Before it became an anime, Eiichi Ikegami wrote a light novel called Shangri-la
No offense to Range Murata, who designed the characters for the anime, but the illustrations for the 2004 Shangri-la light novel came from Kenichi Yoshida, who creates much more mature looking characters than the anime does. Whether Yoshida's writing was better than the ill-paced anime adaptation cannot be, unless you are lucky enough to speak Japanese and buy a copy of the book. Shangri-la was also printed in issues of Newtype Magazine from '04 to '05. Damn you lucky people who read it!
You can see the entire Shangri-la anime on places like Crunchyroll and take a look at some of the novel's illustrations in the rest of the article you're reading right now. Judge for yourself: which would you rather have to entertain you?
Labels: Anime, Eiichi-Ikegami, light-novel, Shangri-la, VichusSmith
