Hana yori Dango is a cautionary tale of what happens when a manga is allowed to live for too long. After finishing it, I'm just left feeling depressed. Not because the story was especially moving, but because it had a lot of potential that was ultimately wasted. I got the feeling that Kamio had a fairly good vision of what the manga should be in the beginning, but over the years that intent got lost.

First of all, the manga was being serialized for over a decade, yet the story itself took place over the course of about a year. I think that was a HUGE mistake. Far too many things happened (approximately 37 volumes worth of things, actually) for that sort of timeline. In the beginning, there were plotlines about pagers, and by the end of the series everyone had a cell phone. It would have been a lot better if Kamio had just bit the bullet, had everyone graduate from high school, and continued to follow their development into college and the working world. There was no good reason NOT to do that since their school had a college campus they could have all gone to together.

The overall tone of the story did a huge 180 over time, too, and not really in a good way. In the beginning, it seemed like things would get pretty dark. There was really awful bullying, abuse, attempted rape (multiple times), psychotic breaks... but eventually it just turned into typical shoujo fluff with a lot of arcs that served no purpose to the characters other than to prolong the story.

The characters didn't get as much development as you'd expect from such a long running series, either. The main characters were mostly static. I can't even count Domyouji's "development" because it really only happened in the first half of the series. The side characters got a few VERY minor subplots, but never changed much from beginning to end and were primarily used to further the main characters' story. Some characters just ended up disappearing, never to be seen again, with no explanation as to where they went. Very few of the characters' interactions felt natural. Most of them were completely awful to each other, yet somehow... for some reason... that's not totally explained... they all become besties 4 lyfe.

The art, though. The art. The art was probably the best part for me, and the only thing that kept me reading until the very end. Not that it's especially lovely, but there was just such a BIG change over time. I wouldn't necessarily say it improved--I really liked the 90s art style in the beginning, and it certainly aged better than some other manga from the same era--but it definitely became more clean and modern. It was fascinating to see.

In the end, I'd still recommend it to anyone who's interested in shoujo. Despite its shortcomings, it's still one of the longest and most well known shoujo manga series out there, and it helps set the stage for what more modern shoujo is like. It deserves respect for that, at least.