sweeny11

The Viz Signature collections features some of my most favorite mangas of all time, The Drifting Classroom, Uzumaki, and Black & White. However, there was always one story that just caught my attention right away after the Signature series started and that was Monster.

Story:

The story is completely different then any other series I have ever read and leaves me wondering what will happen next to our hero. After every volume, I feel I learned something new, but I'm still no closer to the mystery behind the villian.

Art:

This artist has some great skills. Every character and every location is amazingly detailed and drawn so well that any other manga after you seen this one doesn't compare at all. My only complaint is that almost all the female characters are ugly looking in my view.

Character:

Yes, this story provides a lot of good characters that you'll come to either love or hate. I like a lot of them and some of them I just plain wish they die. This story is also loaded with side characters that only appear in a very few chapters and then pop up farther in the future making you look through past volumes to remember who they were again. This isn't a problem for me, but I think a few people might find this annoying.

Enjoyment:

I often read through my manga volumes over and over again, but often very quickly. This series I take my time on. I read over it carefully and try to take in as much as I can because it is so good. Trust me, you'll still want to be reading this series over and over even after it is finished. Though a few chapters were kind of filler and boring that kind of takes the enjoyment away.

Overall, this is a great series with a few minor flaws in my view, but not enough to stop me from buying the next volume. This is a must grab have for any manga fan. Also, this series contains realistic and graphic violence along with brief nudity and some adult situations, so if this kind of stuff bugs you, you might want to skip this series.

This is an age-gap adult one-shot, "simple and obvious but not the worst" plot with a happy ending and nice art. If those are things you like you'll like this 10 min read.

I usually make short reviews on manga and anime answering Yes or NO to the questions:

Is the ending good? YES
Does the main couple end together? YES
Is it worth my time? YES, only because it's a one-shot

If you like this kind of review I try my best to write in all animes and mangas I've experienced, so you can see a complete list of reviews next to my name just above.

Thank you, you're welcome and peace out. ^^

Just another mindless manga where the protagonist through great coincidence finds themselves in an unlikely situation that they succeed in despite a lack of experience. The main character is bland and has no defining characteristics except maybe wanting to date the most popular girl in school. Which he decides to move forward with by abandoning his only friend. The torture is poorly thought out and obeys no real world logic. If this is supposed to be a tournament of causing pain how come people legit suck at it?

It would be easy to sound like an edgelord here. But for reals the torture on display is mind-numbing and would not shock anyone past the age of ten. If you are a fan of the Saw films this will not scratch that itch in any way.
Anyways, don't waste any time on this one.

Oh boy, where do I even begin?

The heroine can memorize pretty much everything and the whole cast of characters are stereotypical and superficial. But for real though, the heroine of the story is just such a garbage mc who knows everything and barrages us with explanations noone gives a shit about. While I do not particularly despise explanations, this one is on the bad side of explanations.

The premise of the story isn't original but not too bad, but the way how everything has been set in motion feels just so forced because the characters jump from one tense moment to another.

The action is fine enough for a shounen manga I guess but some readers might find the unnecessary amount of ecchi to be a huge disconnect to the manga. I don't particularly mind them but I nontheless still think that it doesn't really help raise the quality of the manga.

The art is decent enough.

TL;DR
Oh boy, a manga where even the scanlators can't take it serious is saying a lot already and tbh that's all I wanted to write for this review.

I usually have never felt compelled to write up a formal review in my life. Never has something so forced me to tears for better or for worse to want to tell the entire world whether to avoid or seek out something. But Kyochuu Rettou is truly one of the most foul things ever put onto paper that my poor eyes have had to bear witness to in a long time.

The story is from decades past of B movies = X scenario BUT giant bugs appear, how wacky! Just to be clear, I do not hate this setting. The giant bug section of fiction can be extremely fun and enjoyable, even scary when done right or perfectly camp if done in tongue and cheek fashion; please see Terraformars or Earth Defence Force as good examples of what I believe are good uses of the trope.
To put it lightly the story was abysmally dull and contrived to the ninth degree. I'm not sure if the manga was cancelled or what but there never is any explanation, never any answers, never any payoff to story beats. There is nothing of substance to follow, you are left with no enjoyment beyong the characters and the art. You go through a short, railroad of events and moments that I had to force myself to keep reading beyond the few first chapters that showed something a little interesting.

