Strategic Lovers

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Though Strategic Lovers opens with an intriguing first chapter that suggests a narrative of intellectual rigour and scheming within an Ecchi, Harem setting, only the latter is fulfilled. Although the main character has a background as some kind of mastermind chess player, the attempt at manipulating relationships and people in this manga is done in such a massively convoluted and unclear way that it is difficult to even discern what kind of scheming is being done. Hell, it's even difficult to identify what the stakes are in this manga with all the over the top sexualisation and the poor attempts at characterisation and setting up ... of plot twists.

Still, the art is good and the character models look nice. I guess if someone just wants ecchi content and isn't fussy about the context that they are viewing them within, this can be worth their while.

The whole manga plays out as if it were a sweaty weeb's dream. One that he tries to make into a story while writing the plot solely on his bus ride to his retail job. I've never seen such a poor attempt at creating coherent plot. The manga randomly throws in characters who, aside from being attractive, are supposed to have very influential families and hidden agendas and goals of their own that they plan to use the MC to achieve. However none of these families are ever properly explained. All of the girls motives are given 3 lines of dialog to explain their entire ... backstory and we're immediately supposed to sympathize with them.

The MC is also extremely dull. He's supposed to use his intellect (he's good at chess... that's the only intelligent thing he has going for him) to outwit all these potential mistresses. He relates their actions to those of a chess game but the plot is so horrible, scattered, and unexplained its as if he had never played a board game in his life.

In short, there is no plot because it's incoherent and poorly explained. The characters are all incredibly 2D. The art is nice though.

The manga presents itself like every character has secret motivations and are scheming to get what they want. However by chapter 3 it just falls flat and devolves into Orgy House: Otaku Edition. Our MC is a mastermind because he plays chess very well. I knew a kid throughout school who would shart his pants and then touch it and smell his hands afterwards, and his favorite game was chess. So your mileage may vary whether you can suspend disbelief. Although to be fair some of MC's facial expressions reminded me of Sharting Shane.
The girls are pretty cute though. I wouldn't mind giving them ... some of my rich conglomerate if you know what I mean.

3.1/10

“If Andrew Tate made a manga,” no truer words have been said to describe this dumpster fire. The purpose of harems are to make a reader choose a ship and sink with the ship. Instead, in this manga, the characters make me want to burn the whole port down so no ship will or should ever sail. The plot and characters are equally appalling.

The plot is so scattered, disordered, and chaotic that it’s hard to follow or connect any sort of reasoning to create a logical read. Besides for the harem and diluted doujin scenes, there’s not any memorability or impression in the manga. ... Oh, I can’t forget about the constant chess references that half of the time don’t make sense because it’s not applicable.

The characters are made so weird as they barely get any background, but if they do it’s hard to remember solely because THERE ARE FIVE OF THEM. A five person harem? It’s already hard enough to follow five separate characters, but to introduce them at the same time while giving them a panel of screen time to elaborate is pushing it. Realistically, there’s only two fml while the rest are going to get banished to the shadow realm.

The only saving grace of this manga is the artwork and even then it gets out of hand with the unnecessary ecchi scenes. I’m baffled on how this gets serialized and even translated as every event feels like a fever dream. Honestly, it’s not that bad of a read, but definitely not worth investing over.

PS: I don’t hate Andrew Tate

Reading Rankings (Portnoy inspired & A Huang Teizan Original)
10 – God’s penmanship
9 – Must-read. Drop everything else.
8 – Instant bookmark
7 – Entertaining
6 – Good to pass time
5 – Why are you reading this?
4 – Bad.
3 – Typical garbage.
2 – My head hurts.
1 – Retirement is a thought.
0 – “Did they even give you a story?!”