Cherri_Blxssom2

I am fairly new to shoujo Mangas, but I think that Nana is one of the best ones ever. It’s just that kind of manga that keeps you on your toes, trying to guess what’s next (even though you will be shocked at how different what Ai Yazawa comes up with is from what you expected).
Nana is about how life is extremely unpredictable; two girls with the same name “Nana” meet on a train to Tokyo. The girls are totally different but meet again in an apartment that they end up renting together, so they become roommates and friends. Then the Mangaka takes us on the journey that the girls take (one wants to become a famous singer, and the other wants to find love) and how the choices they make will affect their lives, friendship, and relationships to others later on, sort of like the Chaos Theory.

The Character development (throughout the chapters available) is exceptional. Trying to change and grow, trying to forget the past, making the same mistakes…etc. I just think that the characters in Nana are awesome and so realistic.

Nana made me laugh, cry, think, drop my jaw. If you read Nana, you will find themes like: friendship, love, life, Dreams, celebrities world, drama, realism and many more. I just wish that Ai Yazawa could get better and finish it, it kinda pisses me off that I can’t finish reading it!!!

I recommend it to all because I am sure you will find something that will appeal to you :)

Teppei Fukushima is an author that I like a lot for his ability to portray the candid euphoria of youth in all its different aspects.

Kodomo Otona is a short work of his that manages to do just that, depicting small moments in the life of a grade schooler, and imbued with a great sense of nostalgia.
The common theme of these stories is highlighting issues of miscommunication, mainly in his family, and how at a young age, one can become affected by it and mimic toxic attitudes or change your personality depending on who you keep company with.
These scattered memories are also a way to tell a universal tale of regrets and lies, of small things that you don’t necessarily perceive as a child because of your naivety but come to realize only later.

Kodomo Otona is not necessarily a very complex work but its unique charm of bittersweet childhood makes it worth checking out.

Naturally, when you read a manga you expect to be provided with something new whether it be the art style, the characters or the story. Maybe more than that. Let me say this now: UNDEAD by Terashima Masashi lacks all of those except in its art direction. Well... maybe.

I just want to say this right now: Terashima Masashi is an amazing artist. His art style is perfect for the world he's trying to portray. All the evil spirits are extremely unique, detailed and heavily inked. His character designs are strange and appealing.

Although his art is great, it's hard to be forgiving elsewhere. In the story you follow the life of Hachiouji Tarou, a high-schooler who loses everyone he loves to spirits. While originally weak--mentally and physically--he absorbs those that he hates and hopes to avenge his mother and save his brother... all the while making some shady connections. To me, this story just seemed beaten and tired. Of course you lost everything you loved, of course you went off and tried to avenge them, of course you gained some help along the way... the list goes on. I expected it all and nothing new was really thrown at me plot-wise.

Unfortunately, even the characters were stale. Each and every one of them could be summed up with one word and their purpose could be easily discerned within a couple seconds. It's a shame, really. The only one who showed true complexity was Tarou. Tarou is thrown into a world where demons roam free, feeding on humans and can seemingly be created from something simple as abandonment. Even the weakest evil spirits are extremely dangerous, enough to obliterate a normal human.

He's stricken with grief over the loss of his family, stressed because he may never see his family ever again, constantly in pain from the trails he must endure. And he expresses all of this through his tears. He's the saving grace for the series, he's the only original person in a world of stand-ins.

Overall, this manga is pretty average. I mean, there's much, much worse out there so I can't hate it too much but it can be extremely unlikeable. Don't jump into this one expecting a masterpiece is what I'm saying.

No one I've seen has had a good idea of what is going on in this manga, so I would suggest that you read as much as you can stand of it and then start looking for other’s interpretations of whet they think is going on. (Note: other people’s input helps A LOT here) A few interpretation are presented latter in this review but they are very wordy and should only be attempted after you give up or finish the manga.

