their lives, and who through a coincidental meeting or past relation to the protagonist, Araragi Koyomi, end up solving said problems.
This formula is the same for all 5 arcs comprising Bakemonogatari, and though you might imagine that this would end up being quite repetitive, it doesn't. All the arcs are completely different in every sense, be it the characters or aberrations introduced. I would say that one exception would be the character of Hanekawa, who happens to be the first girl introduced in the series, and who appears throughout the entire novel before finally getting her own arc, which also happens to be the final and longest arc of Bakemonogatari.
What this plot structure does is make you feel used to the concept of aberrations, which ends up being one of the main parts of the entire series. Apart from that, you are introduced to some of the main characters of the entire series, the 5 girls who end up having more arcs further in the series. All of this, including the running gags, essentially tell you what a lot of the novels are going to be like, hence why Bakemonogatari is a perfect introduction to the series as a whole.
Other than that, as it is the first part of a series (though it wasn't at first intended to be a series spanning - you know - 30 volumes), Bakemonogatari sets up the relationship of Araragi and Senjougahara, which ends up being one of the main plots which essentially lasts and develops throughout the 30 volumes or so.
Quite frequently, there would be mentions of certain events happening before the time that the events of Bakemonogatari take place, namely certain events involving Hanekawa during Golden Week, or Araragi during spring break.
So, Bakemonogatari ultimately ends after about a 1000-ish pages with the questions of what exactly happened before the story, how in the world did Araragi become a vampire, and why is there an eight-year-old vampire girl, which ultimately leads to those being answered in the next entry, Kizumonogatari.
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SCORE
- (4.35/5)
MORE INFO
Ended inDecember 4, 2006
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