Manga Review – Wedding Peach: Young Love

Wedding Peach Young Love

Wedding Peach
ウェディングピーチ
YAZAWA Nao (art & story), TOMITA Sukehiro (original creator)
Shoujo – Action, comedy, fantasy, magical girl, romance
1 Volume (complete)
VIZ Media
Out-of-print

Summary:

Clumsy Momoko dreams of one day falling in love and having the perfect wedding. But that might never happen f the Demons have their way and steal all the love in the world! One day, Momoko is given a mysterious compact and gains the ability to transform into a Love Angel named Wedding Peach. Can Wedding Peach protect love and save the Angel World?

Review:

Wedding Peach: Young Love is only for die-hard fans or young manga readers.

Young Love is a reboot of Wedding Peach, one of the many different Wedding Peach manga written for young elementary students. This serialization was in the manga targeting third graders and the only version also illustrated by the author of the six-volume Wedding Peach series. If you’re curious, you can get an idea of what the other adaptations look like here.

Young Love has the same basic storyline: girl and her friends are searching for legendary items to defeat the Demons and save the world. Obviously a lot of changes were made to shrink the series to 1/6th of the original.

  • Several characters don’t appear at all (Takuro, Uragano).
  • The backstory of the Angels seems to have been altered (and shortened).
  • Salvia awakens after the others.
  • Different villains make their manga debut.
  • Additional attacks are used.
  • Limone ends up with no one and has three girls chasing after him.

Young Love is a long volume at over 220 pages. The actual chapters are short though. The final chapter is a whopping 10 pages. That should give you an idea of how quickly the plot moves. Heck, Yosuke doesn’t have a proper introduction! We see him giving the girls’ precious “Yanagiba-senpai” a thumbs up, but he isn’t named or even given a note saying “fellow first year who teases Momoko” or something. Later, we see him appearing at Hinagiku’s family’s shop during a Jama-P attack. The girls, panicking, half-yell at Yosuke for his bad timing. That’s how readers learn his name, but it’s easy for readers to not realize this is the same boy shown in a single panel 17 pages ago. For someone who hasn’t read or watched Wedding Peach previously, it makes no sense to have some boy suddenly protecting Momoko.

As you can imagine, since the male lead barely is introduced, filler material is pretty much non-existent. To balance the plot out, the episodes tend to have a comedic bent to them. The most hilarious is when Momoko and her best friends end up sneaking into the boys’ changing room to check for the mark of a Demon on a boy’s body. Of course, they’re discovered, and the chapter ends with people talking about the Newspaper Club peeking in on guys changing. One attack from Jama-P is the power of sound… from nails on a chalkboard. So it often doesn’t feel like a difficult battle with a lot riding on the Love Angels’ victory.

However, that works when the target audience is young. If Wedding Peach were to air on Disney Channel, this would air on Disney Junior. Even the art, which is mostly the same as in Wedding Peach, has a softer, brighter feel to it. Young Love is impressive in its length, and if this still was widely available, I could see people buying this as a gift for a beginning chapter books-level reader, showing that just because a book has pictures doesn’t mean it’s for little(r) kids. While the Japanese right-to-left format may be confusing for this age group, I can see how it could be a sweet moment between a parent/guardian where they read together.

Translation:

See my Wedding Peach review. Note that several side comments are in German. Nothing too important, but still sloppy. I would have thought the dialogue Young Love would be kept as clean as possible. “Come hell or highwater” isn’t bad language by most standards, but I would have thought it could try to make the script as all ages as possible.

Final Comments:

Wedding Peach: Young Love gives you the abridged version of this magical girl tale. But since it’s out-of-print with no digital version available, most sellers are trying to sell this book for around $50. You may get lucky and find it being sold along with the main Wedding Peach manga, but otherwise, only collectors need to have this volume.

Wedding Peach was also released by VIZ Media. The anime is currently out-of-print in North America.

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2 Comments

  1. dreager1

    Definitely interesting to have a reboot for kids. It’s actually a pretty nice idea and I’d be down with them doing that for more series. I do wish it was a little longer though as I can’t imagine the pacing being anything but rushed no matter how big the one volume is. Sounds like a fun little read though

    Reply
    1. Krystallina (Post author)

      Yeah, you hear a lot about spin-offs or versions of like a shounen series for shoujo readers or seinen for shoujo, but you don’t often get a full reboot. Makes you wonder what a kid’s version of some popular manga would be like!

      Reply

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