Tokyo Crazy Paradise

In my opinion, this manga is very underrated. I only happened upon it by chance, having never heard of it before and I absolutely loved it. The female lead is very strong and admirable as well as hilarious. I also couldn't help but love Ryuuji and his interactions with Tsukasa are absolutely hysterical. I can't believe that this never gained more popularity. I understand that it is a bit of an odd genre having this mix of shoujo with hardcore action, but I just see this as something that makes it unique and special. More people should definitely give it a try. If you love Skip Beat! you should know that this is the same mangaka and she certainly doesn't disappoint.

I discovered this manga when looking for other works by Nakamura Yoshiki- I was first drawn in by her recent manga, Skip Beat!. It turned out she had written a manga directly before Skip Beat!, called Tokyo Crazy Paradise.

The story seems to cross over both shoujo and shounen lines, the shounen covered by the large amount of violence that occurs in this story and the"'I will protect/serve 'insert name of person or area here'" attitude that many, if not all of the characters hold. This aspect also hold up in the main storyline. The more typical shoujo aspects occur in the lead's focus on taking care (up to and including physically) of her family and love interest. The latter is central to her motivations for acting as she does, which gives this more of a shoujo lean. However, as mentioned before, the main storyline holds to more shounen aspects, such as becoming a bodyguard, being immensely proficient at a weapon, protecting the weak, and defeating any enemies that threaten the peace that her life has. Thankfully, unlike with many shounen mangas, the story isn't long enough to fall into the 'enemy of the week' territory. It is also rather innovative, with the lead heroine the one who does the protecting instead of vice-versa. Also, theworld that the mangaka paints is very different than the one most do, with bleak imaginings of the world falling into violence and depravity. The politics of this world are well thought-out, with much study on the Mafia and Yakuza apparent. And while the ending isn't the one that I may have hoped for, it is nonetheless realistic and fitting.

The art is quite shoujo, with large, sparkly eyes and 'pretty' boys. However, is is a little rough in some areas. If you have also read Skip Beat! then the similarity in character design is aparent, with Skip Beat! smoothing out some of the rougher edges in the art style. This also holds true for the charater's personalities themselves- you can see that Kyoko was based of Tokyo's main lead. But in and of themselves, the characters in Tokyo aren't bad- Tsukasa is overall a sweet girl with a few rough edges and the will to protect those that are precious to her at all costs. Her love interest at first appears to be an aloof pervert, but Tsukasa comes to understand that he... is an aloof pervert. While he does fall in love with Tsukasa, to protect his clan and life, he is willing to marry someone else. He is also a definate prototype for Ren of Skip Beat!. And in case I forget to mention, this is a bit of a reverse-harem. Not only is she surrounded by men (all her siblings are male, too!), several men do fall in love, both with her female form and when she's disguised as a man.

I did enjoy how different this was from most shoujo manga. It had action, action, romance, action, and a surprising amount of violence for the demographic it's aimed at- and I didn't mind a bit. Well, almost. It came too close to being too formulaic and violent for my tastes, but that's just a personal opinion. Overall, an eight. If you liked this, I do feel that you will like (or at least like comparing it with) her later work Skip Beat!. For female gender-hiding and reverse-harem, go for Ouran High School Host Club. And for incredible amounts of power, action, a little violence, and more reverse-harem, go for Dorothy of Oz. Enjoy!

This manga is amazing! There's absoulutely nothing I dislike about it! It's incredibly hilarious mixed with amazing action scenes, sweet romance, and touching scenes of angst. I'm not really into drama, but this added just the write blend to keep me interest throughout the whole series. I've read this manga at least ten times (truly) and I still haven't gotten tired of it.
Tsukasa and Ryuji make such an awesome team as both lovers and fighters. You couldn't ask for a better pairing.

I thought that this was an amazing manga worthy of becoming an anime. The whole bad guy and girl disguised as a boy plots are a bit overdone these days, but this was a worthy reading choice. The title itself throws you off a bit as weird, but it was worth finding it. The art is amazing, the characters are wonderful, and the romance, drama, and life going on in the manga are amazing. It shows a bit of breast, but it is so worth reading over and over again.