Unfortunately for the longevity of the manga, that interesting part is the art. Although the rest of the heart, soul and body of the manga is completely barren and bare bones, the artwork and gore of it is actually quite good. I kept reading beyond a certain point for the gore alone, intestines come out in entire clumps, people get sucked into withered husks, cut in half, eaten alive and even more gruesome ends. As a closet fan of gorey slasher films, I found this to be personally appealing and for anyone else who is a fan of it, I'm sure you'll find the barest minimum of human entertainment beyond looking at a still frame of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
As for the environments, it is set on an abandoned island. The architecture is rare and barely worth to speak of, the different biomes of the island are just the exact same forest and two beaches. There is no crazy or wild or even eye catching fauna throughout the entire series. As backgrounds, it is entirely passable. I wish I had more to say but it is clear where the mangaka's strengths lie.

Certainly not with character design though, most female characters are an exact body type replica of high school girl with giant breasts. And considering the manga's constant use of nudity and sex throughout, I can see why they did that but it doesn't interest me and ended up adding to my disgust beyond the first chapters. Almost every character in this manga: male or female, teacher or student, main or side. Is a one-dimensional husk who has nothing to them, nothing of value or interest to see or find out about them, they are an exaggeration of one random trait (generally negative) blown up to the power of ten. This makes it extremely difficult to form any attachment or care to any single character in the manga, by the end I only cared about one and half cared about another. When there were a cast of upwards of around twentyish characters oveall this was disappointing to say the least.
Without spoiling any "surprises" if you could dare call them that, you will be wanting and wishing the entire cast dies horrifically. Maybe that was the point, maybe it isn't the mangaka is just awful at writing any living person and we are meant to hate them to the core of our own soul. I'm sure once you finish it if you still feel inclined to will go through the same coping mechanisms like lying to yourself like this to explain what you just read and wasted part of your life on.

Kyochuu Rettou is unenjoyable. To almost the maximum extent. The only bit of pleasure I could derive from this was some sort of petty, primal enjoyment of seeing characters I couldn't stand die horribly for the things they did to others. The other only enjoyable part was seeing the attention to a lot of the bugs when made so large and shows the mangaka did actually have a sort of passion for the theme. Which makes me question how... the entire rest of the manga was created. The artist can obviously draw really well, they have at least a passing interest and knowledge of bugs and can recreate them well in a gigantic setting. Yet, this piece of art is missing almost every single other neccessary component to be called a passable manga to anyone. If it wasn't for this slight hint of passion and good artwork, I would have given this manga an unapologetic one out of ten.

I had a problem with this manga, I can't understand it.
This is a very predictable manga that one will choose when wanting to unwind, relax, etc. So what you would expect is a simple story full of cliches, easy to read and everything. However in this manga I find very hard to follow the stories because I just don't understand the dialogues.
Besides that the story isn't very original, full of cliches and it's fine if you just want to read something completely cheesy and predictable but again it loses points because of the diaogues. They made it very complicated to understand the story

This story is strange, but in a good way.

The plot is surely something I haven't seen before. The two MC consists of a sadist girl and a masochist boy. The girl is very clever. She is cruel and rough, but no one's pain has given her satisfaction yet. She's very popular and everyone loves her, but the thing is...she just wants a dog who enjoys the pain she gives. Here comes the boy, he is quiet, dark, is the second most popular person in school next to the girl--his secret is he is a masochist. He shows up in front of the girl completely naked and even agrees to jump off the 3rd floor into the pool!!!!

It's one of those appearance vs reality type of stories. I love it and wanna read more. Hope the updates come faster!!

This is my first review, so I'm hoping it'll be easy to understand and help you guys in making your decision on this manga.

Boku no Kanojo is a story following our main protagonist and schoolboy, Shinozaki Haruka who finally mans up and decides to confess his love to the class rep, Kousaka Akiho. Much to his chagrin and surprise, she says yes.

I know what you're thinking, it's just gonna be another light-hearted rom-com, and in a way, it is but what Kousaka says next turns the tables on this rom-com type cliche, "I'll start by memorizing 48 sex positions".

If you have seen or read Seitokai Yakuindomo then you will highly enjoy this as they have the same type of humor as each other. Filled with sexual innuendos and loads of comic relief this story will make you burst not just laughing; if you catch my drift.

