Tag: Cipher Academy

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: So Long, CIPHER ACADEMY

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Yes, here we are. It’s the first time I’ve ever written two Manga Shelf columns about the same manga, and it’s for this sad, sad occasion. Funeral for a friend. Or at least, my friend. I get the impression that most Shonen Jump readers would rather chew glass than read all 58 chapters of Cipher Academy, Bakemonogatari author NisioisiN‘s first and, if I had to guess, last contribution to the magazine. Let’s be serious for a moment; I genuinely did like Cipher Academy, in spite of a number of obvious flaws, but there was no way that it was going to last particularly long. It is a terrible fit for Shonen Jump, and is perhaps proof that NisioisiN really just genuinely doesn’t know how to get out of his own way. Especially given that his version of a simple battle shonen plot involves a tangled mess of cryptography and puzzle-solving that only makes any kind of sense about half the time.

That said, it’s easy to claim with hindsight that there was no way Cipher Academy could ever succeed in the context of Jump, but is that actually true? After all, despite its infamously hard to follow “code battles” and goofy storyline, the series does have its fair share of strengths. In particular, Isshin’s ability to hide real character depth inside of weird gimmicks remains unmatched, with characters like Tayuu and her strange, strained friendship with Iroha’s early-antagonist-turned-ally Kyora being a point of genuine interest. And similar examples coincide with the gimmicks themselves being novel, such as Kyora’s filthy mouth and how it contrasts with her ojou-sama demeanor, and how these both belie a fairly caring person underneath that persona. Or Anonymity Requested, who spends most of the manga hidden behind a censor bar both in- and out-of-universe, only for it to become clear that she’s actually both an impulsive hothead and kind of a jerk.

On the other hand, the manga’s biggest weakness is the actual “code battles” themselves, the series’ cutesy name for fast, real-time code-swapping and cracking. A normal battle shonen can rely on any number of visual tricks to make its fights compelling, but Cipher Academy has no access to a majority of those, given that by definition its ‘battles’ are light on actual action. Furthermore, most of them are nakedy convoluted owing to the conceits of the setting. A lot of shonen fights boil down to characters working within sometimes quite complex rulesets in order to outmaneuver and defeat their opponent, but that fact is much easier to hide in something that involves actual combat or a similarly physical activity. In Cipher Academy, it sometimes feels like watching a chess game while only being passingly familiar with the rules.

In general, it both feels markedly less naturalistic and lays bare how dry “a bunch of characters mess around within a given set of rules” can get if not handled carefully. At its worst, the manga devolves into back-and-forth spiderwebs of speech balloons, especially in the case of its many word games. These both suffer greatly in the translation process and also kneecap one of the manga’s best assets; its art. Isshin’s usual, verbose style doesn’t work here, given that this isn’t a light novel.

Furthermore, even later on, when the battles do get a little more visually dynamic, they still suffer from feeling confusing and arbitrary. That’s kind of a problem, given that these puzzles are, on top of everything else, supposed to be user-solvable.

I’ll concede that I have seen some people claim to be able to solve the cryptograms in Cipher Academy, but the fact remains that not only could most people not do so, a good chunk of the readerbase did not even try, and given the way the manga presents these puzzles, it’s tough to blame them. Some of this might be down to the translation—infamously, translating this manga to a satisfactory degree while still keeping MangaPlus’ deadlines was impossible enough that its first official translator walked and had to be replaced—but the manga’s poor performance domestically implies to me that this was a problem across languages. There might also just be a demographic mismatch here; Shonen Jump’s core readership groups are teenagers and people who really like battle shonen as a genre. Neither of these groups are necessarily going to pop for galaxy-brain puzzle solving. Even for those that do, as mentioned, Cipher Academy‘s codes and cryptograms are a mixed bag.

Speaking of “crypto,” we should probably touch on that facet of the manga as well, since, yes, as alluded to in the first chapter, Cipher Academy’s plot does in fact involve cryptocurrency.

