Welcome to America’s newest and most popular sport: Rhysmyth! Featuring one-on-one dance battles atop a hi-tech glass court grid, when the music hits, you and your opponent dance across a digital minefield for the glory of being the most stylish Rhysmyther. Thata’s the basic idea behind the focus of attention in this new OEL manag from writer Anthony Anddra and artist Lincy Chan. For anyone that has ever played DDR, this manga will cover subjects and ideas that may be well known to you already. It’s a more complicated form of Dance Dance Revolution, plus the lives and conflicts of the players involved – drama and gaming, who could have guessed?

The story revolves around a high school girl named Elena and her need to succeed and be accepted by her peers. At the beginning of the story, she’s looking for a little something extra to beef up her college applications with something physical, but ends up falling on her face for most of what she tries out for. Then she discovers Rhysmyth (or Rhysmyth discovers her – either way). As she’s thrust into this fast-paced world of dancing and moving, she begins to get the hang of it and impresses her friends and foes alike. Rhysmyth shines in its ability to present a game/sport as the main focus, but never forgets to give characters personalities, conflicts and relationships. The game is at the forefront of most of these characters minds, but of course, all the other day-to-day life things happen too, making it a complete story with multiple focuses. Girls will especially be able to relate to the story as it revolves around an uncertain female character trying to figure out her place in the stream of things, as well as figure out her place in the hearts of the romantic interests that pursue her. It’s romance! It’s action! Lots of that drama stuff too!

The art is wispy and certainly on the shojo side of the line. The girls are pretty, and so are the boys (or at least the main ones on the Rhysmyth team of course). The text and text bubbles are all well placed and readable, and it’s nice to see all the sound effects in English for once. Most of the detail is put into the character design and the action portions – both of which are done very well and with a lot of originality.

Besides all that good stuff, Rhysmyth is bursting with all the extras that readers wish that other books had and more. There’s an extra humor comic, back story bits, “Rhysmyth history bites,” character designs and pre-planning work, etc. It’s those extra little details that make a book worth purchasing and helps to really flesh it out. The faster other artists and writers figure this out, the sooner the readers will be more willing to quickly shell out their hard earned income on gazillions of manga. Rhysmyth does a lot of things right, especially some things that other books don’t even make an attempt at – that’s worth something!

IN SUMMARY:
Rhysmyth is an action/romance manga in it’s own totally different league. There’s plenty of sports manga out there, but not too much which hold as many different ideas and character relationships as this one. Try it out!

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