Vampire Game Manga
Vampire Game was surprisingly good for the first... half or so.
The basic premise is moderately interesting; an evil vampire fought some dude a century ago, the vampire did a magical thing when he was losing so the two of them would reincarnate in a century, and in this setting human reincarnation is a full memory wipe while vampire reincarnation is just arising in a new body, old memories intact. (With some odd mechanics; the vampire apparently makes a deal with a female animal to stuff its soul into one of their kids as part of the process) Our male lead, it eventually turns out, is said evil vampire lord.
But it's really enjoyable when we meet the female lead, a princess descended from the dude the vampire fought -who is revered as a saint and in the ensuing centuries it's been A Thing that all royals of one country have to be directly descended from this dude, explicitly leading to serious inbreeding problems- who is likable and friendly and not at all patient with what she considers the idiocy of a system of governance based on who her grandfather boinked. Circumstances conspire for her to end up with the reincarnated vampire lord as her pet cat-thing, and when she eventually discover he's the historical evil vampire lord who slew her grandfather and he's here to slay the reincarnation, she decides to help him.
This leads to a fairly interesting series of forays into trying to arrange chances for the vampire lord to draw blood from family members, because for whatever reason revered hero dude is known to be reincarnating into one of his descendants and the vampire lord can just magically check if someone is his reincarnation with a blood sample. I particularly enjoyed how we got to see that there's 'monsters' in this setting which the story refuses to simply other-ize. Yeah, there's weird creatures that are okay with killing humans for any number of reasons, but happening to be ugly from a human standpoint while also being hostile doesn't get treated as evidence of some fundamental moral failing. There's one arc where a regular human hunting monsters is the bad guy outright, and it makes perfect sense in context!
Unfortunately, the plot seems to lose track of itself at some point. The vampire lord's vengeance gets more or less forgotten, he explicitly becomes a less unpleasant person for no particular reason (Our female lead is the one credited/blamed for this change, but it just sort of happens), and the plot evolves into being this weird abstract politics game where our protagonists and their allies are trying to head off civil war while getting the female lead on the throne with a legitimate (-seeming being considered acceptable if they can convince everyone else it's real) husband who is ideally not contributing to the inbreeding problem, with it being kind of incidental that vampires and monsters are involved with the politics.
Notably, when I was very near the end of the story, I was going wait, this can't be right. There's got to be more volumes, there's not remotely enough space left to handle hardly any of the plot threads!
And while I was wrong about there being more volumes, I was right about the plot threads not being handled. Some people die, we fast-forward to a Happily Ever After, and how on Earth the civil war was averted or successfully beaten down or whatever goes entirely unaddressed. The enemies outside the country also go unaddressed. Several relationship plot threads that needed to be addressed are not touched on.
It makes me wonder if the manga was losing popularity and got canceled and wrapped up in a rush as a result, because the ending is so jarring I have a hard time imagining the creator actually did go 'yes, this is a good ending I am happy with'.
It's too bad there's never been any kind of follow-up. It has an interesting world and I would have liked to see more done with the female lead's attitude in particular -she's a great character, and unfortunately a lot of what I liked most about her got relatively little done with it.
The basic premise is moderately interesting; an evil vampire fought some dude a century ago, the vampire did a magical thing when he was losing so the two of them would reincarnate in a century, and in this setting human reincarnation is a full memory wipe while vampire reincarnation is just arising in a new body, old memories intact. (With some odd mechanics; the vampire apparently makes a deal with a female animal to stuff its soul into one of their kids as part of the process) Our male lead, it eventually turns out, is said evil vampire lord.
But it's really enjoyable when we meet the female lead, a princess descended from the dude the vampire fought -who is revered as a saint and in the ensuing centuries it's been A Thing that all royals of one country have to be directly descended from this dude, explicitly leading to serious inbreeding problems- who is likable and friendly and not at all patient with what she considers the idiocy of a system of governance based on who her grandfather boinked. Circumstances conspire for her to end up with the reincarnated vampire lord as her pet cat-thing, and when she eventually discover he's the historical evil vampire lord who slew her grandfather and he's here to slay the reincarnation, she decides to help him.
This leads to a fairly interesting series of forays into trying to arrange chances for the vampire lord to draw blood from family members, because for whatever reason revered hero dude is known to be reincarnating into one of his descendants and the vampire lord can just magically check if someone is his reincarnation with a blood sample. I particularly enjoyed how we got to see that there's 'monsters' in this setting which the story refuses to simply other-ize. Yeah, there's weird creatures that are okay with killing humans for any number of reasons, but happening to be ugly from a human standpoint while also being hostile doesn't get treated as evidence of some fundamental moral failing. There's one arc where a regular human hunting monsters is the bad guy outright, and it makes perfect sense in context!
Unfortunately, the plot seems to lose track of itself at some point. The vampire lord's vengeance gets more or less forgotten, he explicitly becomes a less unpleasant person for no particular reason (Our female lead is the one credited/blamed for this change, but it just sort of happens), and the plot evolves into being this weird abstract politics game where our protagonists and their allies are trying to head off civil war while getting the female lead on the throne with a legitimate (-seeming being considered acceptable if they can convince everyone else it's real) husband who is ideally not contributing to the inbreeding problem, with it being kind of incidental that vampires and monsters are involved with the politics.
Notably, when I was very near the end of the story, I was going wait, this can't be right. There's got to be more volumes, there's not remotely enough space left to handle hardly any of the plot threads!
And while I was wrong about there being more volumes, I was right about the plot threads not being handled. Some people die, we fast-forward to a Happily Ever After, and how on Earth the civil war was averted or successfully beaten down or whatever goes entirely unaddressed. The enemies outside the country also go unaddressed. Several relationship plot threads that needed to be addressed are not touched on.
It makes me wonder if the manga was losing popularity and got canceled and wrapped up in a rush as a result, because the ending is so jarring I have a hard time imagining the creator actually did go 'yes, this is a good ending I am happy with'.
It's too bad there's never been any kind of follow-up. It has an interesting world and I would have liked to see more done with the female lead's attitude in particular -she's a great character, and unfortunately a lot of what I liked most about her got relatively little done with it.
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