Nikki_Manga9

Given how popular the series is, I really expected more from it.

Thus far 250+ chapters in, the story arcs is very much like sitcom episodes in that everything resets in the end: every visited island are so remote and alien from one other that the events in previous arcs don't make any sort of satisfying connection with future arcs. you get a new crewmember joining each arc, but every member remains relatively stagnant and unchanged with each arc (happy-go-lucky idiot captain remains happy-go-lucky idiot, directionally-challenged swordsman..., money grubbing navigator..., casanova wanabe chef..., etc). The long-nosed sniper apparently becomes competent later on, but I'm not one to slog through another 250 chapters on the off-chance it actually becomes enjoyable. The author is really good at creating backstories for each of the crewmembers but doesn't do a good job in developing them as the story progresses, thus making each section of their journey feel insignificant and boring. Reading through One Piece also makes one realize the difference between giving character personality and depth, with giving the characters tropes (see above) for running gags.

For a shonen series, the fights are really boring and uninteresting, some of the main cast are already established to be ridiculously strong from the get-go without the readers experiencing satisfaction from their rise to power, and their battles are won through brute force and ass-pulled techniques rather than any interesting strategizing; While fights of the weaker members are mostly played for jokes, bumbling their way into victory. The most interesting fight so far is probably the one involving Luffy using moisture from his blood to fight the sand-fruit guy, but the fight itself was pretty meh outside of that concept. I also read forward to the end of the Skypiea Arc, and making Luffy immune to Enel's lightning attack because "rubber" is in my opinion anticlimactic, lazy, and stupid writing.

The artwork was something I tolerated while experiencing the story rather than something I embraced and enjoyed on its own. Given the popularity of the series, it is probably an acquired taste, not that I am able to enjoy it 250+ chapters in.

Frankly I regretted spending so much time trying to catch the hype in this series, and it for me serves as a lesson that just because something is popular, it doesn't mean that it is actually good.

Fullmetal Alchemist is one of the most amazing, interesting, emotional series I've ever been fortunate to read. The powerful mix of brilliant characters, an outstanding plot, interesting settings, and thoughtful concepts drew me in from the very beginning.

Story: (10) I give this series 10 when it comes to story. Fullmetal's plot is one of the most well-developed and interesting plots I have ever encountered when dealing with manga. Every event has a reaction that ends up playing larger roles in the story than you would think.

Art: (8) I give this series an 8 when it comes to art. Hiromu Arakawa has, without a doubt, tremendous skill when it comes to expressing emotions and human anatomy. However, her work slips in some places, some more noticeable than others. The fact that she is working on at least two series at one time is obviously effecting her work, as the quality of the art does not have a steady line as more chapters are released. Regardless, Arakawa has definite skills, and makes up for her slips with dedication to the characters, plots, and settings.

Character: (9) With every character that is introduced, Arakawa has never failed to surprise me. Fullmetal's characters are some of the most well-developed characters I have ever come across. Their personalities are unique and effective to other characters and the plot, and their pasts are explored with such detail and emotion that the characters alone could keep me dedicated to this series.

Enjoyment: (10) I have followed this series since its August 2001 debut, and it has never lost my interest, or hit a dull note. The excitement, suspense, sadness, anger, and happiness I have felt alongside the characters amazes me.

Overall: (10) Overall, I give this series a 10. This series is definitely worth my time and money, and I highly recommend it to everyone!

this is honestly terrible and it just feels like an excuse to have a big titty lady get big and kill some shit. rei is constantly crying and chiho is alright but i dont fw her because she's 24 dating a high schooler.

it's so fast paced that it feels like you missed something at every turn, but the concept could be really cool?? a website is making people's (messed up) wishes come true through a voting process and it seems there's an uprising of some kind coming, but the characters we're watching interact with this world are just so....terrible?? there's a bunch of wackos running around in their underwear and they're more interesting than the main characters.

art style is cool which is to be expected from the author but i'm pretty sure that's not how boobs work. the action and violence is visually impressive when it happens but it doesn't happen often. it feels like there could be something here but there's not much focus.

don't waste your time on this unless you're actively looking for something bad to read.