Story - set in the future, when it is dangerous for women to be on the street, comes the story of two 14 year olds. One, head honcho of a powerful yakuza group, the other the daughter of policeman, living as a man.

Yes, this is the basic story, but it is So Much More!! It is action packed, it is (slightly) romanitic, it is about growing up, and growing together, it is jealousy, it is humour, it is just so addictive!!! There were many occasions when I laughed outloud, in situations where I was not expecting any comedy.

Art - you can tell who all the main characters are, and Tsukasa's (our heroine) facial expressions are just grand! Ryuji despite his stoney expression conveys a lot, and I actually love it when they slip into chibi style. The art isn't as clean as I like it, but that is a personal preference, and not a failing of the mangaka. Occasionally I had trouble telling characters apart (that would be the younger brothers and some of the school friends), but on the whole I am really impressed with what happened with a LOT of characters.

Characters - I can't say anything other than outstanding. As mentioned above, there are a LOT of characters, and each has their own feel. Throughout the story, they grown, and change, and I fell in love with both Tsukasa and Ryuji! As well as numerous side characters.

Enjoyment/Overall - I got hooked. I got addicted. I sat down and read all 19 volumes across 2 days. And I don't regret it! It also has very high re-read potential. This manga has made it to my list of all time favourites. All I can say is give it a go - I don't think you will be sorry.

This is one of the first manga that got me hooked!
I loved the whole girl in boy disguise!
Hows innocent the main character is but strong willed and her personality is amazing.
I had some great laughs throughout the manga, the fighting scenes were great, the family and friends are used amazingly well.
And I wouldn't want to give anything else! So read it.
YOU'LL

I'm not really a fan of romantic type of manga, whenever i see a category of romantic in genre I immediately ignore it. But "Tokyo Crazy Paradise" is an exemption of those, I'm out of manga to read when I tried to give these a shot and I am super really, really great-full of it.

The reason I dislike romantic manga because of the common type of protagonist whether a girl or a boy, always a wimp, lame, harem, ecchi, etc so tired of those character. In TCP all the character are created well thoroughly whether its the protagonist or the antagonist of the story.

Tokyo crazy paradise is full of comedy-action-romantic manga on different level. In hundreds of manga that I've read for me the theme (gokudo) of this manga is one of the rarest (I hate spoiling story so I usually doesn't give a summary or synopsis in a review). The art in the beginning is kinda poor but just bear with a little because as the story goes it also became great and really addicting.

I couldn't count how many times I re-read this. I am just kinda disappointed that there is no anime adaption of a great manga as this, Skip Beat manga (same author) isn't even on the level of TCP. This is included in my top five most favorite manga. n_n

I tried really hard to like this manga, and on the surface, it has a lot of elements that I usually like. Strong, kick-ass female MC? Check. Gender-Bender slow burn romance? Yeah, I'm a sucker for that. Written by Nakamura sensei? Well I love Skip Beat, so I would love this one too, right?

I read through several of story arcs, hoping that it would get better, before I eventually gave up and moved on. There are a few different reasons why it didn't appeal to me:
-Age of the characters (14). As a female in her 30s, that is already an age that I can't really relate to. More importantly, I found it creepy and innapropriate that Tsukasa was often referred to in a sexualized manner. There have been other manga that I have read with character's of a similar age, and sometimes I am able to see past that (for example, another manga that I have read recently and recommend - Meteor Methusulah), but in this case I felt like I was constantly reminded of the characters' age. Additionally, Ryuuji''s place as the head of a yakuza clan felt completely unrealistic to me
-Ratio of text to illustration. I prefer it when the mangaka allows the pictures to speak for themselves, rather than have to spell out every little detail in the text. TCP is crammed full of text, much of which doesn't really contribute anything to the story.
- Art...it was definitely dated, and not my style. Not a deal breaker for me - there have been other manga that I ended up loving in spite of their art style (for example, Skip Beat and Basara). If the story and characters are good enough, I can potentially overlook the art style. That was not the case here, and the panels all felt really cluttered and disorganized.

One of my all time favorites and also underrated manga. The story starts off very cliche and uses many repetitive tones and plots like any other manga out there. BUT I also feel that it deserves a lot of leeway considering that it is a mid-90's manga.

