Dosanko Gal wa Namara Menkoi
Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!

Edit

What would you like to edit?

SynopsisBackgroundAlternative TitlesPictureChapters/VolumesPublishing DatesRelationsTypeExternal Links  

Dosanko Gal is a pretty great manga... up until the point where it became a harem. I have to admit I really enjoyed the manga in the beginning— there was a cute girl doing very cute and funny things, and an MC who maybe didn’t seem hopelessly dense when it comes to love. But alas we can’t always have our cake and eat it too.

Unfortunately I had too high of expectations when I thought this MC could actually recognize and realize the main girl’s feelings. No matter what type of romantic or sexual advance main gal makes, our virgin boy always somehow dismissed it ... or turns it platonic. For example, in one chapter, our main gal straight up sends a photo of herself in the bathtub to MC, yet he has the audacity and lack of brain capacity to respond with, “You’re very serious about taking care of your beauty! I really admire that!” Like NO sir, she was trying to get you to fuck her, not praise her skin routine. It is like this with practically every girl he encounters— main girl #1, main girl #2, and probably main girl #3.

Despite MC being as dense as a brick, and despite the manga steering into a harem route (which I personally think is unneeded), there are still enjoyable things about this manga. Every main girl is genuinely a likeable character. They all compete for MC’s love and affection while still being friends and maintaining a good relationship with each other which is pretty respectable. And somehow I also still think that MC is an adorable and loveable character— he just needs to work on his density.

Other pros: Good art, funny story, light ecchi (not too much and not too little, just the way I like it), very regionalistic as Hokkaido culture is apart of the manga.

Overall, could this manga be improved? 1000000% yes. Should you still read it even though it has flaws? Yes, yes you should.

First off, I am still a huge fan of the Oneshot and first some chapters of this manga, rating both of them 10/10. My initial review for the serialization was a deserved 3/10. More on that below. Now, ...

THE MADMAN (author) DID IT. Turned a solid 3/10 into a good 6/10 before it ends by pretending that ~30 chapters never happened. What a turn of tables. It was around chapter 90 when the author realized what a hot pile of dogshit they created. The "story" and "characters" make no sense anymore. There is no endgame. THANK GOD, randomly, in the midst of an "arc", literally ... mid sentence, we get a clear cut- Huge timeskip and Fuyuki is a whole different character again. Same with Tsubasa. So much (important-)stuff got pulled out of thin air from off-screen with zero foreshadowing and sense to then be resolved off-screen in an instant. The cut is pretty harsh and it is clear that the author did not know how to proceed anymore, it was a tangled mess. It was quite honestly embarrassing to read at times so acting like it all never happened was the correct choice. The senpai will forever be some of the worst writing in a shounen romance manga but whatever.

This isn't 100% garbage but it can objectively not be rated higher than a 7 (the whole senpai arc...). I recommend reading the first some chapters and a skip straight to around 90. This is not a joke. There is no real character or story development that is worth reading 80 chapters for. You will get the same thing without having to see the author forget about who his own characters are at times, characters turning bipolar randomly, minor characters randomly being majorly important for something they did off-screen 30 chapters ago and some of the worst ass-pull "story"telling ever. Again, this is not a joke. It makes this whole thing a better experience.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, my initial rating was a deserved 3/10. It is the author's first published work. The Oneshot was great. The start of the series was, too. But everything went downhill fast. I do not blame the author (first work) entirely. It could've been an editor (most probably) pushing the author in the wrong direction.

The manga instantly turns into a Harem. This is a non-issue for me. Fuyuki and Tsubasa are still really enjoyable as characters at this point. Until one or two "arcs" into the series. Even if students, all characters behave like unreasonable 5 year olds randomly. Whole relationships randomly change around. Characters behave differently. There is timeskips everywhere. HUGELY IMPORTANT PLOT happens off-screen (HOLY SHIT THE ASSPULL "STORYTELLING"). The author is abusing his characters, straight up. The story is turning in circles but not really because characters, their mental and happenings get teleported around and circle around somewhere else randomly. Every 3 chapters you gotta ask yourself "who are these characters?", "what is happening?", "why are we back in school suddenly?", "This character that was mentioned once fleetingly suddenly is major and did something REALLY important off-screen and 20 chapters ago (the Senpai)".

The very obvious and glaring problem with this manga is that it has no other purpose or goal other than working as a glorified travel brochure for Hokkaido. Every single thing —from the characters, to the romance, to the conflicts— is mediated by the necessity of, at some point, inserting a scene that goes like "look at how cool this tourist attraction is!". Initially, it's not much of an issue: you, as a critical reader might realize that the characters are as bland as a fictional water flavored ice cream; this is because none of the characters are written with the purpose of exploring a ... human mind, instead, they exist as tropes which serve the only goal of constructing the simplest of plots; an excuse, in other words. But that's OK, any manga reader has come across millions and trillions of unoriginal stories and boring conflicts (the love octagon, the family trauma, the search for purpose; we've seen everything).

The problem is that it gets egregious the closer it gets to the end (or well, to the now, as it's still being published). It doesn't even have so much of a story now; it's just the tourism pamphlet interpolated by panels of the main couple going "OMG I love her so much", "oh god, I'm so glad I am with you, Generic-kun!", "can't wait to see what the future will deliver for us", and more and more phrases with absolutely zero substance. Not even the story gets saved aesthetically; it feels like the artist just looked at an Uniqlo or Mujin catalogue, or perhaps the blandest of K-Dramas, and decided to base the whole artstyle over it. It has zero identity —no, actually, scratch that; it has the identity of a corporate advertisement. Because that's what this is. The only thing separating this from a TV ad from Nike where we see an athlete winning the race because of the shoe of the moment is that this one goes on from +100 chapters, somehow.

I give it a 3 only because it manages to not be offensive to the reader, which is the bare minimum.