This manga had some good potential. Due to its short run, however, it failed miserably. There were so many characters that you never got a sense for any of their personalities before they got killed off. I didn't even remember any of their names. It would have been much better with only 3 or 4 characters with more fleshed out personalities. The art was decent in some spots, but seemed frenetically rushed in others.

If you're in to survival anime storylines, then this one is worth a read just because it falls so neatly into the genre. If you're a completist like me (I have to read/see everything having to do with a topic/genre I enjoy) then it should definitely be on your list. If you only want to read the best stuff a genre has to offer then do yourself a favor and give this one a pass.

4/10 overall.

VIRGIN BLOOD - HIIRO NO BANSAN - 06242018

OVERALL: 7.6

PLOT: 6/10

Vampires sucking blood out of people is kinda cliche. If there is no different twist made, it is highly possible that there will be no impact on the viewers heart. I love to read incest genre, most likely the dad-daughter and brother-sister relationship. This one is a dad-daughter love but the girl is an orphan living along with the vampires. The twist of the story is kinda unique, I guess. But the story is too fast pace it decrease it's capability to make a good story.

CHARACTERS: 6/10

There's really no expectation made for a short manga, most of the time. It's very rare to see a short manga whose characters are well developed. The characters in this story played their role just fine. It's not really something bad, it's just it is also not something that good.

ART: 10/10

The art of this manga is really great it make me screenshot it for about a dozen of times? The lines, the clearliness of the drawing is really something. Though the emotions is sometimes not aligned in the face the character is makin', it is a very detailed one. The hair, the face, it is too cool.

ENJOYMENT: 8/10

I enjoyed looking at the art, all the time. The character is so cool I wished they're true. Well, a typical shoujo love story is almost always wanted by a girl. Sometimes, enjoyment is not really because of the plot, it can also because of small scenarios and gestures of the character that make the reader enjoy it.

ENDING: 8/10

Expected but unexpected. I thought it'll end there. A small twist, a cliche ending. It's kinda common but it's kinda not. The application of the twist makes it a rare one, I think? But it's for the good. The ending turns out into a shock and it's kindof unusual ending that you might like.

Holiday Love is about a Married woman and her Husband, fighting with signs of cheating =.

Honestly I am very mad which made me (want to) drop this Manga. I thought it would be something like Hapi Mari which I loved. But i can take a One Shot of cheating on both parties but to have cheating and then on both sides of the relationship I could not take it so this is the reason why I dropped it.

I could already tell where it was headed on the first chapter with the dating app, but it was the husband that cheated first so for her to get emotionally involved with another man its going to be bad. Besides that being a fact Rina is a co-co bird and is still trying to be with him. I wouldn't be surprised if she tried to hurt The Wife just to get with him like honestly I can only take so much of it, it really pissed me off that she was reconsidering her divorcing him honestly he doesn't deserve her anymore. Ugh I really just can't with this story I was already ready to end it on the note that she was reconsidering being with him but then she went ahead and messaged back someone on that stupid dating app that broke her relationship up with her husband in the first place, like I seriously can't finish it im so mad rn that I really want some one to hit these two in the head.



Even though the above was my honest opinion the other day, I just couldn't stop thinking about this story so I rushed through the rest, i guess ill continue reading, but im still mad.

the story kicks off slowly compared to wakaki tamiki's last work TWGOK. but that much is to be

expected this is his new work after all and by the looks of it so far its not going to be the same in

the slightest. the plot centres around two small bakeries that are competing for dominance in the

area. Our MC Seiji is a high school boy who along with his two brothers have inherited their parents

bakery but have sadly fallen onto rough economic ties.

that sums up the story so far to be honest I'm excited for wakaki new work i loved TWGOK the

ending wasn't what i wanted but I'm okay with chihiro's ending and i believe the fandom really blew

it out of Proportion. the real reason why TWGOK ended so suddenly was because of Wakaki poor

health i mean really the guy was sick as hell. a year later he released TWGOK OVA manga and now a

year after that it seems his real next work is kicking off. so far the manga is really intriguing with

the recent 2 new chapters ( released sept 18-19th 2015) the story is starting to kick off as we learn about seijis brother and the two assumed

romantic interests. it starts slow so be warned but also take note that their is promise in this title. its the art that we all came to love so i hope

Wakaki the best and i hope that this manga at least reaches 100chapters and is translated often.

