Psycho Busters - TV Tropes
- ️Wed Oct 26 2011
Kakeru Hase is just an Ordinary High-School Student left alone at home after his mother and sisters go on a vacation to Hawaii (and with his father away on business). No sooner had their cab left than Kakeru proceeds to do what boys his age do — watch TV all he wants, play games for the entire summer break, and uncover his Porn Stash (as well as his father's). For him, life is too peaceful...
...That is, until he discovers a beautiful naked girl in his bedroom. The girl — Ayano Fujimura, as she calls herself — is a psychic escaping the Greenhouse, an enigmatic organization who captures such savants like her and experiment on them. Earlier, she and her fellow psychics are forced to jump off a cliff to elude the Farmers, the personal troops of the Greenhouse, but not before their leader, Joi Touma, asking her to find Kakeru himself.
Kakeru is ultimately dragged into the fight together with Ayano and Joi, as well as their other allies — Xiao Long Bai and Kaito Himura — against the Greenhouse as other players behind the scene watch from the shadows. All the while, they must try to unlock the mystery of why Kakeru ties into their fates despite lacking powers though he proves to be far more than meets the eye...
Psycho Busters is a seven-volume manga adaptation of a three-volume light novel series by Tadashi Agi (under the pen name "Yuya Aoki", the same one he used for Get Backers), with art by Akinari Nao.
The manga provides the following tropes:
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Kakeru defeats several powerful psychics mostly by figuring out their weak points and brutally exploiting them.
- The Big Guy: Kaito Himuro, the Hot-Blooded pyromancer.
- Death Equals Redemption: Oddly played by Ikushima in the end. After Kakeru mortally impales him, Tomoe's spirit appears to comfort her father and allow him to accept his fate, making sure they are Together in Death. Then Redemption Earns Life is applied when Kakeru travels back in time (at the risk of permanently deleting him from existence) to prevent Tomoe's death and thus indirectly avert her father's Start of Darkness.
- Deus ex Machina: Kakeru's reappearence in the end, after he erases himself from existence. There's very little explanation to it and the title of the last chapter is "Miracle".
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: One of the bonus Yonkomas has Joi and Kaito marveling at how big a giant cyclops is.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: Joi's power is seeing into the future.
- The Hero: Joi Touma, clairvoyant leader of the fledgling psychic La Résistance.
- The Lancer: Kakeru Hase, the protagonist and fledgling Reality Warper/Time Master.
- Meaningful Name: The kanji for Kakeru means 'flight', and fleeing is one of the things he does best; Takemaru means 'fierce'.
- Ret-Gone: The ultimate fate of the Ikushima who served as Big Bad of the series; in his place is the kinder dad whose daughter Tomoe never died and thus caused his Start of Darkness. Kakeru was also supposed to have vanished for good after traveling back in time to retcon Ikushima and Tomoe's destinies, but he got better.
- The Smart Guy: Xiao Long Bai, specialist in qigong, a special technique that requires lots of thinking.
- Tempting Fate: In the first chapter, Kakeru says that there's no way that the exciting stuff he sees on TV or videogames could possibly be true. Guess what happens next.