Title: Tista Vol. 2
Author: Tatsuya Endo
Publisher: Viz Media
Language: English
Format: Physical
Pages: 237
Genre: Action, Drama
Publication Date: July 4, 2023
The Story
The second and final volume of Tista consists of Snow continuing to poke her head into Tista and Arty’s lives by trying to get to the root of everything that happened with the museum incident. While she’s still a bit eccentric, she’s been finding leads to try and figure out who Tista Lone really is. Thankfully, we don’t need Snow to do that as the manga sends us back in time… several times at that… and explains Tista’s past, how she was taken in by the church, and how she decided to become Sister Militia.
Fearing that she’s not able to perform her duties for the church anymore, they aim to strip Tista of her title; however, they decided to give her one last opportunity to prove that she can still carry out assassination missions… by giving her Arty as a target. The manga and the series end with the aftermath of her mission.
Final Thoughts
Even though there was character development, I’ll lump what I think of it in with my final thoughts on this short series.
Tista, herself, was a pretty interesting character. Manifesting the sight to carry out assassinations and doing it for the reasons that she did add some depth to her character instead of making her out to be some sort of soulless machine best to serve the church. Of course, we had already seen that she wasn’t soulless due to her interactions with Arty in the first volume.
By the time we got to the end of the series, everyone was on the Tista case. Snow, the detectives, and even the FBI. With that many eyes on the situation, and with knowledge of the church, you would think that there would have been a means to an end there; however, and this might be a slight spoiler, the fact that nothing was really shown to have happened to them despite it all being narrowed down to them, was kind of baffling. If something did happen, they didn’t really hint at it. That would probably be my only complaint as far as wrapping storylines up goes.
I did like the development they did with Susie here in the second volume. She didn’t really play too much of a prominent role at first but as we dug deeper into her past, we saw how much it intertwined with Tista’s and how that served as the basis for the entire story. She did her job well as a supporting character… I just wish the series was a bit longer so it could’ve had more time to breathe.
I understand that this was one of Tatsuya Endo’s earlier works that are just now getting distributed here in the United States; however, I felt that they were just so much to explore here. The first volume had a lot of action, world-building, and character development was nice but then the second volume just felt like it regurgitated everything all at once because it had no choice to. I am not sure if this was Endo-sensei’s intention to only have it two volumes or if it got canceled out of the gate but I felt we spent way too much time digging into the past before wrapping up the story.
Then again, because it was two volumes, in order for everything to make sense, this was the only option that Endo-sensei could go in. I’m not saying it was bad because of this, though… for what it was, it was a pretty good story and a good indication of Endo-sensei’s storytelling capabilities. While many know him for Spy x Family and as a comedy writer, this shows that he can be serious. While the story wasn’t anything that will blow your mind, it is something that will keep you entertained and that’s okay. With it being only two volumes, you can kill an hour or two reading this and end up satisfied knowing that you read something that didn’t waste your time.
As I said before… I just wish it were longer to let everything breathe but it is what it is.
Overall Score: 3/5
You can also check out other The Outerhaven reviews on your favorite social media networks:
Subscribe to us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theouterhaven
Subscribe to us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheOuterHaven
Subscribe to us on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/theouterhavennet
This item was provided for review by VIZ Media.
