Recently I went back to look up some stuff that's drawn by Mayumi Azuma who unfortunately had some vision disease that led to blindness and stopped doing any manga about 10 years ago, and it's a bizarre case of self destruct for no obvious reasons, and that sometimes making up random stuff in the Anime is actually better than the source material.
First we got the Star Ocean 2 anime. Similar to the manga, it follows the same basic idea to just disregard everything that happened in Nede which I think kind of made a lot of sense because it pretty much didn't have anything to do with the first half of the story other than you find some guys that are trying to destroy the universe and since having the universe destroyed would suck you're sort of stuck fighting the Ten Wise Men. In the manga Claude simply just blew away some random demon that was supposed to cause Expel to collide into Energy Nede with his phaser, fulfilling the prophecy that the hero with the sword of light was supposed to save Expel. So that seems pretty easy stuff to just copy over verbatim, and sure like almost nobody watched the Anime but you still got to finish what you started, right? Well, I think they somehow ran out of budget on episode 26 and Claude is literally like 'let me go get my gun' and then the story ended, and then I think there's some supplemental stuff that confirmed that yeah, he later did blew up Gabriel with his gun (unlike the manga the Ten Wise Men was the final enemy though not like it makes any difference because there's no backstory on them).
It's really mystifying since the whole thing went on for 26 episodes and it did get to the final battle so it's not like they're trying to do a season 2 and got axed. I guess maybe they want to do a movie or OAV or a longer part thing to end it, but it still seems unlikely because Claude almost got his gun and if you read the source material you know the next thing he does is just shoot Gabriel to death with it and that ends the entire conflict.
After somewhat success from Star Ocean 2 manga, Mayumi Azuma worked on Elemental Galade, which is a story about girls that magically transform into swords. It's like Yotsuba! or Spy X Family level of wholesomeness and then you randomly have snippets like the girls mentioning it's their first time transforming into a weapon or that someone who wields too many types of weapon is like having a harem, and on top of that the girls have the sexual attractiveness of Anya and basically if you didn't pay attention it'd never occur to you that the story is making some random lewd jokes in English.
Anyway, the story is about a boy name Coud who met a mysterious girl named Ren who is one of the Seven Glittering Jewels which means she can stomp an entire nation or whatever whenever she feels like it and for some reason every random dude they fight gives Ren a hard time to defeat, presumably because she has low synchronization with Coud even though they're like lovers for quite a while fighting guys using girls as disposable weapon. At the time the Anime started, Ren is the only Seven Glittering Jewels in the story and from the background story it's like people aren't even sure if their existence is real or some kind of myth, and sure for some reason she's never instant killing the opposition but at least everyone they fight acknowledges that she's supposed to be unstoppable. So the Anime did the logical thing with Ren going evil and actually being as powerful as she should be and then love brings her back and conquers all and blah blah. All in all it's a pretty standard and acceptable ending.
Then the manga eventually finished and it's one of those 'you should burn the last volume to destroy any evidence that you're involved with this'. Since it is a relatively low volume thing it isn't actually easy to find the pirated version but for some reason the bookstore does carry it pretty regularly, probably because the art is really, really good and people like me always buy it up. First, our heroes ran into Cia, who has been hyped up for a while as someone really important and for some reason this person in flashback that was like a healer girl suddenly become the strongest weapon girl ever known because of nanomachines or something and starts attacking with tentacles, and it was revealed she was the one who killed Keath Fergan who is like the strongest human ever have lived because he tried to experiment on her baby (with Keath) which made her went insane. Okay, so this part is like adding a final boss without any real build up, but it actually kind of works because Cia is not one of the Seven Glittering Jewels so Cia's special ability doesn't work on Ren (Cia can absorb life of beings touched by her tentacles) and they had no choice but to kill Cia to put her out of her misery and kind of reinforces how strong the Seven Glittering Jewels are.
And then in the final volume it turned out that Seven Glittering Jewels actually grow on trees. After beating Cia, our heroes immediately fight Ranju who is an ice elemental Seven Glittering Jewel, and up until this point there's this unnamed mysterious girl who has a fetish with being chained up that we see occasionally and you can infer she's obviously meant to be the strongest weapon girl in the story until Cia showed up and she's got snowflake design on her somewhere so she's ice elemental which is supposed to be the nonexistent element (there is water element but no ice). And then Ranju's like 'hi we got 2 ice elemental users in the Seven Glittering Jewels!', in a story where there are 18 elements! And of course Ranju's like way, way stronger than Cia, and you can also infer that the chained up fetish girl is probably like a thousand times stronger than Ranju. After some random epic fight they finally defeated Ranju, just kidding, Ranju was using like 1% of her full power the whole fight anyway and finally decided to go 100% like Frieza. Then some mysterious guy is like 'I got bombs here to fight these weapon girls that are supposed to make technology obsolete' and try to blew Ranju up, which predictably did nothing but it did blew up the structure they're on so our heroes fell to their death. And the unnamed girl who's like been waiting for Ren to fulfill the prophecy which is probably something like one of the Seven Glittering Jewels will actually challenge her for supremacy or whatever turns out to have been wasting her time because Ren fell to her death, because we totally expect a wind elemental weapon girl to not survive falling from heights.