90's shounen ai manga. They're weird and always filled to the brim with homophobia (whether intentional or unintentional,) zany stereotypes, and messy plots that don't always make much sense, which will put off any reader starting from the first few chapters. This is how I felt the most while reading Bokutachi Otokonoko.

Something I wanna get off my shoulders first, though, is that when I initially saw the cover art and first few pages of this, I got that vibe that I got from a lot of other 90's shoujo/shounen ai manga similar to this one; the one where the mangaka tries desperately to make "western" or "American" references and characters. The result is almost always a cringey, try-hard depiction of something that the author has absolutely ZERO idea about apart from the heaps of 80's and 90's Hollywood movies they consume and so they put these exaggerated pieces of dialogue or character designs because they think everyone in America lives like Home Alone (which, by the way, makes a small, almost unnoticeable cameo in this manga.)

I absolutely hate these kind of cliches and it's one of the reasons I find it hard to read through shounen ai manga from this era and not stop because I'm painstakingly cringing at the constant dumb attempts to make something western. The West, and America in particular, is definitely not that impressive as people think, so I wish it weren't put on such a pedestal by mangaka.

Moving on to the story itself, the plot is basically all over the place. I found myself lost at a number of chapters, not feeling that sense of smooth connection between chapters that talk about different scenarios and ideas, yet manage to stay hitched to the main plot like other slice-of-life manga. Like, I get it, one of the main characters just keeps whining about how "he's had enough of the sticks" and that's supposed to be the main idea, that he just wants to get out of his small town and go somewhere else.

But throughout the chapters, you have these new "subplots" being thrown in your face, like a character who apparently wants to get bigger and wonders why he's flabby, or a character suddenly discovering he can draw well and suddenly decides he wants to become a manga artist, a character being whisked to the other part of the world like it's no big deal and somehow adapts by selling enemas (yes, literally, enemas), and at first glance these might be normal strays from the main plot seeing as it's a slice-of-life more than anything else, but the thing is, they all feel so unnatural and disconnected from the rest of the story here. They weren't of importance and literally had nothing to do with the conclusion and just made things more crowded and confusing.

This kind of plethora of stories within a story work best, in my opinion, in gag and 4-koma manga because the stories there doesn't have a necessary goal they need to fulfil. However, in Bokutachi Otokonoko, I cannot, for the life of me, tell what the mangaka's goal was with this story. Was it to show how Tomio is clingy and doesn't want to let go of Takashi meaning he was in love with him? Was it that Takashi only wanted to leave because of a deep reason or literally just because he was bored? Was it to showcase the bittersweet sides of childhood? Or was it to show how people dealt with same-sex relationships at that time? If that's the case, then it failed to do so. It's harmfully stereotypical and contradictorily homophobic and is absolutely NOT the best example of a deeper LGBT-themed story.

Then the art. I can't say anything except it's bad. It's inconsistent and mostly lazy. Not nice to look at. It just made the story increasingly unbearable for me to read. Even the side illustrations weren't that pleasing.

Characters. Like I mentioned before, this manga is chock-full (and I mean CHOCK-FULL) of dumb, pathetic stereotypes in the form of even dumber, unlikable & unforgettable characters. You have an American mom that's a literal pedophile, an prepubescent who isn't very prepubescent (but also apparently age-regresses? it's so confusing, honestly,) a female character who was literally only in one chapter just as a tool to make one of the protagonists jealous, and a lesbian who is aggressive, ugly, and yet is the source of the only good line of dialogue in the entire manga and possibly any manga I've read thus far and I quote, "if any man ever dares to make you unhappy, I'd shove my fist up his ass so far my fingers will be tickling his uvula ♥"

None of these characters were funny or likeable to me and even the protagonists weren't all that interesting. I could maybe kind of relate to Tomio at times, but other times he was just being as big of a jackass as Takashi and everyone else.