WARNING! GO READ THE MANGA SOME BEFORE PROGRESSING

For a story, Fushigi no Kuni no Shounen Arisu seems to hold a weak continuity and story line reusing the same characters to tell “love” stories between the Prince of Hearts and Arisu. Don't worry if you aren’t into man love ect. it isn’t that kind of manga, however you should be weirded out occasionally. This strangeness adds to the enjoyment and the overall ambiance of a drug induced hallucination that was the original Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll was a Morphine addict). Hoverer, the plot is just an optical illusion, a mystery if you will, all the more dramatic when revealed at the end! The plot between chapters reads like a drug trip and is actual fascinating in that respect, understanding the action is underrated BUT if you just can’t stand it then find some one trying to interpret it and get an idea of whet other people think. This sort of ruins the mystery, like flipping to the back of a mystery novel so be warned. Each progressing chapter blurs the line between unrelated side stories, dream sequences and the “actual story” resulting in characters developing in story lines seemingly unrelated to the plot. All in all, the confusion seems to have subtle patterns indicating a rhyme and reason to the literature further confusing you. This strangeness is one of the reasons I think this is a great manga. Anything that gets you going “What the heck was that!” hours or even day later is a true work of art, maybe it won’t be enjoyable but it will always be fascinating and I think this makes Fushigi no Kuni no Shounen Arisu a fantastic read.
The other reason I so greatly enjoy the series is that I think Arisu becomes a great tortured character. Arisu’s overall personality and the sort of “self hate that should be developing but isn’t” as he progresses through the story line are my favorite way that writers mess with characters. His agony and confusion in latter stories as everything becomes subtly wrong to him, even himself and eventually when he just breaks down because everything he ever knew or believed becomes wrong and the only thing left in his faded memories stretching back as far as he can remember is the Prince of Hearts. That is some sad stuff, but great reading. Stockholm syndrome for the win!

What is actual strings the chapters together, for everyone who just doesn't get it. Its ok if you have read the manga three times and asked your friends and forums and you still don’t get it. This is the natural order of things, sit down with a dictionary and I will explain.
Pre work: do not begin reading until you understand the following terms!
Dimension/ Plane of Existence
“Alternate” or “Parallel” Reality
Lucid dreaming

#Idea 1 No continuity: nothing in any of the chapters can be thought of as effecting any of the other chapters, if it seems like it does then it is just to mess you up.
#Idea 2 More than one Arisu: Every time Arisu enters Wonderland or returns home, he never does, in fact he shifts to one that is almost, but not quite, the same as the last one he was in which was just vacated by another Arisu. This is an adequate explanation and what gave me my final aha moment, answer #3.
#3 Power of a God: Arisu doesn't know it, however due to the nature of wonderland as explained by Alice and shown in chapter two he has the ability to change wonderland with only his thoughts. When he retuned, he somehow took a bit of wonderland with him and though the manga as it is demonstrates that he can return to Wonderland, he subconsciously forms the wonderland and bases what he is creating on his own world view and recreates himself a bit with it. This normally wouldn’t be too bad, he would end up taller, handsomer and a better singer than he formerly was, but no big deal. However, the constant bombardment of affection from the Prince of Hearts causes a problem, all of those little things that you do that are out of character and dirty little thoughts that you have combined with the Prince’s attempts at Arisu and the general chaos are stacking up into a knock back combo pushing Arisu from what he was to what people (the prince) think he is. It certainly doesn't help that each jump smears Arisu’s memories eventually leaving his only constant input as “You are Alice, bride to me the prince of hearts! Come away with me and we will be married”.
Following this mental recreation of everything creates the following changes and stationary concepts over the chapters. The Prince of Hearts gets more manly going from crybaby to playboy to finally loving man as Arisu tuns him into the manly man he can love. Arisu slowly shifts from “the Arisu who got on the bus” to “the Alice that is to be wed to The Prince of Hearts” because this concept has become a solid rock in an ocean of confusion and change. Also fairly constant are “Arisu is a man, he live here” and “The White Rabbit”. What is really going on in the end is that Arisu dreaming, fantasizing, what ifs, self doubts, and the Prince’s superior force of will are destroying Arisu’s stable image of reality causing Arisu to create reality as he thinks it is, unstable thus creating more chaos. Repeat this cycle 2 or 3 times and you have the manga.
You may also want to decode individual chapters and for that you really need to put them into any of three categories: Reality, Lucid Dreams and Unconscious Dreams. Reality is what you think of as the core of the continuity he is not in wonderland and he is Arisu. Lucid dreams are chapters were Arisu has total memory and is in wonderland or an actual dream, everything make comparative sense but has an unrealistic tinge. He remembers these experiences fairly well and they are always as much of an influence as reality is either directly or though reshaping of Arisu’s world view. Unconscious dreams are those side stories that seem to not be part of the continuity at all. These are where Arisu creates a world that isn’t related to the story, plays out a story and then tweaks the characters based on what you see in that story. If these are real honest to god dreams or trips to wonderland with everything made weird, I don’t know, but everyone has a new history for the course of the dream and never remembers it latter on so even if it is just as real as everything else the only part of it that matters outside of the dream is that little part that is subtly altered because of the dream.

