Kare Kano is one of the few rom-com shows/manga that actually advance past admitting they love each other. They go out on dates and deal with one another's quirks and flaws.

Despite being listed as a romantic-comedy, it later on tends to drop the comedy to focus on resolving the character's conflicts in life. The entire main cast is broken is some sort of way and each one gets an arc dedicated to their problem. About three entire volumes are dedicated to ignoring the leads to focus on the side characters. And while it's good to build up the side characters and flesh out their own problems, it should've been done in a way that was cohesive to the main lead's own development. At certain points it seemed like the rest of the manga's world faded to black as X side character got more development, making it feel a bit hollow.

Because it has this laser focused spotlight, the male lead is not as well developed as the female lead. A problem that becomes more apparent as the manga continues onward is how they handle Soichiro's character arc. Due to the nature of how victimizing his past is, the development of him as a character is more about resolving the past rather than his relationship with Yukino. She gets a lot of development as her problem is, for the most part, straight forward. It's baked into her personality and gets improved as their relationship continues. While it's not something that kills the enjoyment of the story, it does hamper my enjoyment of it.

I really enjoyed the comedic aspects of the manga when they were around. And the two main characters actually being in a relationship was fantastic. The main cast all had a personality that made watching the interactions between each other interesting. I'd mainly suggest reading it because of them. Most of the conflicts are well fleshed out and it doesn't fall into a melodramatic pit in the end that romance books can tend to do. While I do have the problems listed above, they're more grips rather than reasons not to read it.