Yamada-kun to 7-nin no Majo
Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches

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Wow.. ever since the anime ended I didn't touch the manga until now, and OH BOY I'm glad I read through the end. We got a beautiful and happy way to end this amazing series.

Back then I was young and naive when I first encountered the anime and now I'm about to enter a University just like the crew. I was worried for a second cuz I read manga to escape from reality, but got pulled up back to reality when they started the University "Arc". Nevertheless, from an anime that I wanted to watch because of how obsessed I was on the romance genre ... to coming back years later and still FEEL the same emotion as I did back then. This was a genuinely and truly an amazing Manga to read.

Cried like a bitch but worth it.

9/10

tl;dr: A manga with a great first third with a pretty solid plot and good character/relationship development, but that then slowly becomes much worse written and just in general less fun to read.

This manga is about a delinquent type student named Yamada getting involved with the seven witches of his high school. These witches have supernatural powers that are activated upon kissing. For example, the main heroine Shiraishi has the power to switch bodies. The first third of the manga involves Yamada, Shiraishi, and the rest of the members of the supernatural studies club that they’ve created, going around and investigating the other witches, trying ... to discover the root behind what’s happening and why. This is somewhat episodic in that each witch has their own issue that needs to be resolved and each witch is dealt with one by one.

Ultimately, this culminates with a grander, larger, and more complicated arc that builds up off of everything that happened up to that point and changes up the story quite a bit. Still, though the circumstances are different, even after that arc it essentially returns to a similar structure to before the arc in that it involves Yamada going around investigating witches again and solving their problems. These parts of the manga I felt were well written and pretty enjoyable. Each of the witches was decently well developed and how their issues were resolved was somewhat satisfying. Both Yamada and Shiraishi had pretty solid character arcs and relationship development. And the side characters were in general handled pretty well too.

The manga changes quite a bit around the half way point, and unfortunately it isn’t for the better. The focus shifts from being about all of the witches powers to instead focusing on a single one, memory manipulation. And as is often the case when this concept becomes the focus, things get really convoluted. That would be okay if this convolution was building towards something, but in this case it felt pretty directionless. It largely felt like there was no overarching plan on where the plot or characters arcs were going to go, or if there was it changed so much in the midst of things that the end result was a muddled mess. Plot wise it feels like it’s just spinning its wheels without moving much a lot of the time, but it also has very abrupt jumps, so the pacing is all screwy. While the first half had a few plot holes as well, they felt pretty minor and the type that are easily overlooked, but in the second half they’re much bigger and really in your face in such a way that it kind of feels like the plot itself makes very little sense at times.

Character arcs in general are handled pretty weakly in the second half because it introduces way too many characters that it doesn’t really know how to use well but seems to try to keep too many of them relevant and thus doesn’t manage to properly focus on anyone. The relationship development between Yamada and Shiraishi also peaks at around the half way point, and for most of the rest of the manga it’s either standing still, or regressing and having to build back up to where it already was. There’s a time skip epilogue where there’s major progress with everyone, but while I’m generally a fan of time skip epilogues, this one felt really forced and thematically off and thus just in general the ending to the manga wasn’t all that satisfying. Also, this manga is a harem manga with there being a lot girls interesting in Yamada, but in general and especially in the second half, it’s pretty terrible at handling this aspect to the point I feel that harem fans will have little to like here while those that hate harems will be put off so it would probably have been better to just not have had that.

The art in the manga is pretty great throughout. Character designs are nice and in general the framing and layouts are used well. There are a lot of really nice extra illustrations as chapter cover pages as well.

Other than the art style being iffy at best and quite off-putting often (don't look at their eyes when their head's are tilted), the first large arc of 65ish chapters is okay.
However, after that, where it absolutely should've ended, it continues for another 180 chapters, with 20-30 added characters, and 10-30 added plot lines that NEVER get resolved or touched upon. So many characters just evaporate when they're very important, only to be brought up 30 chapters later to say hi and do nothing. So many relationships are shredded and the characters involved just move on ... with their (INCREDIBLY RUINED) lives instead of giving a single care?
Also, while this is certainly a common plot driver, EVERY drama in this series is caused by the characters having unbelievably bad commination, which is infuriating.
And hoo boy it just gets worse and worse over the last couple volumes, the last one is completely flabbergasting.