Game Maou
The Game Devil

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The Game Devill starts as a interesting, but quite typical isekai. The main character get's sucked into a video game world together with the rest of the world. Nothing to special, but what makes this series fun early on are the characters.

They are all quite unique and interesting and as the series goes on the characters all get a lot of development. Ones the manga starts it's second half the story becomes very mysterious and it manages to keep you hooked till about the end. The last few chapters are a bit rushed, but they are still fun to read.

My main gripe with ... this series is the use of pixel art early on. It contrasts a lot with the regular art and not in a good way. It is annoying and not nice to look at. Luckily as the series goes on the use of the pixel art get's a lot better and that makes reading the series a lot more enjoyable.

I think that the Game Devill is a decent read, nothing to special but it stays fun the whole way through.

Upcoming spoilers, I will mark them as we go but I just now finished reading chapter 37, and I'm looking through other media to find out if this series is either axed/cancelled, but its 37th chapter is titled Game Over and I imagine within the next chapters (probably doesn't go beyond chapter 40) this title will end. (as of june 21, 2024, the manga is complete) As you read the Jump Plus app's comments, you'll see that people are pretty bored or not expecting much from the initial chapters but all can agree that the interesting meshing of pixelation and standard manga style (albeit not ... the prettiest, not the flashiest) is unique and rarely seen. The main selling points at the beginning were not enough to impress many people reading and I'm not gonna say this is a masterpiece, I somewhat agree that the intro/prologue is standard semi-isekai, RPG in manga form, the main protagonist devoted himself to manga this whole life therefore he's a noob and doesn't get concepts and other characters have to explain them out loud, art is average to meh, even bad, at some points. Okay, you might understand now that I've front-loaded the bad to average stuff from this manga but I rated it higher than most.

SPOILER TIME

You have to get through that muck to get through a story with a major twist that will re-conceptualize many things, and it reminds me of the advice Robert Kirkman received from a mentor during his writing of the comic Invincible: deliver a quick twist early on. I'm not comparing the two in quality, but this manga delivered the twist a little late, potentially dropping people on the way, think about that meme of a dude mining diamonds but gives up. Okay enough preamble, this story isn't a diamond, the twist comes in the form of a backstory reveal of the black knight character that accompanies Roku. Roku is played off as schizophrenic/hallucinatory because only he can see the Black Knight, he starts to mentally break down. The pacing and sidelines within this story are where the crux of character depth exists. Half of the characters we meet early in the party within the first town will get exposition, we get to know their lives before the game and their connection to the game's creator, making their standard character introductions fall away once you discover who they really are: truly each of these backstories has a twist. Midway through, a new character is introduced that becomes the main character for a new arc, his existence is a twist, a bug in the game, you could say. SUPER SPOILER: The gameplay has deathloops, so every time Roku dies, the game creator resets the world, like a child in a tantrum. And then during one loop, no one wants to return to reality because their own reality, their own lives, are mistakes, dreadful, no longer possible to return to. So the meh story of the first half of the manga, with some slight depth in characters, some good interactions, all that is cut short because of the temperamental attitude of the creator. And then the story continues like most video games do: at the "continue?" screen. Random words thrown together here to that no one reads the spoilers in the previous sentence in case they mind the spoiler tags.

END SPOILERS

There is much commentary on art theft and passion when creating, there are deeper moments of grief and depression, there's a rebellious attitude towards corporations who treat their employees as trash, and of course there's the standard shonen drive and hope in making it big in the hero's journey. But I'm afraid that gets pushed towards the midway point that if you don't carve a path through some less-than-stellar early story, you might not get to see this evolve. This is a good case of "let them cook" because i think my feelings at first were what I've seen from other reviewers, I wasn't feeling the novelty or the hook, I was simply going through because I like video game narratives but I don't mind 40ish chapters, it's not very long and it's a rather quick read.

What I will say though, is if none of this seems appealing, don't force yourself, it's still a 7/10 story, 7/5/10 if I could do decimals, I just think I'm rating it higher because I expected nothing and then got meh and then it turned into "oh shit that's pretty cool" and I wanna echo what I've seen in the comments, this is not entirely my thinking: if this series was delivered in a longer format, not fearing the ax of manga publishing, if it came out as a whole, perhaps this would be better received. I could not imagine the weekly/biweekly release format with a story that isn't really developing well until a major twist, halfway through its current run time.

So yeah, this is my yap sesh on why it shouldn't be dismissed early on, work through the nearly 40 chapters, then lemme know what you think. Thanks for reading <3

I only started reading this because the cover art looked interesting, but damn this is terrible. The actual artwork is trash, basically just low quality drawings with a blurry pixel filter on top. The story itself appears to be some kind of meta commentary on struggling manga artists, but I couldn't care less because it's so damn boring. It's the worst type of generic action where random monsters show up and everyone makes a comment about how it's just like a video game... If this was supposed to be a comedy then they failed miserably. This is just bottom of barrel shounen that will get ... cancelled soon.