Of course, in the last few pages people suddenly realized that someone who can command wind probably isn't falling to their death so the hero's friends decided to go search for them and that's the end of the story. The final boss weapon girl apparently was just posing being chained up for fan service, even though it's pretty clear that's her condition for powering up so she's actually been getting ready for this fight which just never happened because they weren't getting through Ranju at 100% anyway. I mean it might have made sense if Ranju was like the final boss girl's clone or weakened version but it's like nope, we just happened to have a duplicate elemental user in the Seven Glittering Jewels that serves as a test to see if the heroes are worthy to face the final boss, and it turned out they're not anyway.
Eventually in Elemental Galade Blue which takes place two years later apparently the final boss girl spent another two years getting chained up and stopped global warming and threw the world into an ice age instead and then went back to being chained up again to prepare for her next fight. And then the author lost her vision so nothing ever came out of that anyway. Speaking of which, Elemental Galade Blue set the bar for the Seven Glittering Jewels even lower than before. Whereas Ren in theory is only having a hard time because of low synchronization issues, in Blue the Seven Glittering Jewel is Jin, the sun elemental weapon girl (another one of the nonexistent elements, so why have 18 if half of the elements aren't in those 18?), went to her first fight by showing the true power of the Seven Glittering Jewels by immediately casting self destruct on herself against some random fodder dude and then the narrator says even if she blew herself up it's probably too weak to stop some random fodder but thankfully some random guy came out and helped them.
I've seen some pretty bad ways manga end, but the case of Elemental Galade it's almost like the author went insane in the last volume as opposed to some lack of ability. Maybe her disease was taking a toll. Elemental Galade was never going to anything more than a fringe boy meets girl and save the world story, but it's still pretty mystifying on how the final boss girl can get sidelined in both series. Well, Elemental Galade Blue got stopped at volume 7 or so, but based on what happened in Elemental Galade there's really no reason for anyone to believe Jin was ever going to be anywhere remotely close to be able to challenge the final boss girl.
First we got the Star Ocean 2 anime. Similar to the manga, it follows the same basic idea to just disregard everything that happened in Nede which I think kind of made a lot of sense because it pretty much didn't have anything to do with the first half of the story other than you find some guys that are trying to destroy the universe and since having the universe destroyed would suck you're sort of stuck fighting the Ten Wise Men. In the manga Claude simply just blew away some random demon that was supposed to cause Expel to collide into Energy Nede with his phaser, fulfilling the prophecy that the hero with the sword of light was supposed to save Expel. So that seems pretty easy stuff to just copy over verbatim, and sure like almost nobody watched the Anime but you still got to finish what you started, right? Well, I think they somehow ran out of budget on episode 26 and Claude is literally like 'let me go get my gun' and then the story ended, and then I think there's some supplemental stuff that confirmed that yeah, he later did blew up Gabriel with his gun (unlike the manga the Ten Wise Men was the final enemy though not like it makes any difference because there's no backstory on them).
It's really mystifying since the whole thing went on for 26 episodes and it did get to the final battle so it's not like they're trying to do a season 2 and got axed. I guess maybe they want to do a movie or OAV or a longer part thing to end it, but it still seems unlikely because Claude almost got his gun and if you read the source material you know the next thing he does is just shoot Gabriel to death with it and that ends the entire conflict.
After somewhat success from Star Ocean 2 manga, Mayumi Azuma worked on Elemental Galade, which is a story about girls that magically transform into swords. It's like Yotsuba! or Spy X Family level of wholesomeness and then you randomly have snippets like the girls mentioning it's their first time transforming into a weapon or that someone who wields too many types of weapon is like having a harem, and on top of that the girls have the sexual attractiveness of Anya and basically if you didn't pay attention it'd never occur to you that the story is making some random lewd jokes in English.
Anyway, the story is about a boy name Coud who met a mysterious girl named Ren who is one of the Seven Glittering Jewels which means she can stomp an entire nation or whatever whenever she feels like it and for some reason every random dude they fight gives Ren a hard time to defeat, presumably because she has low synchronization with Coud even though they're like lovers for quite a while fighting guys using girls as disposable weapon. At the time the Anime started, Ren is the only Seven Glittering Jewels in the story and from the background story it's like people aren't even sure if their existence is real or some kind of myth, and sure for some reason she's never instant killing the opposition but at least everyone they fight acknowledges that she's supposed to be unstoppable. So the Anime did the logical thing with Ren going evil and actually being as powerful as she should be and then love brings her back and conquers all and blah blah. All in all it's a pretty standard and acceptable ending.