Let’s put two facts out there as we do this. One; cryptocurrency is boring. There are people who (incorrectly) think it’s useful or desirable to have, but it’s not interesting in of itself, and if you think otherwise I would love to know how you found my blog from /r/dogecoin. Two; NisiosiN’s writing is not cool. It is a great number of other things; bizarre, ambitious, mysterious, campy, fun, complex, convoluted, goofy, theatrical, self-assured, horny to a sometimes troubling degree, problematic, incredibly autodidactic, impossible to mistake for anyone else’s, etc. But it’s not cool. Isshin is a NEET-ass geek of a writer whose work absolutely drips with evidence that he’s a complete dork. I say this with love, as a fan of some of his work, and as a fellow uncool person, but it’s important to note. NisiosiN’s work has never been and will not ever be cool, and when we’re talking about a Jump manga, that does matter. Combined with the whole crypto / metaverse aspect, I think this was genuinely be a big contributing factor to the manga’s poor performance. You can get away with a lot when you’re writing in this format as long as your stuff is cool. Isshin’s work is fundamentally not.

As for the other stuff, well, cryptocurrency garbage is not quite the PR death sentence over in Japan that it is in the Anglosphere, at least not yet, but that doesn’t mean any regular person actually thinks it’s interesting. At best, they think of it as a way to make money. This fundamentally dull piece of recurring subject matter, when combined with the fact that Isshin is Isshin, plus the generally spotty quality of the puzzles themselves, creates a situation where it’s easy to see how Cipher Academy failed to create and maintain a strong fanbase. There are simply too many hurdles for the average shonen manga reader here. Which would you rather read; this, or a manga where a guy can summon shadow goldfish with a magic katana?

That’s what I thought.

Of course, all this gets at is why the manga failed with its readership at large, which is only half the story. At the top of this article I mentioned that I actually liked Cipher Academy, and that’s mostly true. Why? Well, put plainly, as a fellow-traveler complete dork I tend to find NisiosiN’s particular brand of absurdity more entertainingly silly than obnoxious. But I think, perhaps unfortunately for Isshin, that I’m fairly rare in this regard. At least, rare among the sorts of people who routinely check out new MangaPlus titles.

Cipher Academy‘s central theme is that of code creation as communication. This idea that by hiding things about yourself on purpose, you’re more likely to be honest with people who can see through that obfuscation. The manga does a few interesting things with this, including a really great early moment where Iroha basically sneaks his entire backstory into a code battle a good 30 chapters before we get most of it spelled out in plain-text. Things like this make Cipher Academy‘s best moments feel actively rewarding instead of just convoluted. It’s also worth noting that Yuuji Iwasaki’s art is consistently great and occasionally fantastic, and may be the best part of the series overall.

Unfortunately though, I think trying to get people onboard a manga this willfully obtuse for a handful of moments where what it’s trying to do actually clicks is a tough sell no matter how you slice it. By the end of its run, even I was bored with Cipher Academy, and as it wears on—and the effects of its looming cancellation become more and more obvious as plotlines are condensed and rushed through—it becomes harder and harder to root for. By the conclusion, I was pretty much fed up.

Indeed, if we turn the manga’s theme of the cryptic-as-the clarifying back on the manga itself, we’re left with a decidedly unflattering portrait of its author. The manga’s final chapters offer simple and clean solutions to massive problems; wars end with a handshake, and the real global problem is a lack of mutual respect. This is an uncharitable read, but its emblematic of the problems found in some of Isshin’s less refined work, and “less refined” really does just define Cipher Academy in general. The whole thing ends in a giant, glossed-over shrug, and a decidedly unearned (and very boring) happy endings epilogue, because it has neither the time nor depth to do anything else.

