Chobits 20th Anniversary Edition 1 Book Review

I’ve long been a fan of Chobits, both the manga and the anime adaptation. I never bothered with the Chobits 20th Anniversary Edition volumes as I already had the two omnibus volumes from Dark Horse. For some reason, Chobits came up in a conversation a while back. So I thought I’d take a risk and buy Chobits 20th Anniversary Edition 1 to see what it was like.

Note: I won’t do a story review because I did that in the Chobits Omnibus Volume 1 review and Chobits Omnibus Volume 2 review.

–> Buy Chobits 20th Anniversary Edition 1 from Amazon.com!

About the Book

The first thing of note is that Chobits 20th Anniversary Edition 1 is a hardcover book. While I do own a few hardbound light novels, I find no hardbound manga titles in my collection. I bought my niece the Fruits Basket Ultimate Edition in hardcover, but not for myself. So this Chobits hardcover is the first in my collection.

The book is ~8.5″ by 6″, so it is nice sized and looks good on a bookcase. This first book contains the first two volumes of the manga. There’s no divider to let one know where the original volume 1 ended and volume 2 began. However, much like the Dark Horse omnibus, Kodansha kept the color pages. As such, chapter 13 starts in color, as it should. Likewise, the color art that starts chapter 1 is there.

The additional color artwork is saved for the end of the book rather than have some added with the start of the volume. I’m going to presume all the artwork will show up throughout the rest of the Kodansha releases. However, I did note the art of Chii in a bed of panties that was part of volume 2 for Dark Horse was not in this first book from Kodansha.

As to the translations, they are a tweaked version of the Dark Horse adaptation. I didn’t go page by page, but in spot checking, at times things are altered ever so slightly. Whether this is a positive or negative, I cannot say without access to the source Japanese. That said, at least all of the honorifics appear to be intact. And there are translation notes.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

In the end, Chobits 20th Anniversary Edition 1 is lovely because we get a great manga with a hard cover. I will be buying the remaining three, hardbound releases.