How far can cuteness take it? For how long can absolutely nothing extend the life? The answers lie in Hibi Chouchou: apparently not as far and not as much are the ones.

Hibi is like Kimi no Todoke. Only a tad bit faster. At first, it will give you that "warm and fuzzy" feeling about young and innocent love, but the further you progress in manga, you'll just keep skipping pages because literally nothing of interest and importance occurs. For an example, you can skip 39-44 chapters, and you'll be easily good to go.

Let's talk story briefly: it's cliche. It's a standard shoujo premise and, while that's not bad as long as it's executed well, or has its own spin onto it, Hibi's story is just kind of boring to be blunt. The story is progressing at a snail pace, two to three chapters are spent covering something absolutely worthless and boring and so on. While I will admit that its pace is faster than the "classical" shoujo, with so many examples out there of stories that progress far and well within a short span of time, it simply gets to be far too boring at some point.

[SPOILER]

45 chapters in, and they didn't even hug. The most they did was hold hands.
[SPOILER ENDS]

I understand that it's an innocent take on the story, but that doesn't mean it should take ages for something remotely interesting to happen. While we're at it, the story RARELY focuses on the side-characters so it really has no excuse as to why it takes so long for the characters to do anything. Some will refute that with "well, they're shy, blah, blah, blah" but I'll get to that.

One point where this manga is really good is the art. It's crisp, it's clean, it's well drawn, and, to be honest, aside from the few chapters, I couldn't ask for anything better than that. It has plethora of pretty girls, some good-looking studs, and it has that "cutesy" look majority of shoujo manga have, with the exception of looking better than the most.

As far as the characters are concerned, I'm honestly disappointed. At first, you'll think that Suiren is cute. You'll like her. The same goes with Kouha. You'll think that their shyness and awkwardness is innocent, cute and whatever comes with those emotions. However, as the story "progresses", you'll be getting more and more tired of their lack of ... well ... anything. Misunderstandings pile up just because they're unable to talk properly, random "oddly-said" words make our characters go balls-to-the-walls for no reason, and so on and so forth. Suiren quickly becomes cute and annoying. Although, at times, she can be decisive, for the most part she just shuts up and expect everything to go merry way. When compared to Kouha, though, she acts like a damn playboy. Kouha is a specific kind of annoying. His indecisiveness can only be described as mental illness to be honest. It takes him ages to do anything and, when he does it, he does it small. As for the other characters? Nothing. Zero. Bleh. They're the generic sub-cast put there just because it's high school and our heroes need friends. (Main girl's friend who's there to protect her, energetic girl interested in love, generic main guy's best friend, generic rival who comes along for literally 0 reason other than to "drama-it-up a notch", and so on)

Did I enjoy this manga? Meh, kind of. For the first twenty chapters or so, I really did kind of like it. It wasn't new or fresh, but it seemed as if mangaka had something on his/hers mind when it came to this manga. But, after that, the sheer lack of progress in anything - their relationship primarily - is just a huge put-off. It lacks impact, consequences (well, for consequences to exist, there must be action, so I'm kind of contradicting myself right here), and it's basically just a slightly faster paced Kimi no Todoke with the exception that main girl isn't scary, but rather beautiful (inapproachable all the same though).

I recommend it only to die-hard shoujo fans and those who are looking for a chill manga where they don't expect a lot of progress within the first 50 chapters.

[spoilers]

No, seriously, it takes them like 20 chapters to realize they even like each other. Twenty more to go on a second date (well, technically first since their first date lasted like 5 minutes), and the most romantic thing the two of them did was sort-of confessed to each other.
[spoilers end]
[review ends]