Koihime Soushi

Overview
Princess Koiko has the power to unleash love for her in other people’s hearts. However, it has no effect on her personal bodyguard, Shiro. Together, they just might have the most unexpected romance of the year! But can their love defeat circumstances that threaten to keep them apart?

Review
From the moment you set eyes on Koihime Soushi you can guess the storyline before you even read the blurb on the back. On the cover sits Princess Koiko, and she is cute. Really cute, and add to that the hearts in her hair and the pink kimono, and you know that you’re in for something that is also very much a love story.

 Koihime Soushi isn’t a bad manga at all, it’s got all the key components but there still feels like there’s something missing. Personally, I think that it is simply too short. The storyline is very simple, and it feels quite rushed, especially the ending. The storyline itself is nothing new. It’s the same old story of a princess falling in love with someone she can’t have, in this case her bodyguard. Of course they can’t be together because of their different social statures, and so on and so forth, it’s been done lots of times. Some will find it boring but I’m sure that many will enjoy it, just bear in mind that there is nothing particularly exciting or different about Koihime Soushi’s plot.

The best thing about Koihime Soushi is the art style. If you like chibi-fied characters and beautiful boys then you’re in luck because Koihime Soushi is full of cute chibi girls and Shiro, Koiko’s love interest, is a rather good looking young man, he does look a little chibi-ish but he still looks very much like a man, not a child. My favourite thing about the manga was that there are a couple of pages at the beginning (the introduction, contents and double page depicting Koiko and Shiro) which are in colour.

Also at the end of Kouhime Soushi is a “Special Bonus Story” about a woman who is about to enter into an arranged marriage and meet her husband to be for the first time, her ex-lover died in the war and so she misses him and wishes that things could be different. Then just as she’s wishing she could go back and change things...she travels back to pre-historic times somehow and is charged by a woolly mammoth, kills it, comes back to the present and then decides that actually meeting this new husband to be isn’t that scary. After all, she just killed a mammoth. So again, a great idea, but it feels rushed and leaves the reader wondering why Koge-Donbo didn’t flesh it out more and make it into its own manga.