I hope this gave you some new eyes to try and reread the manga with or if you were bad and read all of the way through convinced you to read it once. It is worth the examination.

I think I have read bad stories and this one.
this is pretty much a summary of the story (by LogicalPoint on KM):

"Racist Savage uses magic to posses little Japanese girls and strip them. He is obsessed with committing mass genocide against all "white men". The government is literally pissing themselves with fear as their primary response to the situation."

at least the mangaka knows it's shit (he makes an afterword at the end of the series) and his try to be political was the worst if he wants to try to rebel in any form at least do it right ... there's editors that do worst when they axe good series (Mx0 hahahaha) but there's also bad ones that allows this things to be made. The art was okay but daaaamn this was a shit show.
I think this is the first time that I can say I read a 1 or 2/10 manga.

"Has potential" means "has not yet lived up to it". That's the lesson I hope people that were all over hyping Time Paradox Ghostwriter get out of this because that's certainly how I ended up feeling. I can't blame people for getting excited over a series like this as it seemed like this series would be Bakuman minus the stock romance + Stein;s Gate, a cool seeming idea that had some interesting questions to ask about creative writing, particularly whether or not it's truly possible for a different writer to take up someone else's beloved intellectual property without losing the intrinsic value that made the work so special in the first place. It's a question that the protagonist, the failing wannabe mangaka Teppei, finds himself having to answer with his own belabored effort when he receives a piece of the future from his microwave in the form of an issue of Weekly Shounen Jump featuring the debut of White Knight, a series set to make waves when it debuts in 10 years, but does not exist in the present. Teppei takes it upon himself to steal the manga wholesale and uses the weekly magazines he would receive henceforth as drafts for his own redrawn version to pass off to the public as an original work. Add into the equation the real creator of White Knight, a teenage girl named Itsuki Aino, has already conceptualized the story and is herself currently trying to break into the manga scene as an assistant, and you've got one spicy set up full of potentially rich and fulfilling avenues. There will be spoilers, but given how this series is set to be axed with next issues as of the time of writing, it shouldn't matter.

Of which the series takes absolutely none. It's kind of hard to say why. How much of it has to do with incompetence on the part of the writer and how much with how poorly Japan's reader base took to the idea of following the exploits of a shameless plagiarist (to the point to which all mentions of words "plagiarism, or plagiarist had to be replaced with synonyms for the first poorly-selling volume release), I can't say. But what I can tell you is that what we got as a result is confused, poorly paced mess that bulldozes all of it's oppurtunities for sudden time skips or just lazy storytelling. Did you want to see how Teppei would force himself to evolve as a writer to match the higher bar set by the Future Aino? Sorry. Were you wondering how Present Aino would approach the man profiting off of ideas so similar to hers they far exceed being called uncanny similarity? Well she befriends him immediately and shows, showing not even a hint of suspicion and even starts another smash hit manga soon after (a feat her future counterpart wouldn't accomplish until nearly a decade later).

The problem with this accelerated approach to storytelling is that it doesn't give any of the questions raised in the first chapter answers with any room to breath. What is it that makes White Knight so good to begin with? It just is. How does Teppei fill such big shoes when the issues from the future stop appearing? He just does. I brought up my positive comparison to the series Bakuman, a work that showed far more interest in showing what it truly meant to be a manga artist. The specific writing techniques Muto Ashirogi had to adopt when tackling different genres in there struggle to find something that would stick as a multi media franchise, the weekly grind to hit the top survey rankings and the resulting rivalries. It's because of our witnessing of the grueling routine of these starting artists that each of their victories and failures feel all the more uplifting and devastating respectively. TGPW beyond the first few chapters likes to tell you that all that struggle really did happen, for real just trust us, but taking shortcuts just makes everything about the story ring as empty and what's this all in service of?

