Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata: Egoistic-Lily

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tl;dr: An alternate telling of a good story that isn’t really different enough to give it much value.

For those that aren’t familiar with the main series, Saekano is a light novel series that has also received an anime adaptation as well as a manga adaptation and various manga spin offs. It is the story of Tomoyo forming a circle to create a doujin VN for comiket. In the main series, three members of that circle (Katou, Utaha, and Eriri) are focused on about equally. This spin-off, Egoistic Lily, is a version of Saekano that heavily focuses on only one of these three heroines, Eriri. Eriri ... is Tomoya’s tsundere childhood friend with whom she had a falling out, and this manga is about them slowly reconciling. It’s a pretty solid relationship arc that certainly does lean heavily on tropes, but has enough beyond that to give it a good amount of depth and some pretty good emotional beats.

While this manga is especially focused on Eriri, I certainly would not consider this the ‘Eriri route’ version of the story. This is because the focus is more due to subtraction than addition, by which I mean the focus on Eriri in this manga is more so due to skipping or glossing over the parts centered around Katou and Utaha than through anything new regarding Eriri. The story of this manga is ultimately the exact same as in the main series and nothing major happens in this that doesn’t happen in the main series. To be honest, one of the biggest ways it cements itself as an Eriri manga is by ending where it does, right at the end of a major Eriri arc and before getting into any of the other heroine’s arcs that would follow. This manga does expand certain parts related to Eriri. For example, there are things that are just briefly talked about as having happened in the main series, but this manga will show them happening as they occur. But ultimately, it doesn’t really feel like these further fleshed out her character.

The main Saekano manga did a pretty bad job with both Eriri and Utaha, so I suppose this is better in regards to how it handled Eriri. However, the anime did just as good a job with Eriri and also managed to handle Utaha and Katou just as well. Another spin off manga, Girl’s Side, requires already being familiar with the main story of Saekano to understand properly, but it actually fleshes out Eriri better than the main manga does in certain regards by actually adding new substantial content. Egoistic Lily on the other hand just feels like a slightly different adaptation from the main manga. And ultimately the story is great and this adaptation is pretty solid too with solid art, so that’s enough to make this manga good. However, considering the anime and main manga have considerably more story content, including more Eriri content, at the same or better level of quality, this manga doesn’t really seem to have much of a point.