At the end of the day, the problem is obvious. NisiosiN’s greatest strength as a writer is also his greatest weakness, his ability to absorb and scramble basically any kind of theme or subject matter into a fresh and surprising story. Cipher Academy, frustratingly, is those things, it just isn’t terribly coherent. Describing the series to someone else makes it sound like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist; cryptocurrency vaults, the NSA infiltrating high schools, child soldiers with real guns that look like toys, dancing prisoners of war, superpowered cheerleaders, hyper-advanced spy tool glasses, and so on, but unlike Isshin’s best work, Cipher Academy can’t actually support all of this, and when it tries to, it veers from “goofy” into “just generally wretched.” It’s too brief and too tossed-off to explore most of its ideas in detail, so on the rare occasional it gestures to them, it feels unfinished and almost insulting. Much of the manga ends up reading like a random sampling of whatever ideas happened to furrow their way into Isshin’s head as he wrote it. He’s a ridiculously prolific writer, and this smashed-open spigot approach has led to some great work, but Cipher Academy is a decidedly minor piece of his bibliography.

I won’t discount the possibility that Isshin’s real crime here is greatly overestimating his readerbase (up to and including yours truly), and that if read from a certain angle, Cipher Academy somehow makes more sense and coheres into some kind of wonderful whole. I liked the series for the moments where it clicks, its colorful cast of bizarre characters, and its great art. But—and I can’t say this too loudly—the ugly fact is that those things alone aren’t enough to float a manga in the most competitive magazine in the industry, at least not for very long. As it stands, this is a minor work from a guy who has done much, much more interesting stuff. I doubt anyone but Isshin’s true diehards will remember this manga existed even a few years down the line. So it goes.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions, The Manga Shelf

New Manga First Impressions: Cracking the Code on CIPHER ACADEMY

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

“μεμέ(τρηκεν)() ἰς̣() τὸ δη(μόσιον) (πυροῦ) γενή(ματος) τοῦ διελ(θόντος) ιθ (ἔτους)
Αὐρηλίων Ἀντωνίνου καὶ Κομμόδου
Κ[α]ισάρων τῶν κυρίων (διὰ) σι(τολόγων)() λιβὸ(ς) τοπ(αρχίας) [Σ]ερύ(φεως)() τόπ(ων) Κλάρος Διδύμου ἀγορανομή(σας)
[θ]έμ(α) ἀρταβαι() ὀκτο() χ(οίνικας) δ, (γίνονται) (πυροῦ) (ἀρτάβαι) η \χ(οίνικες) δ./ Διογ(ένης) σι(τολόγος) σεσημ(είωμαι).”

Shonen Jump’s rush to find their next big hit has produced its fair share of odd little manga, most of which don’t get the chance to run very long; from the still-in-limbo draconic slice of life that was Ruri Dragon to the sweet-tooth, axed-before-its-time battle shonen Candy Flurry, the casualties are frequent and litter the magazine’s pages—and that of its affiliates—like skeletons on a battlefield. Just the other day, it was this environment that Cipher Academy strove into; confident, swaggering, and about as qualified for the job as anyone could hope to be.

Cipher Academy‘s greatest asset is not actually anything within the manga itself, at least not yet. It’s the manga’s author; NISIOISIN, one of the modern anime / manga landscape’s great eccentrics. (On art, we have Yuuji Iwasaki.) You might not know that from reading Cipher Academy itself, though. So far, it’s actually been fairly tame by Isshin’s standards. Of course, that still means that this thing is pretty weird; the premise alone—our protagonist is a new student at an academy that specializes in teaching its students high-level cryptography—is fairly novel. Add in the general state of the manga zeitgeist, and the introductory chapter drops such shamelessly silly shit as AR glasses that help our hapless femboy protagonist bluff his way to Sherlock status (complete with “elementary!” as a catchphrase), a Jojo-posing mean-girl clique who threaten to indenture him on his first day, a habit of literally censoring some of its own dialogue (mostly, though I would be willing to bet not entirely, for comedic effect), and of course, this admirably-insane single page of exposition, which is, in its entirety, most of the worldbuilding that we’ve gotten so far.

