Ranked #5446

Yomeiro Choice (Manga)

I'm not sure why some people insist on approaching this series so seriously. It's a boundary-pushing gag manga, and that's all it was intended to be. With how over the top and outrageous it can be at times, I think it's a great success. If the concept doesn't sound appealing to you, then do yourself a favor and just don't read the series.

The story itself makes no real world sense at all, but that's why it's entertaining. It's a bit like Back to the Future (in fact the series itself references the movie with several chapter titles and little winks and nudges here and there), but a little more complicated with its multiple timelines and it will make your head hurt if you try to make sense out of it. Basically, daughters with different mothers from different timelines in the future are in danger of disappearing from existence and are trying to make sure their father chooses their respective mother so that they get born. The story really is not why you should be reading this, but I think it does a great job at giving a ridiculous setting for the ridiculous gags to play out.

The art is pretty good. For a harem-type series, it's relatively detailed and dynamic-looking, but it's nothing amazing and often the panels seem very busy and crowded. The characters' designs themselves don't look like anything too special, but it's easy enough to tell them apart at least for the most part.

Speaking of the characters, most of them fulfill some common archetype. Saku is the loser harem lead, Karin is the childhood friend tsundere, Hiiro is the emotionless kuudere, etc. This may sound like a criticism, but because this is a parody gag series, it really works in its favor.

To expand on that point a bit further, many chapters seem to parody harem and general manga cliches by taking typical plots way beyond what you would expect to see and some of the gags are often a bit shocking, but that's a big part of the entertainment. Giving examples would only spoil the fun the first time through, so I'll restrain myself, but rest assured, you'll be left wondering if the publisher can even legally show some of this stuff.

The series is not perfect, though. Characters will often act completely out of character or become totally Flanderized for a single chapter in order to accommodate a certain story, and although this has an amusing comedic and cartoonish effect, it can feel a little damaging to the characters sometimes. Although the gags in the series are shocking and often gut bustingly outrageous, chapters that focus primarily on gags and move away from the relationships and characterization tend to be a bit weaker.

But those things hardly make this a bad series. Frankly I've really been surprised at just how entertaining I've been finding this series, and fortunately this sort of "ridiculous ecchi gag" thing seems to be the author's forte, so I look forward to seeing more ridiculousness from tenkla/Doi Sakazaki in the future. If you're looking for an ecchi harem series that really pushes the boundaries of what can be shown in a shounen manga or something that makes no sense at all and knows it (in a cartoony kind of way), then you've come to the right place.

EDIT: The series is over now, and my opinion and score remain the same. Without spoiling anything, the ending was downright ridiculous, but at the same time, it's exactly what you'd expect from this series. It was one of the few endings to a harem series I found satisfying, and it does actually wrap everything up neatly. For this, I think the author deserves some credit. She went all the way, and for that, this is a series I won't soon forget. Thanks, tenkla. read more

Time travel is one of my favourite Sci-fi sub genres, however there are a lot of different variations of it:
- Going back in time to change the future.
- Going back in time and altering the past, thus creating a parallel possible future.
- Going back in time to ensure that certain past events occur, because everything is seamlessly connected.
Yomeiro Choice uses a bastardized version of all three, to form it's inconsistent plot. But in the end none of that really matters, because why complain about the usage of science theorems, in a mediocre harem, ecchi, rom/com.

And just like in any harem, there has to be a protagonist and it comes in the form of (the generic male protagonist #517) Saku Sakuraga. He lives alone, like all Japanese boys supposedly do, but is never given a moment's piece, thanks to his childhood friend's constant meddling and his cousin's sudden arrival. Yet if that wasn't enough on his plate, an odd little girl appears outs of nowhere; claiming to be his daughter from the future, who's travelled back in time to ensure her Dad will procreate her... and she isn't the only one. Well that's it for the basic premise and like I said earlier, the time travel aspect merely plays second fiddle, making this into yet another implausible story where some hapless guy has to pick between multiple girls. However the reasoning behind it all is kind of farfetched. As for the structure of the story, it's exactly what you'd expect, with each chapter having a theme or character focus, to provide opportunities for some comic relief but never really doing much to advance the plot. The comedy and ecchi mostly come from the numerous times the daughters forcefully try to get involved, bringing their future tech into their shenanigans, but it's nothing more than a bunch of uncreative jokes that got old in the days of Love Hina & Tenchi Muyo.

Another thing that got old was the art style. To the mangaka: So what if you can draw cute girls in ecchi (borderline hentai) situations. It doesn't mean anything if little-to-no effort is put into providing a unique look and feel to those cute girls in their ecchi situations. In the end the art of the manga was boring, because it offered nothing new and looked really simplistic.

The characters themselves are simplistic. Heck, they are basically just cardboard cut-outs of what we are all used to by now. Nothing more to their personalities than the one-word captions used to think them up (i.e. Kuran=Tits, Karin=Tsundere, Mebuki, Kiiro & Hiiro=Lolis, Saku=Meh...) So yeah, there's nothing to the characters, but if you enjoy your characters simplistic, then you'll have a variety of them to choose from. Nevertheless they seem to lack any depth that'll make you care about them and by the time the mangaka tries to give them depth, it already feels like it's too late.

I remember that one episode of Futurama when Fry met his accident-prone Grandfather, in the past and takes it upon himself to ensure that his Grandparents hook up. But it was his involvement that killed his Granddad and in the end he became his own Grandfather. It's this kind of messed up feel that Yomeiro Choice has, but unfortunately it's no way near as entertaining. Certainly this manga does have some genuinely funny moments, but they really don't happen often enough, to fully redeem its shamelessness. If it wasn't for the time travel hook I really wouldn't care about it that much, but it can still be written off as just another generic harem, ecchi, rom/com; where some bland teenage boy ends up living with a bunch of easily attainable girls, with a whole bunch of jokes cropping up in-between. I mean sure, if that's all you're looking for then this little title could very well satisfy your need, but that's only if you don't mind: the badly put together story, some poorly executed jokes, a spoilt loser of a protagonist and heaps of non-consensual sexual activities (oh wait, if it looks like she's enjoying it then I guess it's OK).
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