Well I also did compare this series to Stein;s Gate, and while that comparison is a bit more tenuous, both works undergo a sudden shift into a "save the girl" type narrative via time travel. The shift really did feel like the manga equivalent of a "rating trap" but at this point the manga's fate was likely already sealed, and I already had checked out. Too many narrative opportunities and I could smell the axe coming a month ahead of people who are only now surprised to know this series didn't do too hot. These past few chapters feel as though they might have worked better for a final volume for a much longer series in which the relationship between Teppei and Aino would have felt far better realized, but that level of investment was left behind in one of the timeskips. So what we're left with is nothing more than the skeleton of what seemed to be a great story that died too soon and was picked to the bone before it had the chance to be told.

I don't really know how to rate this one. I keep slipping between ten and zero.

On the one hand, you have a barely coherent story that makes light of all sorts of issues and honestly is all very surface level... but on the other hand, Pure Trance really is imagination running wild on the page, with the distinctly beautiful art to back it up.

I'm not really sure how to qualify something like this. I could give it a rating in the middle, but I think the work is both better and worse than that. It really is something. I just don't know what that something is.

Let me tell you one thing, this manga is - heartbreaking.
I don't mean in the Genre way, but in expectations.
It started so well, with this ecchi scenes (lol I'm a perv) and everything and well, it broke my heart.

Story: 3
Seen than a lot of times. They could have made it better in so many ways! But they just HAD to make it so stupid... And by the end of the story, everything went so fast I couldn't keep up. Forced Story.

Art: 8
Good, but not enough. Hot girls, Hot boys... fine! but there was this something that sometimes annoyed me...

Character: 2
Yes! 2. Those were the lamest characters I have ever seen, all of the annoying used up characters in one manga... and not only that! They seemed so nice in the beginning (I expected so much more from it) and they just became so... low.

Enjoyment: 7
Just because it had this... good... ahm... sex scenes. That's all.

Overall: 6
Technically it should be 5, but +1 point for something that made me want to read it

Cynthia the mission is another one of those "missed potential" series, the characters were very well done and each had their own quirks and background. However there were several characters that felt thrown into the story for the sheer hell of it or served no purpose through most of the series. I say it missed its potential, because the plot was very weak throughout most of the series and alot of the characters were overused or underused.

Another thing I didn't like is alot of circumstances occur that make almost no sense for happening or just flat out make you say "WHY!?", an example being that the entire 6 volume is nothing but flashbacks... in the middle of an important arc.

However I did appreciate the ending, justice was served and while it wasn't completely satisfying, it was still pretty satisfying. Overall it was interesting and the action was prevalent, so I give it a 7.

Supposedly there's going to be a part 2, but seeing as it's 6 years later, it would seem the idea has been dropped. Unfortunate, a second part could have made up for the first's shortcomings.

Review is based off the adaption by Viz back in the 80s.

2/10.
A special 0/10 specifically for volume 2

One of the most useless and boring manga I've had the displeasure of reading.

Pointless and uncreative action scenes fill the pages, especially in vol 2. Explosion after explosion, so many explosions Michael Bay would be turned off. Dull, uninteresting characters. Everyone speaks like a robot. The dialogue is atrocious. Example given below. My issue isn't that it's chauvinistic, but that no one speaks in that manner. I would blame a horrid translation, but Gerard Jones the English Adaptor had translator notes where even he said the characters were boring. Leaving me to assume Tagami is an awful writer who doesn't actually talk to people. A bunch of robots named different things always showing up. The main enemy who don't really do much cuz our protagonist always defeats them. And some how a 2 volume series has such a jumbled plot that ends with no explanation.

This is fucking atrocious and I pray to god for forgiveness for exposing myself to this. I can't call it worm food because not even worms would eat this shit. This is on a completely lower level of hell in how bad it is. I could write 2 full pages on everything terrible about this series, but it doesn't deserve that attention.

Nice titties tho

https://imgur.com/a/tNch54E