Did I enjoy this story? Honestly, no. Ironically, I was actually pretty excited reading the synopsis for it and I had high hopes for it but by the time I finished the first couple of chapters, I wished I had spent my time reading something else worthwhile. There's really nothing good to be taken out of this manga. Even the part where one of the protagonists is seemingly empathetic with gay individuals claiming that they're free to love who they want to and that no one had any right to talk shit about them, is ruined when literally just a few chapters later he's disgusted by the idea of a gay relationship. It just made zero sense to me.

Overall, Bokutachi Otokonoko is not a good example of an LGBT story, and going by the presumption that the author is a straight female, I don't think she had the slightest idea of HOW to write an empowering and true-to-life gay story without throwing in absurd and harmful stereotypes all the damn time. That's not to say that straight female mangakas aren't able to create genuine LGBT stories that are amusing yet moving and as truthful as they can get, because while they are few, they do exist; this manga just isn't one of them. In general, though, it's clumsy, kind of an eyesore, and isn't memorable or impactful, and I don't really recommend it whether you're a fan of shounen ai or otherwise.

In contrast, I'd like to recommend two manga that are similar to this that you may enjoy instead:

1. COMPLEX - Manda Ringo (A great shounen-ai that follows the lives of two schoolboys all the way to the end of their lives, showcasing their childhood and the issues of discovering one's sexuality and the complexity of same-sex relationships in society in a truthful way--plus, the author identifies as bisexual herself!)

2. New York, New York - Marimo Ragawa (A more mature yaoi manga that follows the lives of two young adults in late 90's America, a closeted gay policeman and a man he saves who has a dark past. This manga has it all, beautiful art and an amazing storyline with a deep look into the true struggles of being gay in that period of time, with issues ranging from HIV/AIDS, coming out to parents, abuse, drugs, and prejudice in the workplace and society as a whole. It also follows along to the end of the character's lives.)

I decided to read this as I had this random urge to read something light and cutesy. This was in a "neighbours fall in love" collection on the manga app I use so I decided to give it a shot.

The art style is was mediocre at best, while the characters were given cute and humorous personalities there was no standout design visually. I am still not sure what exactly makes Ginga a heartthrob.

The storyline was really heartwarming, I enjoyed seeing Ginga navigate through life with his new found freedom. I also thought the premise itself was very cute up until the large age gap is revealed after which I felt highly uncomfortable so I finished the volume and decided to drop it. Nothing overly sexual happens but the 9 year age gap between a 16-year-old boy and 23-year-old women feels ...off.

Overall it was a great manga and sadly we won't be able to read about the whole story, rest in piece author-san.
I recommend reading the Spin-Off "Caterpillar" first.

Story - Quite an interesting plot, the whole story was based off of people or these assassins, incorporating these insects as a pillar for their distinctive way of killing. One thing I do have to complain about is the lack of the background story being built in the initial stages of the story, though i do understand that, that was for the best in the later stages. going along with that, i was confused at certain parts since i wasnt able to grasp the, why, they were doing what they were doing. In general, some parts could've been more detailed, but eh it was still good. I do hve to say that i really did love the mix of Slice-of-life, horror, josei.


Art - For the most part the art was very well done. I do have to say that the individual characters indeed need a distinctive feature incorporated, since differentiating between them all was sort of difficult.

Characters - The characters though i do like them, especially the main protagonist, they were in a way generic in some aspects of them all. And though i said that they were sort of generic, somehow the author brought forth a personality, a individuality to them even with the genericness

Enjoyment - I loved reading it and I wanna read more of it in the future but sadly most likely not going to happen considering the author Murata Shinya died.

I liked the manga and I'm going to keep it in my favorites, as well as giving it an overall rating of 10. Hope you decide to check it out and that you end up enjoying it.