Kamisama Dolls

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tl;dr: A story that's paced well enough to be interesting all the way through but also feels overtly random most of the time.

This manga has a pretty interesting plot that's paced pretty well. It's pretty consistent in adding new twists or mysterious elements right as it's finishing dealing with previous elements so it's always moving pretty fast. There's a bunch of tone shifting, where things are super serious, it randomly gets comedic for a bit, and then it's back into really serious elements, which is kind of jarring due to how fast it happens, but feels like it fit the flow of things eventually. The ... plot also isn't all that complicated so despite things moving fast it's pretty easy to follow. Thus, it's always engaging and usually pretty interesting.

However, ultimately the biggest issue is that after it was all over, it felt overtly random. The biggest reason for that is the characters, who were mostly incredibly shallow, had no personality, and were just in general pretty dull. It still manages to have some good moments with them despite that, but just in general as a result of the characters not feeling very fleshed out, their motivations didn't really feel well conveyed, and as a result their actions don't feel like they have a solid flow to them, and thus just feel kind of random. It feels like it clearly tries with how it provides a lot of background to most of the main characters, but it doesn't do a good job of conveying how that background is resulting in their actions. The background doesn't feel like it provides build up for key moments that should be built up by said background. It feels like it was intended for there to be character arcs, but because of the lack of personality to characters overall they didn't really land. Similarly, the relationship development was also really weak in that the relationship just randomly develops at some point.

People seem to be fond of Aki, who seems to get the most in depth background and consider him an exception to the generally weak cast of characters, but I didn't really see how he was any better than the rest of the main cast and his actions similarly seemed to have arbitrary motivations. The only exception I really felt was Mahiru, who is only a side character so it doesn't even attempt to flesh her out too much, but she has a larger than life personality that stands out very strongly amongst the rest of the cast, and is simple enough that her actions follow her motivations pretty clearly, thus making her pretty likable. Though she's only a side character so that isn't enough to help the manga much overall.

The ending in a very broad sense is pretty predictable, but in terms of finer details is really random, especially in terms of how only Aki got blamed and punished for things while everyone else got to be a karma houdini. The action is pretty solid and reasonably well fleshed out. It was drawn in such a way that it's pretty hard to follow what's happening in a physical sense panel to panel at times though. The art was decent in terms of quality, but it intentionally seems to be pretty dull in terms of style for settings, characters, and the dolls, with rare but appreciated exceptions, which makes it functional, but not that enjoyable from a visual point of view.