Gun x Clover

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tl;dr: A manga that’s full of enjoyable characters, action, comedy, and art but that ultimately buckles under the weight of how it can’t really stick to anything.

The highlight of the manga is definitely the protagonist, Morito. He does his best to generally look like a meek little boy and is supposedly the lowest rank possible when it comes to mercenaries. However, he’s in actuality a master rank mercenary, of which there are only thirteen in the world, and though his exact age is never disclosed he’s old enough to have trained a number of other successful mercenaries. The setting makes incredibly good use of this ... dual identity, in that he’s pretending to be a student at Mikado High School, an academy for mercenaries as well as those that need mercenary protection. To the students, he’s just a weak kid that’s seen as either lame or cute.

But to the staff, many of whom are his former pupils, he’s a monster worthy of both fear and respect. The gap between him acting weak and kind of pathetic one moment to then incredibly powerful and somewhat sadistic the next is hilarious. And this comes into play quite often, because while he’s overpowered and often quite wise, he’s also really petty at times. Having to act weak with the students often pisses him off, resulting in him letting his anger out on his former pupils. Him, just being overpowered and shocking people that expected him to be weak, both allies and enemies, is also written in a pretty satisfying manner.

While he is incredibly powerful as a master rank, there are twelve others at the same level, so it’s not like he’s completely overpowered. A heavy amount of the action in this manga involves fights between him and other masters while underlings on both sides also fight each other, and the moment-to-moment action here is pretty exciting. The cast overall is packed with colorful personalities that are a lot of fun and the manga is also pretty good about having lots of fun interactions between them. The most interesting as one would expect is the heroine, Kotonoha, who has seven distinct personalities, each with their own design and abilities. The manga handles introducing all of them pretty well, and them having conferences in their head discussing how to handle various situations is generally pretty amusing due to how different they all are. Morito having to figure out how to deal with all of them due to his main job being to guard Kotonoha is also pretty well written, and the initial relationship establishment between him and six of them is handled well. The art is pretty great with a good style and pretty solid quality. The character designs have a good amount of variety and are generally used pretty well for a lot of good art. The action too has a lot of variety that the art showcases well.

The problem that lies at all the issues in this manga is the lack of any overarching cohesiveness. There are a lot of plot threads that seem interesting when they are introduced, but they never go anywhere. For the most part it just keeps pushing them along at a minimal level while constantly adding new ones, and in the end it just kind of throws half of them away while rushing to quickly resolve the rest. The world building has a lot of interesting concepts, both in terms of the mercenary system and supernatural elements. However, they don’t really fit with each other, often contradicting what came before. This makes the action especially hard to get invested in as it’s just all completely random with powers and abilities that don’t mesh at all. The world building for each arc works well for the arc, but falls apart at a larger scale, and that builds up to making the world overall not feeling cohesive.

Similarly, while there are a lot of great characters, the manga is really bad at using them after introducing them and giving them some basic development. A lot are reoccurring but it doesn’t feel like anyone, not Morito, not any of Kotonoha’s seven personalities, not a single character in the entire manga has a proper character arc with development beyond the arc they’re introduced. Similarly, showing how a lot of the cast fell in love with Morito is written pretty well, but then absolutely nothing romantic happens after that with any of them. The manga also does try to give a serious take on various themes, primarily centered around why humans go to war. However, a lot of that it is just random monologues or infodumps which are then never brought up again. It ultimately feels like all of it is more for the aesthetic of appearing like it’s dealing with serious themes, rather than actually dealing with them. As such, the manga is really enjoyable chapter to chapter, but ultimately leaves no lasting impression whatsoever.

This manga has an overused storyline and seems like quite a bore from the outside but after you read the first chapter, it will seem interesting. The characters are well thought out and has a charismatic feel to the protagonists.

The story has a overpowered male protagonist and is surrounded by females in an mercenary training school. For those that liked Chrome shelled regios, this may be a fun read, its a new series but it has potential.

Wow, every once in a while you get something different in the harem genre... In this manga instead of the main character being a small, innocent, wimpy kid, the main character is a a small child-like, arrogant and extremely strong adult thats only PRETENDING to be a small, innocent, wimpy kid. Amazing, what a breakthrough manga. Of course, you can take my above sentences in 2 ways, sarcasm or truth. Now in my review you should be able to work out which one it is, as the manga is an... interesting one.

Story-6
Herpa Derp, its a harem manga, so if you think there is going ... to be a clannad like story here, then you are in the completely wrong place buddy. Now that we've got rid of people actually wanting a story, let me tell you about this "harem picturebook". Basically, an all powerful master of mercenaries looks like a kid. A kid that has almighty powers but needs someone really powerful to look after her while shes at school because everyone wants her power. So amazingly, this master of kungjitsu (I use this to name overpowerd fighting styles) pretends to be a student in this school of mercenaries to protect the girl. Sounds not too bad eh? Too bad it follows the path of the overpowered guy --> underlings get but kicked ----> overpowered guy comes in the nick of time and destroys the enemy and saves the girl. Rinse and repeat, it's so predictable its boring, so they action scenes in between the fan service is average, lacking any real surprise.

Art-5
Have you ever the phrase "She/He would look hot if you put a paper bag over his/her face". This is the perfect manga to apply this. The face art in this manga is goddamn horrible. And I know why. Its because they put all their effort into the characters "other" assets. Thats right, the body's look really good in this manga, in more ways then one. Too bad I can't get over there ugly faces, it just ruins the the characters. Another problem is that the fights scenes are drawn averagely, as more effort is put into showing the women in awkward postions instead of actually showing fighting but hey its still fan service right? So its all good? , But in doing this fights look really confusing. The background images are nice though!

Character - 7
Another really "amazing" idea these people came up with is that, why not make the main female protagonist love the protagonist in more ways then one. So the female protagonist with multiple personalites was born. To bolster up the harem, each personality of the female protagonist are completely individual, with their memories and ability being all different, who come out at different situations the orignal personality is in, with each one of them falling for the protagonist. Now this actually sounds like a neat and interesting idea, too bad each of the personalities fall into the tried and tested cliches (i.e tsundere and local slut), so really it would have been the same to each personality have their own body. Of course, the women the protagonist beats the shit out of also come to respect him and fall in love with (like we haven't seen that before), as well as some classmates thinking his super cute because of his little boy facade. Wow

Enjoyment - 7
Meh, I like my comedy funny, but the times it actually made me laugh were few and far between, with it also taking itself too seriously. Also, as I said before the action scenes were also fairly average as well as every fanservice moments being ruined by the god-awful faces. With it failing at both light weight comedy and serious action manga you'd think I would not enjoy it all. But I did. And I don't know why, maybe because despite all its flaws it still manged to keep my attention, maybe for alot of the wrong reasons, but it still kept my attention. Plus only a few chapters are out, so it wasn't enough to make me go crazy.

All in all, this manga had some interesting ideas that were unique to the harem genre, but was let down by execution and and the placing of characters into cliche personalities. Though if your looking for a quick read, the first chapters only 50 pages long... oh wait, nevermind. Seriously though, it still is readable though I wouldn't recommend it, so this manga is just average and if you've got nothing to read, average manga is still alright. In conclusion, what do you think the answer to my 1st question is?

Thankyou for reading my review and if you have any advice for me or mistakes found in the review please don't hesitate to give me a shout in my comments section. Seeya