Tokyo Mew Mew

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I'll be frank: Tokyo Mew Mew is bad.

While the concept is mildly interesting - bio-engineered magical girls save the world - the story itself is shallow, cheap, and flat. The tension in conflicts isn't there because the resolution happens within a page or too.

The magic itself is uninteresting; there's no learning curve, the girls just automatically know what to do. Even in the attacks, there is no variation - each girl only has one move.

I also found the romance - between Ichigo and Ryou, as well as between Ichigo and Masaya - dull. With Masaya, it's simply pages of Ichigo staring at him ... lovestruck and trying to hide her cat ears and tail; we don't actually know much about Masaya except that he really, really cares about the environment and endangered species. On the other hand, the ship tease with Ryou and Ichigo relies on his sexual harassment of her, which is downright gross, and on his being a jerk with a heart of gold, which is just... boring.

As a bonus, the outfits are uncreative.

Overall, the story doesn't compel me to care about any of the characters. It's fine if you want something fun and a little flashy, I guess, but it is totally lacking in substance.

This manga doesn't seem to do anything exceptionally well. The plot is very basic and similar to many other magical girl shows. It's about a typical girl who suddenly gets magical powers and now has to protect the world with a group of four other magical girls. This basic premise isn't bad, but it's nothing special. The issue is that almost everything else in this series seems to also follow this "Alright, but nothing special" -formula.

For example, let's take the characters. All 5 of the "Mew Mews" have distinct personalities. There's the relatable main character, the spoiled and sassy rich girl, the shy girl who ... is very kind, the hyperactive and very immature girl and the older cool and smart girl. Now, it's great that the characters all feel very different from each other. The issue is that all of them are very one-dimensional, and there is no chemistry between them. They simply do not feel like a believable group of friends and none of them have any development after they join the team. Also, the story of this series is mostly about the main character and her love interest. The other Mew Mews don't really influence the main story, so it feels more like they were there just to sell merchandise.

Magical girl series usually revolve around both the main character's day-to-day life and then their life as a magical girl fighting evil. For a magical girl series to be successful, both have to be interesting,so it's interesting to see how their day-to-day life affects being a magical girl and vice versa. Now Tokyo Mew Mew doesn't make either that interesting. The fights are very predictable and boring and the only way that being a magical girl affects the main character's day-to-day life is that she has to hide it from her love interest, but even that doesn't really matter since the love interest loves her so much that her weird behavior doesn't affect their relationship in any negative way.

The only thing that I consistently liked about this series was the artwork. The character designs are cute and there are some absolutely beautiful pages. Even then, there were some issues with the paneling that severely affected my enjoyment of the series. Sometimes the pages felt extremely cluttered with way too many panels. There were even a few times that I had to re-read certain parts just to understand what was going on.