tl;dr: A manga that is pretty simple but has a really funny and likable cast.

Love Hina is an incredibly famous series from what feels like quite a while ago. I actually read the original English release in the mid 2000s, but I felt it was worth a reread as it’s been quite a while and I’d forgotten most of it. I think this was one of my first manga too so it’s something that I have a lot of nostalgic memories for. My opinion on it after reading it again is that it holds up incredibly well.

The manga is held up by two very closely intertwined elements, comedy and characters. The comedy is pretty different from most comedic manga these days in that it relies heavily on being exaggerated, both in terms of its concepts and in terms of its visuals. The world of Love Hina is mostly pretty normal, and thus things that break from that normality stand out very strongly. The manga makes good use of that comedy, which while pretty much never all that complex or witty still manages to be pretty amusing. A very large portion of this humor comes from the protagonist being thrown into misunderstandings and other crazy situations that result in him getting attacked or beat up. That’s something that’s been used in a lot of other manga as well, but a lot of the time it just feels kind of annoying and not all that funny. Here it feels like the author actually managed to use it pretty well. Both in terms of visuals and the effects it has, it just seems so ridiculous that it’s easy to just completely disconnect it from common sense and just laugh at it. This isn’t just as simple as just leaving no aftereffects no matter what happens, as that probably wouldn’t be all that funny. Rather, it actually seems to be a running gag that the characters all acknowledge, with the protagonist even being referred to as immortal at times, and it actually feels like he’s going along with everything rather than just being the victim. This aspect does feel like it gets a bit repetitive at times, but it pretty much gets woven into everything to the point that it’s omnipresent in such a way it doesn’t even really stand out that much after a while beyond keeping things perpetually lightly amusing. Thus, that alone wouldn’t be enough to make the comedy good as it kind of faded into the background somewhat. Thankfully, there’s a good amount of great comedy outside of that that has a good amount of variety with all sorts of crazy completely disconnected things happening which allows the comedy overall to manage to stay funny from beginning to end.

As for the other core aspect, the cast of character’s aren’t all that complicated with deep backstories or complex character arcs. Rather, it feels like the primary motivation that was being considered when designing the characters was how to create an amusing cast that work well together. And that they do. A lot of the humor is directly tied to traits of various characters, and due to the variety of characters the humor too manages to be solid, and as the cast themselves are the source of that, they end up pretty likable. That’s not to say that the characters are completely flat outside of their comedic aspects. Most of them have do get at least some level of character and relationship development, though I would say it’s pretty weak for most of them. The exception to that as one would expect is the main couple, around whose romance the overarching plot revolves. The protagonist Keitarou definitely does grow considerably over the course of the manga, though it isn’t developed all that well. The main heroine Naru also does have growth which does get fleshed out better, but it feels like there’s a lot less of it. The romance between the two is pretty solid, but it’s also excruciatingly slow to the point that you want to bang your head on the wall at times. This isn’t as bad as it sounds as it isn’t as if it feels like the author is simply dragging things out as long as possible for the sake of it. Rather, that it’s being dragged out for so long feels like it’s an element in Naru’s character arc and is also used directly for comedic purposes. Still, while it does have its purposes, it’s still immensely annoying. I should also note that both of them being likable is enough to get invested in them which made the plot pretty satisfying when things finally started progressing, especially the epilogue which was pretty extended and an incredibly good way to end things. It should also be noted that while this does seem to use a lot of what are very common tropes these days, this precludes them becoming so ubiquitous, and yet still manages to use them incredibly well.

I would also like to note that the art is quite nice. The designs aren’t all that unique as they’re for the most part all pretty down to Earth and not particularly creative. Still, the character designs do look nice enough and do a good job of fitting the characters they belong to. The style too is incredibly clean and precise. This isn’t all that special anymore since digital tools have made it a lot easier for art to be that way, but I think it’s pretty impressive for a manga from the turn of the millennium. The art also flowed reasonably well, but I felt that it was packing in too much content at times and that it would have been better to have more portions where the art was given more room to breathe.