Writer/Artist: Ru Xu
Letterer: Erika Milligan
Editor: Fawn Lau
Publisher: VIZ
There’s a long history of competitions and community in video games, from arcade tournaments in the 1980s to LAN parties and fighting game tournaments in the 1990s and 2000s. Multiplayer games like League of Legends and Overwatch became massively popular in the last ten years among casual and competitive gamers. Thanks to games like these, Esports became big business in the 21st century. Writer and artist Ru Xu recreates all of that for the first volume of their new series Status Royale.
Xu smartly translates all of the elements one expects from manga like Haikkyu!, Eyeshield 21, and Slam Dunk into the world of Esports. It opens with childhood friends Vell Juarez-Park and Min-Jun Yong playing the online VR multiplayer Status Royale. Min-Jun, who is a Status Royale legend known as CheckMateYourKing, returns to their hometown of Houston after the dissolution of his former team. He teaches Vell the basics of the game before randomly dumping her mid-match and killing her character.
Xu builds the rest of the story off that with Vell forming a team meant to go pro and Min-Jun navigating his career in the wider world of Esports. Centering the story around a dissolved relationship and the resulting fallout puts Status Royale in a league above most sports stories. The best sports stories aren’t really about the sports at the center, the best stories use athletic competition as a means to explore the human condition.
In Status Royale, the game isn’t just about the competition. It’s about the community around it and the people who find each other through that community. Xu fills the book with characters who have complex relationships with each other and the game itself. Vell loves the game but playing it frequently brings back terrible memories of playing with Min-Jun. Vell’s other teammates, Henry and Pepper, have their own complex childhood friendship. The three bond over playing Status Royale because as much as they want to go pro, they love playing the game together. Xu wants to remind readers that games are a communal experience that brings people together.
Xu also makes Min-Jun a complex character. He’s clearly hated by Vell and Henry for similar reasons but his relationship with Pepper, who he bonds with over their dogs hints that he’s not an outright villain. Min-Jun shares a lot of characteristics with his visual inspiration Seto Kaiba from the manga/anime Yu-Gi-Oh. They’re overly competitive people who are out to win, no matter what it costs them.
Min-jun also wrestles with all of the feelings that come with being the best player in the game. An event before the series starts clearly soured him on being a team player or letting other players get close to him. Being the top player in the world seems to have brought him a sense of loneliness rather than a sense of accomplishment.
Xu builds not only a game out of Status Royale but an entire world and reading the first volume makes it clear that they thought out the actual game mechanics, which is a feat in itself. The gameplay mechanics are easy to figure out even if you have only a basic understanding of games like this as it features a whole world of tournaments, rankings, and elite players.
Most importantly, the characters make Status Royale look like a fun video game to play. Xu populates the world of Status Royale with appealingly designed characters inspired by fairy tales. They’re clearly a student of classic video game character designs from a studio like Capcom or fantasy RPGs like Grandia. This is a gaming comic with characters that actually look like they would be in a video game.
Xu also manages to capture the energy of the action around what it would be like to play Status Royale. They imbue their action sequences with an earnest, intense visual dynamic so the characters never get a moment to sit still as their in-game characters. Each page makes obvious the skill of Vell, her team, and their opponents. These are dynamic pages that move and leave you captivated, so when you get to the last page of a match, it’s hard to believe it’s over.
By the end of the first volume, Ru Xu leaves a lot to explore in the world of Status Royal, with a world worth exploring around Vell, Henry, Pepper, and yes, even Min-Jun. There are tournaments to enter, corporate sponsors, owners to encounter, and top-level players to defeat. The heart of this series isn’t just a video game, it’s about a wider community and how we come together to share an individual passion.
Status Royale vol. 1 is now available from VIZ in both digital and physical formats.