As for what this thing is actually about, well, our protagonist, Iroha, enrolls essentially out of lack of better options. The titular academy is mostly but not entirely a girls’ school, and Iroha is in fact crossdressing throughout the entire thing, almost as a matter of fact. This might conveniently dovetail into some sort of harem setup later on, but the emphasis must be on the “some sort” there, given Isshin’s history with that genre. More importantly; he’s a total airhead and doesn’t have the slightest brain for cryptography at all. Enough so that, when he’s handed his first assignment in his home room (where he sits directly behind the beautiful and brilliant Kyoha. Keep her in mind), he has no real idea what to make of it.

Things seem rather dim for Iroha until he runs into Kogoe, who is on the run from Kyoha and her girls for reasons we’re not currently privy to. Iroha hides Kogoe, aided by the fact that Kyoha is immensely dismissive of him, writing him off as a “token boy”. (A meta-joke? Maybe.) Kogoe, grateful, offers Iroha these.

Google Glass, eat your heart out.

She then lightly teases Iroha about the possibility that she might be dangerous. Is this foreshadowing? Probably, although if she actually is a war criminal that’s less foreshadowing than one or two-shadowing. What we might make of her claim that she enrolled at the academy so she can become “a hero” without “resorting to violence” is similarly fairly up in the air. None of this is that strange; first chapters are supposed to have a lot of setup. (I also feel compelled to point out the SHAFT-style head tilt here. Look at that smirk; priceless.)

The real payoff of the first chapter comes when Kyoha and her circle confront Iroha again. Kyoha, correctly, accuses Iroha of having gotten someone else to do the assignment they were handed earlier. When Iroha denies the accusation, Kyoha forces a wager on her, and it’s here where things start to really take off. (Another sidenote; look at her face in that first panel. Positively Seto Kaiba-ish.)

As mentioned, those glasses that Kogoe gives Iroha aren’t actually just for show. They are, for lack of a better way to put it, hacking glasses. An AR interface that both solves no small amount of any given puzzle on its own but also directly aids Iroha in completing the rest. It seems like quite a handy thing to have at a school full of crypto nerds!

It’s a Unix system, he knows this.

The puzzle as-given turns out to have a fairly simple lateral thinking-esque solution (the cryptogram refers to someone, as Kyoha says, “amongst us.” Thinking about this for a few seconds will tip you off that the grammar there includes Iroha as well. Iroha himself, naturally, is the solution to the puzzle).

But we’re not done yet! In a final and very Isshin-y twist to this situation, this then happens.

Note the speech bubbles; that’s not Iroha himself talking. That’s the glasses. Or rather, Kogoe talking through them. During his very first day at school, Iroha has gotten Kyoha, earlier established not only as a brilliant cryptanalyst but also the heiress to a weapons company, under his thumb, through no active will of his own. Time will tell if that actually holds.

The opening chapter’s final scene is this cut back to Kogoe, squirreled away in some lair, where she casually ropes another definition of the term “crypto” into this manga’s world.

Cryptocurrency certainly works better as the proverbial treasure chest in what promises to be a wild battle-of-wits adventure than it does here in the real world, but more than anything, this scene did make me wonder if Cipher Academy might be more ambitious than I was initially inclined to give it credit for. Certainly, the “censored” speech bubbles are a funny joke, but they too could easily point to something more substantial. This early on, it’s hard to make strong claims, so firmly within the realm of speculation is where we remain.

In terms of pure quality, I’d call Cipher Academy more solid and promising than an out-and-out show stopper, but given that NISIOISIN is involved, it seems likely that even if it totally crashes and burns, it’ll at least do so entertainingly. The fact that Iroha himself is functionally just a pawn of Kogoe at the moment points toward some interesting possible dynamics; either one where Iroha is constantly shuffled between opposing forces, like a repeatedly-captured bughouse chess piece, or one where he must learn to leverage his limited assets in the form of the glasses in order to become a proper contender in his own right. There are a lot of open questions about how the world of Cipher Academy even functions, too.

All of this and more provides a number of opportunities for the manga to open up in interesting ways. I just hope that it actually takes them. If it does, you will likely see Cipher Academy in this column again.

Cipher Academy can be read legally, for free, in English, on MangaPlus.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.