Level E: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes

Manga Details

• Author: Togashi, Yoshihiro (Toe-gah-she Yo-she-row)
• Author’s other works:
  • HxH and Yu Yu Hakusho
• Run dates: Sep 19, 1995 to Dec 3, 1996
• Chapters/Volumes: 3/16

About the Manga

• Plot
  • Hundreds of alien species live on earth and we have no idea. The following is a series of vignettes taking place in that world.
  • Ouji is the prince of the Dogra, appearing in the home of high school baseball player Tsutsui’s home and pranks him and his bodyguards by setting up a fake attack from a genocidal alien race called the Duskin, who don’t attack humans because they love Baseball
  • A human-devouring alien creature has infiltrated a high school and eats young girls. Four boys witness a murder and seek help from the mysterious Level E, a subsection of a mental hospital dedicated to investigating aliens.
  • The investigator looks into it and discovers that the aliens are the last of their race and they reproduce through cannibalism, it’s complicated but the sci fi logic behind it is actually pretty well explained.
  • The boys all decide to pay back the investigator by joining him to help Level E, but this whole story was actually a manga written and drawn by Ouji, whose pitch is rejected by the Shonen jump editors for being too dark.
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  • Ouji is bored so he kidnaps five kids and turns them into power rangers, teleporting them into a knock off-Final Fantasy I that he made in RPG maker 95
  • Ouji himself gets trapped into becoming the evil general’s wife, until the actual Dark Lord appears, revealing that he doesn’t want to be evil. This angers Ouji who made him specifically to be evil. The power ranger kids immediately turn on Ouji and leave the planet, forcing him to fly them home.
  • An alien species named the Magra reproduce when an alien queen mate with one male of a random species, giving birth to millions of daughters and spreading a virus that destroys the race of the father.
  • The alien queen ends up falling in love with a trans man, but since they can’t reproduce, she kidnaps him and gives him HRT and presumably a penis, and they fall in love. Kraft and Ouji did some complicated trickery to make it so humanity isn’t wiped out tho.
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  • Remember baseball kid from the first chapter? He’s back and this time he’s on his way to the baseball championships when his team is teleported to a dream world? This one was kind of confusing and I’m not sure how they got out of it but they did.
  • The power ranger kids rescue a trafficked mermaid who kills you if you tell a lie.
  • Ouji’s fiancé appears and tricks him into marrying him and becoming king.
  • 10 years pass, Ouji and his wife are held hostage by a rebel group but trick them into killing themselves. Turns out that was on Earth, which has fully adapted to the aliens and integrated them into society in a beautiful utopia.
• Characters
  • Tsutsui Yukitaka (Tsu-tsu-u-ee Yue-key-tah-kah
    • Earthling
    • Lives alone
    • Plays baseball
  • Prince Baka
    • Alien
    • Breaks into house
    • Acts like a huge asshole, makes fun of people
    • Accidentally says what he’s thinking and thinks what he’s saying
    • Has cool alien powers like regen and blue blood
    • Prince of planet Dogra (Doe-grah)
  • Edogawa Miho (ey-do-ga-wah Mee-hoe)
    • Neighbor
    • Pretty girl
    • Father is an engineer looking into the aliens
    • Goes to the same HS as Tsutsu
    • Straightman in the triad
  • Sado
    • Prince bodyguard
    • Serous looking one
  • Captain Kraft
    • Heard blooded like Tsutsui
    • Can be cool-headed though
  • Colin
    • Last bodyguard, just kinda there
    • Was a spy for princes younger brother
    • 
      
  • Color rangers
    • Gang of idiots
    • Eventually become cool mmo gamers (™)
  • Princess Saki
    • Alien princess
    • Has a virus that will make humans go extinct if she falls in love with a human
  • Kyoko Mikihasa
    • Human Saki has fallen in love with
    • Hopeless romantic teen
    • Trans man?

Why it failed

• No art
• The humor kinda falls flat, I feel maybe this is a “Seinfeld is unfunny” issue where everything feels overplayed but wasn’t 30 years ago
• There’s a lot of text
• The art seems kinda weird, like did he trace people?
• This series takes a long time to make jokes, like does it want to be a gag series or just a series with humor in it?
• Weird how casually Prince Baka killed someone
• Terrible with introducing character names so discussion of it is really hard
• Nothing happens in this series that doesn’t have to do with the prince so it’s kinda the poochi effect
• It completely abandons the original premise in the first 5 chapter
• The art completely falls about in the last chapter
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What it did well

• This is some good art
• Funny
• Having an anti climax for the first ark is pretty interesting and very Togashi
• Well thought out with how the aliens work like the cannibal aliens
• Chapter 6 seems to be a turnaround, the characters are more interesting and it presents the info better
• This is fun to read as a mix of ideas for hxh like greed island is clearly inspired by this as is chimera ant with the whole humans are garbage thing
• This series is really great at Togashi just fucking around for a year before making something more complicated, from the art, plot, characters it’s great
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Where it could have gone

• Maybe bring the humans into the plot more, make it humans learning about weird-ass alien cultures, like all those crazy people you see on the street? Actually aliens. Like Japanese style MIB. Gives a framework to all the weird stuff
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Misc Thoughts

• Alien dude feels like a jojo character
• Kinda weird they don’t say the alien dudes name for a long time
• I can’t harp on the series but man the translators used some hard to read fonts
• Did you notice every panel is a square?

Final Verdict

• Six-Word summary
  • Scott: Level E: Great ideas but an uneven execution.
  • Twolfwood: Level E: Togashi's long-forgotten manga
  • Maxy B: Level E, deliberately short, rare trait
  • Tucker: Alien invasion annoys and inconveniences mankind
  • Rated E but not for everyone
  • What if Araki made YuYu Hakusho
  • Godswill: A legend's forgotten funny middle child
  • What if Sandman was a dick
• Flop or not
  • Flop I just felt bored reading it
    • Read dandadan which is what this series would have been like if made now
  • Abso-fucking-lutely not a flop
• Is this the best/worst series we’ve talked about