Throughout the story more characters will be added to the fray, most of which will be, in a sense, fetish cliche characters that we find in other manga i.e. brocon, childhood friend, rich girl. This artwork is pretty good however the characters have little to no development as of yet.

If you are looking for a time-passer, want to laugh, and can understand at least some sex humor, then this is the show for you.

The title of the series is "Girlfriend" and the author makes a few attempts to link the title with the content. In my opinion this link is unsuccessful -at least in a western context- since a title like "f*ck buddies" or "Friend with benefits" would do for most of the stories.

Don't get me wrong, it makes an interesting read and it can make you root for a character... it can disgust you a lot too. If you feel uneasy about cheating boyfriends/girlfriends or adult-teenager relationships, be ready to feel very uneasy at some points. There are however some bitter-sweet stories (never entirely sweet) that are worth the while. Also, be ready for a lot of sexual scenes depicting various poses. The author is specially attracted to bj's, but worry not, the male reproductive organ is only implied.

The stories are rarely revisited and never conclude entirely. It's like a feeling of a lot of knots being tied and problems that arise without ever being resolved (I can only think of one or two stories that do reach an ultimate conclusion). There are of course a lot of cliché stories being exploited. Of how realistic they can be I guess depends on what sort of sub-world you live in: there is without a doubt teenage sexuality without love, based on self esteem problems or even loneliness and curiosity. However, being in my late tweens, I don't really think I've ever been in a relationship that twisted or at least never really thought of them in this depressive angle.

The art is good. It may not be extremely beautiful, but it fits the realism the author wants to imprint the stories with. Still, it's not realistic enough as to draw fatty girls, for some reason all the girls in the series seem to be pretty and the one complain is to be plain (then again it's mostly a guy's point of view).

The characterization: Yes, there are horny girls in the world and I can identify myself with that (not all of us are so crazy about bj's, though). Men can be sometimes more prudish. The author seems to enjoy portraying women using men for their status, their vulnerability, their shyness, etc. Women in the series mostly want to use the men to experience sexuality without strings attached or for selfish reasons (eg. boost their self-esteem so they can chase after another guy). The one exception to the rule I can think of is the only story told in the girls pov. Guys are masochists: be ready for a lot of "I know she's playing with me, but I can't help it".

You will be drawn to the series. You will want to read more to see if you'll finally learn what happened with x couple. As the dread pirate Roberts said: Get used to disappointments. It will make an impression on you, whether good or bad depends on how much you feel related to the story and how much offense you take on the chosen topics.

I can't say I enjoyed it, I can't say I suffered it. I certainly would have chosen NOT to read it if I knew how most the stories would turn out. I would not read it again either.

All in all: inconclusive storyline, nice art, semi-twisted but possibly lovable characters, will make an impact on you.

This manga is a ridiculously standard romcom. Every single event that happens is pretty by the book and something that if you have any familiarity with the genre you’ve probably already seen quite a few times. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but another issue is that while it has its moment, for the most part the implementation is only average. The general path the story takes is pretty decent, as are the general concepts behind each of the characters. However, the way the story is paced feels like it has random pacing and is quite haphazard, with things happening pretty randomly without there being any flow of events to draw the reader in, and things coming and going way too quickly and easily. The characters too all felt sort of off. The concepts are great, but they feel very underdeveloped. For example, the story of the heroine Meguru, gets resolved with some very evident character development, but it seems to be resolved pretty arbitrarily, and it never feels like there’s a solid enough explanation for why she was like that in the first place, nor is there really enough demonstration of her growth as a character. The same seems to apply to the other characters such as Tsubasa or Kururi, where they have development, but it comes such that their stories don’t really seem to be going anywhere at all but suddenly they’ve reached their conclusion. Hence to some degree, everyone’s story feels unfinished or incomplete. Ultimately, the only characters that don’t feel awkward and feel fully properly done are the joke characters with little roles, though on that note these characters, Afro and the Grannies, are pretty awesome. It’s important to note though, that in the case of Kousuke and Meguru this feeling of incompleteness is greatly mitigated by the ending, where even though it still feels like some things are missing from the body of the story, the ending itself gives a tremendously strong feeling of completeness and is a tremendously satisfying way of ending romance mangas that I wish we saw more often. The comedy was decent. The art is also decent enough and cute.

A pretty generic romcom with a mostly average implementation with some highlights.

7/10