Then the manga eventually finished and it's one of those 'you should burn the last volume to destroy any evidence that you're involved with this'. Since it is a relatively low volume thing it isn't actually easy to find the pirated version but for some reason the bookstore does carry it pretty regularly, probably because the art is really, really good and people like me always buy it up. First, our heroes ran into Cia, who has been hyped up for a while as someone really important and for some reason this person in flashback that was like a healer girl suddenly become the strongest weapon girl ever known because of nanomachines or something and starts attacking with tentacles, and it was revealed she was the one who killed Keath Fergan who is like the strongest human ever have lived because he tried to experiment on her baby (with Keath) which made her went insane. Okay, so this part is like adding a final boss without any real build up, but it actually kind of works because Cia is not one of the Seven Glittering Jewels so Cia's special ability doesn't work on Ren (Cia can absorb life of beings touched by her tentacles) and they had no choice but to kill Cia to put her out of her misery and kind of reinforces how strong the Seven Glittering Jewels are.
And then in the final volume it turned out that Seven Glittering Jewels actually grow on trees. After beating Cia, our heroes immediately fight Ranju who is an ice elemental Seven Glittering Jewel, and up until this point there's this unnamed mysterious girl who has a fetish with being chained up that we see occasionally and you can infer she's obviously meant to be the strongest weapon girl in the story until Cia showed up and she's got snowflake design on her somewhere so she's ice elemental which is supposed to be the nonexistent element (there is water element but no ice). And then Ranju's like 'hi we got 2 ice elemental users in the Seven Glittering Jewels!', in a story where there are 18 elements! And of course Ranju's like way, way stronger than Cia, and you can also infer that the chained up fetish girl is probably like a thousand times stronger than Ranju. After some random epic fight they finally defeated Ranju, just kidding, Ranju was using like 1% of her full power the whole fight anyway and finally decided to go 100% like Frieza. Then some mysterious guy is like 'I got bombs here to fight these weapon girls that are supposed to make technology obsolete' and try to blew Ranju up, which predictably did nothing but it did blew up the structure they're on so our heroes fell to their death. And the unnamed girl who's like been waiting for Ren to fulfill the prophecy which is probably something like one of the Seven Glittering Jewels will actually challenge her for supremacy or whatever turns out to have been wasting her time because Ren fell to her death, because we totally expect a wind elemental weapon girl to not survive falling from heights.
Of course, in the last few pages people suddenly realized that someone who can command wind probably isn't falling to their death so the hero's friends decided to go search for them and that's the end of the story. The final boss weapon girl apparently was just posing being chained up for fan service, even though it's pretty clear that's her condition for powering up so she's actually been getting ready for this fight which just never happened because they weren't getting through Ranju at 100% anyway. I mean it might have made sense if Ranju was like the final boss girl's clone or weakened version but it's like nope, we just happened to have a duplicate elemental user in the Seven Glittering Jewels that serves as a test to see if the heroes are worthy to face the final boss, and it turned out they're not anyway.
Eventually in Elemental Galade Blue which takes place two years later apparently the final boss girl spent another two years getting chained up and stopped global warming and threw the world into an ice age instead and then went back to being chained up again to prepare for her next fight. And then the author lost her vision so nothing ever came out of that anyway. Speaking of which, Elemental Galade Blue set the bar for the Seven Glittering Jewels even lower than before. Whereas Ren in theory is only having a hard time because of low synchronization issues, in Blue the Seven Glittering Jewel is Jin, the sun elemental weapon girl (another one of the nonexistent elements, so why have 18 if half of the elements aren't in those 18?), went to her first fight by showing the true power of the Seven Glittering Jewels by immediately casting self destruct on herself against some random fodder dude and then the narrator says even if she blew herself up it's probably too weak to stop some random fodder but thankfully some random guy came out and helped them.
I've seen some pretty bad ways manga end, but the case of Elemental Galade it's almost like the author went insane in the last volume as opposed to some lack of ability. Maybe her disease was taking a toll. Elemental Galade was never going to anything more than a fringe boy meets girl and save the world story, but it's still pretty mystifying on how the final boss girl can get sidelined in both series. Well, Elemental Galade Blue got stopped at volume 7 or so, but based on what happened in Elemental Galade there's really no reason for anyone to believe Jin was ever going to be anywhere remotely close to be able to challenge the final boss girl.
