Death Note Re-light: Vision Of a God Vol. 1, starts off with an average shinigami looking for something new to do. He goes out on a mission to find the shinigami who dropped a Death Note into the human world, to learn more about the human world. He finds Ryuk, which is only swayed by an apple from the shinigami world. Ryuk starts his tale from the very beginning, with the thought of boredom and the dropping of a simple notebook…
Light Yagami Is an A-class student in college who wants to follow in his fathers footsteps as chief of Japanese Police in the area. Light's goal is to uphold justice and his ultimate dream is to cleanse the world of evil. Then, one day, Light sees a black notebook fall from the sky while he was in class. After class is out, he heads over to the notebook and pick is up. It's titled "Death Note" and inside there are direction: "a persons name written in this notebook, shall die." Now, Light doesn't believe it, he just waves it aside as a hoax, like chain emails, so he sets it back down. Before he knew it, the Death Note was in his bag, if there was a chance it would work, it could help him achieve his dream. It didn't take him long to test the book, which happened to work exactly as it said in the directions. When Ryuk finally showed himself to Light, and explained the contract between Light, the Death Note, and Ryuk.
Light would end up using the Death Note to kill anyone who was accused of being a criminal, and eventually those who get in his way, trying to make him stop his mass murdering. He was able to outsmart his obstacles, except one, that always seemed to keep coming back. Its name was L, and he happens to be a famous detective that's been able to quickly solve every case he's worked on. L is pretty sure he knows who the killer is, or "Kira," and he believes it is Light. Unfortunately, L is unable to convince his partners on this case that Light is Kira, though L never gives up on that theory. There's a definite difference between these two geniuses, and an intense battle of intelligence emerges.
Just when you think Light wins, Ryuk closes his story with a sigh, saying: "No, Light, you didn't win". By now, the shinigami that wanted to know Ryuk's tale, has left and was taking the walk to the gate to the human world.
It's very interesting to see the dramatic difference between Light and L that Ryuk saw. Even though it was scenes from the anime, it didn't seem like they were. I like this idea of Ryuk being a story teller of his adventure, it shows how he was deeply affected by Light and the way he treated others. Before he went to the human world, he was very motivated and cocky, now, that he fulfilled the contract between him and Light, he just sulks all the time and doesn't care about his duty as a shinigami, something you don't get from the series. I really like Death Note, there's such an interesting way to look at the concept of Good vs. Evil, through the powers of cunning and intelligence. My only problem with this is that it ends in the middle of the regular series, kind of like the live action movies. But, the fact that it takes out some of the most intense moments of the anime after L, it's still engaging and intense all by itself.
ComicsOnline gives Death Note Re-Light: Visions of a God, 4 out of 5 delicious red apples.
