Kouya ni Kemono Doukokusu

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The art in this manga is possibly the best I have ever seen, easy 10/10, I must say if I were to ever write a manga I would want this man as the artist. It has a delicious faux-90's quality to it with sharp black and white contrast that I love, it gets so creative with the paneling and the designs of the beastmen/women and the spreads of the Mesoamerican imagery in particular are magnificent. I would recommend this title to most people on the strength of the art alone, it's seriously that good.

So why mixed feelings? Well there's a problem with Kouya. Kind of ... the biggest problem a manga can have.

The story and characters are not very good. Not irredeemable but subpar to say the least.

It's all very fast paced and has a bunch of different organizations and minor characters (a great portion of the dialogue is dedicated to expositing about this) all after our amnesia having MC for different reasons. Basically it's just a vehicle to get the reader from one incredible looking sequence to the next, which is fun for what it is but leaves you not caring at several moments that should be emotional because these characters give you no reason to be attached to them or their relationships. Indeed there is only one character from this series you see posted everywhere and that's Makura. Fittingly this isn't because of the strength of her writing but because she's a sexy well designed monkey waifu.

If you did somehow get yourself emotionally invested despite the lack of reasons to, prepare to have it dampened every time the too frequent meta humor interrupts a serious moment. I wouldn't call this more than an annoyance usually but there's an entire poorly integrated subplot dedicated to meta humor about being a mangaka.

But it didn't have to be like this! The concepts of the story are so cool! I love beastification stuff! I love Mesoamerican mythology and i'm happy to see a manga utilize it! I even love the somewhat cliche points about humanity it tries to make!

But concepts aren't enough, because I know if it had average art i'd probably forget about it the second I finished it and it's all down to the frustrating execution. Still, it does have it's art so even though I just called it a subpar story i'm going to give it a 6/10 and a cautious recommendation just because I love looking at it and it's sexy monkey so much.