[7/10] ART
The art is not as pleasant and polished in comparison to what we are all used to, and can take a bit of time to adjust (like I did). However, I want to make note that as the story progresses, the illustrations IMPROVED!!

[9/10] STORY
The story and plot are not exceptionally divine and different, but it does not take away the charm from the characters. I really enjoy a manga that can make me feel attached to the characters, giving them all my support and get soppy when their wishes don't come true. I also like that it has GOOD RESOLUTION and that gives me the satisfaction of a true fairy tale shoujo.

[10000000/10] OVERALL LOVELOVELOVE
Overall, if you are interested in reading it, stick with it for the first few chapters--I know, the art will make you cringe a little but it'll be worth it.

Make me want to read it again writing this review.

Ideally I would so so so LOVE it if they could make this into an anime...so kickass.

Cheers.

I'll be honest right from the start: this review is biased. It focuses too much on only one aspect of the manga. That said, it is an aspect I consider very important and that could be even a deal breaker, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Yes, it is about the art. To say sucks would be an understatement. It's absolutely horrendous. It makes the manga practically unbearable. The illustrations are worse than bad fanarts posted by a 13 years old teen on a deviantart. The anatomy is worse than that of bad yaoi manga, and that's something. The characters are constantly offmodel with plenty of tiny heads, unnaturally huge shoulders and grasshopper legs. If you're into some tall characters than this might be for you, as the characters in the manga experience some serious growth. Not as a development, but as a literal growth. Through the series the main characters are more and more often portrayed as someone with legs three times the length of their torso. It goes to such extremes that random unnamed characters in background are considerable better drawn than the protagonists.

I'm a fan of stylized manga art like for example works of Yuuichi Yokoyama or Hayashi Seiichi. I can enjoy goofy illustration like ONE's Mob Psycho 100. But this, this isn't excusable by "an artstyle". This isn't goofing around. This is just plain bad art. It's that sort of illustrations that would make art professors shriek with terror when approached with it, like trying to hand the Bible to a demon. This manga took a look at the already low standard for shoujo manga and told to itself "boi I can sure do it even worse while still avoiding being axed". It's so awful I have to question whether there even were editors in the times this was made, as it looks like literally nobody except the author has seen the pages before they went to the print. The characters are often abominations and the final product looks like there was zero quality control involved.

Of course, this work also falls into the pitfall that usually ensnares shoujo manga - bad backgrounds. Or to be more specific, no backgrounds. This manga can go PAGES without having a properly drawn background for a single panel. This combined with the already horrid art makes for a comic that is quite hard to orient in and to gather what and where is happening, adding to the enjoyableness. But this manga takes it even further - not just backgrounds, it can go without using even the already easy to add filters, making the panels just ugly drawn characters on a blank white background. Such a low-effort product. Sometimes I got baited by one or two pages being passable, thinking that the author finally improved, but this was always just a false hope as the art quickly got back to its usual state of being poor, sometimes even worse than previously.

The panel composition itself is also unsurprisingly a failure, with no reason and rhyme put into it most of the time. Often there is just wall of a text on a page with smaller illustrations, making it seem like that larger amount of text is there just so the author doesn't have to draw more. Sometimes only half of the page is filled with some small cringy chibi drawing on rest of the page. Honestly this manga might have worked better as a novel. I'm sure some established and respected publishers such as Harlequin would be happy to take upon themselves to publish it.

Which gets us to the story itself. Not gonna lie, I wasn't able to focus on it much, spending most of the time either snickering or facepalming to the the hideous art. When I was trying to find out why do people even like this manga, what I got was basically "it features adult themes like mafia and drugs even though it's a shoujo, so it's good", which is just plain faulty reasoning. It's not the themes alone that make a work good, it's how they are portrayed in the work. "Iz gud coz for adults" is just an Elfen Lied/Another/etc. mentality all over again. What I can say after reading this manga that no matter how serious your plot might sound on a paper, craftily added shoujo elements such as "le random xddd" super deformed facial expressions and badly timed comic reliefs are perfectly capable of destroying the overall atmosphere.

I wanted to say that this work didn't age well, but it's actually bad even when compared with its contemporary works. This is among one of the worst drawn manga I've ever read, and I've read my deal of bad manga. Definitely a waste of time.