“There is a legend that tells of how the world was almost destroyed thousands of years ago by the vampire queen after she unleashed her latent powers. Despite their efforts, the humans were unable to defeat her, and thus resorted to sealing her away until the time came that they would be powerful enough to destroy the seal and kill her. However, the humans are not the only ones after the seal. Having cast aside his kingdom and betraying his own race and the dhampirs (half-vampires), the vampire king is persistantly searching, even to this day, for where his queen has been sealed away so he may break the seal and free her before the humans do. Fearing that once the king and queen are reunited, they shall continue to destroy the world together, the humans and dhampirs hunt the king, using any method possible.”  -Mangareader.net

Trying to convince you to read this manga may be extremely hard.  This is not because this manga is bad, on the contrary, this is a mind blowingly awesome manga.  But the trouble lies in the fact that all the awesome things that I want to say are huge spoilers.  Because of this, please read this review knowing that there so much more to this manga then what I write here.

Within the first chapter we learn that the character we are following, Akabara Strauss, is the Vampire King.  Only a slight glimpse into his background is revealed at first, as it should be.  As the manga goes on more and more about Strauss is revealed.  Strauss is one of the deepest, most well written characters I have ever seen. Strauss’ past adds a huge amount of depth and explains the entire plot. Also, what is interesting is that Strauss (to the best of my memory) never gets any stronger than he was at chapter one.  This is one of the few mangas that has a main character like that. Of course, Strauss changed mentally but he was still restraining himself in the beginning as not to damage human settlements as he battled the dhampirs* who are pursuing him.  Besides the dhampirs, he also has to worry about the Black Swan, which is a spiritual parasite that attaches to girls who have strong spiritual energy.  The girls are embedded with the spiritual energy and memories of their predecessors. They are also forced to kill Strauss with the condition if they don’t within five years of their “infection” they will die.

The Record of a Fallen Vampire has an amazing plot with more twists than maze.  The characters, especially Strauss, are so well written that they are at the point of feeling alive… well almost.  The art is good, not great but that is more than made up for in every other category. Also, this manga does something which is called a Genre Shift. As the name implies, the Genre Shift is when there is a shift in the genre. In this case we have the shift from supernatural to sci-fi supernatural.  

*Dhampirs are half-human and half-vampire.

Available here and here

GO Rating: 4.5/5

Source: [tinypic.com] [tenmanga.com] [manareader.net] [manga.animea.net]