Trouble Dogs

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Trouble Dogs is a pretty cool name for a manga, and it represents the characters love for dogs. At the end of each volume, there is a short story that depicts some of the characters backstories, their previous lives and how they cared for their pet puppies, which is pretty fitting for a light-hearted manga such as this. In fact, those little short stories are probably the best parts of the manga, the main stories however, are sometimes very clumsy and struggles to hold things together.

For the most part, the story has very little to do with dogs. We have a troubled girl named Shina ... who is a popular blonde bombshell at school, one day she joins the afterschool club known as the Troubled Dogs. Now what the hell exactly is a Troubled Dog? Well, it's basically a group of mysterious students, a botanist, and a janitor who goes around kicking ass and solving problems at school. The problems range from sending a fluffy love-letter to a random heartthrob to something as serious as stopping a bomb threat. The better stories always involved the villain Shinai, who is actually a very charismatic Top-A student who constantly fiddles the tune of a completely evil conniving bastard, although at times he can be surprisingly nice to the main character Shina because well, he just wants to sleep with her.

A lot of the stories are fast-paced, always trying to raise the tension as the students are trying to work around the school system and avoiding the teachers and authorities. However, it's not quite as exciting as it sounds, simply because some of the plots are borderline silly, and not to be taken seriously. The case would be the chapter where there was a field trip to an outskirt part of the city and suddenly the whole place was bombarded by terrorists and the students were held hostage. Well, the way the story was resolved was extremely silly. Apparently the terrorists were all idiots with no training whatsovever as a couple of students just took them down like Navy marines.

My biggest disappointment with the story was the last volume. There are 10 volumes and the final volume was extremely underwhelming. I thought the whole thing would go out with a bang with the school finding out about the mysterious Trouble Dog organization but they introduced a new villain instead and from there it became a rushed mess.

But also then again, the entirety of Troubled Dogs wasn't as bad as it seemed. There were some fun and good moments sprinkled throughout. Especially the love triangle between Shina, Shinai, and the main male character Ryuu. There were also some minor characters who were pretty interesting as well, but they didn't appear too often. This was just a mindless manga with good character moments, but pretty disappointing because of its unfulfilled potential.


Story - 6

Some good character moments, the thrills were few, but they were fun. But a lot of the stories can be silly, and just made me lose interest.


Art - 5

Just mediocre. A lot of the characters look the same and becomes confusing especially the last volume, where there were at least 3 important characters who looks exactly identical.

Character - 6

The best part of the manga. The female main character Shina wasn't too annoying, although she was your typical female character she always displays strong qualities and is always the first to try to solve any problem. The villain was good, and the main male character Ryuu was more of a mysterious bad-ass, but he has probably the best dialogue out of all of them.

Enjoyment - 7

I did enjoy most of the volumes. Of course the last volume just wasn't up to standards, but the middle volumes were quite decent.

Overall - 6

It's a pretty forgettable manga, but skimming through it wouldn't hurt.