Shin Honkaku Mahou Shoujo Risuka

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TLDR : It's kinda peak until the last few chapters. Nonetheless, it's still interesting enough to be worth reading. Even the mistakes commited in the last chapters are interesting to dive into. Just read it

Risuka is about a very twisted, smart, but powerless kid fighting dangerous magicians with only his brain and his magician ally.

Let's note that the author, NisioIsin is a big JoJo fan (so much that he even did an interview with Araki a decade ago). And it shows 'cause it is the most JoJo-ish manga I've ever seen up until this point. Not art-wise, but fighting-wise. There is little to no ... hand to hand combat, every fights are about insane powers opposed to MC Kizutaka's ingeniosity.
Even though I may be comparing it to JoJo, it still has its very own distinct personnality, don't get me wrong it's only about inspiration. Emoto Sensei's art was also insane throughout the whole manga it was FANTASTIC.
It was a great read for most of its running, despite one or two asspulls during certain fights..

So what went wrong here ?

First things first, even tho its author turns out to be the same as Monogatari and Medaka Box (aka peak human art), this is the adaptation of an old novel he started like 23 years ago in 2003.
The thing is the novel went on hiatus in 2008 until 2020, where he dropped that lackluster, final volume. That's an insane period of time to put a series on hiatus. Sensei even admitted after the manga's final chapters that after reading his oldest works, he realized he wasn't built to write those anymore.

In 12 years, your writing experience, beliefs and writing style tend to change so drastically that you simply cannot write anymore in the same way as you used to 10 years ago.
Which explains that very rushed conclusion that basically consists in exposition dump and thousands of completely insane plot twists at the same time, while just one volume backwards, the story seemed to be only in the middle of it, not in its final part. It really came out of nowhere like an axed manga's conclusion

However, what he didn't say, is that in my eyes, it just seems like Sensei also took such a long pause because he felt like he cornered himself with the way he made the story evolve, and ran out of ideas to unwrap the story he initially wanted to tell. Leading him to run away from his own work, until he desperately came back to it 12 years later without any grand conviction, as if to finish off a dying patient he had failed to save.
I like to know about this tho because it makes me feel better to know that even this man happened to produce flawed works.


It would've been a 8, if not for that fraudulous ending. So to me it's between 7 and 7.5.
If there's one good lesson we can take off that work, it's the following :

A good blacksmith never lets the iron cool down before finishing.