I have to give this manga a 10 despite its many, many flaws because I was so completely captivated by it that it would be dishonest to give it anything less.

This series is just so enjoyable. The world feels as if it is breathing. Every character is perfectly developed just a bit more than someone of their importance in a different series would be, and it makes the story feel completely alive.

I almost never reread or rewatch anything. At a minimum, I read this series over four times while it was still coming out monthly because I wanted to be sure I remembered everything about what was going on. I never felt that it had gotten old. It covered so many emotions that when I read or watched other things I was constantly comparing them to Soul Eater.

The story follows Maka Albarn, one of the most irritating and hate-worthy protagonists I've seen. And the series (the manga, not the anime) handles her extremely well. In the wake of her parents' divorce due to her father's repeated infidelity, Maka comes to the conclusion that all men are untrustworthy and should die. This is complicated by her relationship with Soul Eater, a boy who turns into a scythe, whom she fights alongside and must trust with her life daily.

Soul himself is an expertly crafted character, a former member of a high-class musical family who was forced to leave after finding out he had weapon blood. He is so conflicted by his past and future that he changes his name in an attempt to declare separation from his past as a pianist, but music still seems to follow him everywhere. What Soul really needs is a hug, but instead he is faced with hostility by Maka, the person he is now sworn to protect.

The emotional core of the series is the relationship between these two characters. Many coming-of-age stories deal with the protagonist learning independence, but Soul Eater takes the opposite path and tells a tale of learning to trust. This theme of love and teamwork is present in every single character and interaction in the series.

And these other characters are just as enjoyable, and in many cases more so, including a hotheaded boy raised with Maka who wants to gain enough fighting skill to surpass God, a young prince so concerned with doing well in his role that he develops obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mad scientist teacher who fears his impending insanity may one day harm his students, a warrior woman conflicted in whether to continue fighting or settle down and get married, and a father who seeks only his daughter's forgiveness.

The art style starts out, frankly, terrible, but just like Maka's character, it improves exponentially over the course of the series.

The humor is top notch. The reason I'm writing this review so many years later is that I remembered a joke in chapter ~104 or so the other day and I busted out laughing all over again. (For those of you who have read it, it's where Kid tells a certain council about what happened to him in the girls' shower.)

The ending is, not gonna lie, iffy, but I didn't think it was bad. The reason so many people hate it is that the last chapter is like a 6/10 when you've been conditioned to expect a consistent 9.5/10 every chapter. Regardless, everyone, no matter how minor, makes at least 90% progress towards their goals, and you can easily see where everyone is going. The epilogue is a little ambiguous, but it's certainly not criminal and it didn't affect my enjoyment of the series as a whole.

All around, from me it gets a definite 10/10.