Osanazuma: Marple no Jikenbo

This manga is a weird mix between short murder mysteries and intense hentai scenes, framed by a romance story about a newly wed couple. The "Drama" and "School" genres are completely wrong btw and don't apply at all, so ignore those. But does this mix work? Sadly, the answer is no.

The murder mysteries are easily the most enjoyable part of the manga. But most murder cases only last for one chapter, some of them are two chapters long... and these chapters are short. Simply put, they have no depth and don't even qualify as mysteries. We pretty much just get an information dump on the murder, then one odd little thing is revealed about the crime scene, and then we immediately get the solution. Half of the time my lazy guess at that point was correct, but I didn't feel accomplished at all since the mysteries were so simple. The other half of them just had bullshit solutions. But even if they were more clever, as a reader I couldn't care less about them. There simply is no time to get invested in anything.

The characters are flat, but that doesn't really matter. There is no overarching story as the manga is very episodic, and you're clearly supposed to only read one chapter at a time. The romance framework story never actually goes anywhere and you are bound to have a deja-vu in every chapter, as it is the same thing happening again and again: Random murder, Miss Marple gets involved and immediately solves the case, hardcore fucking.

The art is really great though and among the best I've seen! All the characters look unique, all the lines are clean and some backgrounds - especially on the splash pages - are absolutely beautiful! There are only very few "low effort" panels, and our main character is simply stunning! That said, there is a huge problem that I have... and it's the censorship. But more about that in the next paragraph.

This manga utterly fails when it comes to the Hentai scenes. They are very vanilla, heterosexual sex scenes with various sex positions etc. That's fine, but what really bothers me is the terrible censorship! The genitals are completely blocked out by white blotches and pretty much everything is left up to imagination! I am pretty sure they did it this way to get a better rating and could publish it under better conditions, without it actually counting as porn (it's for 16+ year olds here in Germany), but at that point you have to ask: What's the point? I would have been fine with some standard "pixelation" censorship, or small bars blocking the most important parts. But if I wanted to see barbie dolls fuck I wouldn't want to read this shit and look at a non-existent penis penetrating a white void.

With all of these three aspects (murder mysteries, romance plot, sex scenes) failing, I can't bring myself to rate this manga any higher than a 4/10. Which is really a shame, since I really loved the artstyle and the idea they were going for. Whether you want an engaging mystery, a good romance or some hot Hentai action: There are better alternatives out there.