Psycome

Accused of a crime he didn't commit, Kyousuke Kamiya is sent to Purgatorium Rehabilitation Academy. Suddenly, he's surrounded by a variety of fetching lasses—each one a murderer! Worse, he's famous for being the "Dozen Demon," a killer responsible for twelve deaths! When the busty, gas mask-wearing beauty Renko Hikawa approaches him, the difference between death and desire becomes very narrow indeed. How is Kyousuke gonna graduate alive?

(Source: Yen Press)

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Background

Psycome was published in English by Yen Press under the Yen On imprint from June 21, 2016 to February 27, 2018.

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Psycome: Unplagued Omnibus

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Characters

Hikawa, Renko

Main

Akabane, Eiri

Main

Kamiya, Kyousuke

Main

Igarashi, Maina

Main

Shamaya, Saki

Supporting

Akabane, Kagura

Supporting

Akabane, Fuyou

Supporting

Akabane, Ryou

Supporting

Saotome, Shinji

Supporting

Hikawa, Renji

Supporting

Reviews

Jan 30, 2023

Equalator

Recommended

Let's get one thing out of the way.

Do you enjoy a psychotic demonic loli beating a high school kid to a bloody mess of hamburger with the intention of burning fear into the hearts of his classmates?
Do you enjoy the image of a boy running for his life from a bunch of psychotic murders and cannibals that want his heart - literally?
Does your classic dandere become much more interesting when she is the equivalent of a walking natural disaster of accidental mayhem and death?
Are you not put off by graphic descriptions of mass murder, torture, cannibalism, rape and necrophilia?

If your answer to any ...

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Jul 13, 2019

hexashadow13

Recommended

tl;dr: A series with a really unique and darkly comedic premise that has some core tonal and thematic issues but ultimately manages to resolve them in an incredibly interesting fashion.

Note: Spoilers that aren't related to specific plot events but related to themes and how a character grows are included in this review.

This is a really interesting novel series in that it’s a mish mash of a lot of things that kind of don’t work but also work pretty well. For the most part, it feels a lot like a high school slice of life novel series where the focus is on character relationships and development, ... even with the extreme violence and craziness throughout. For the most part, there’s not much of an overarching plot, but rather smaller plots per novel that focus on introducing new characters or further developing old ones in regards to their effect on the overarching narrative. These plots are pretty interesting, in that the twist on the slice of life aspect makes it quite unique and allows for a lot of interesting elements, such as a good amount of suspense and crazy twists, as well as the large amount of action. I should note though, that the action was somewhat disappointing a lot of the time, due to the MC not being all that great in terms of this. The series is tagged as “protagonist strong from the start” but that’s not entirely true. His ‘strength’ comes mostly in the form of heavy endurance which allows him to survive taking heavy punishment, but in terms of actual combat ability compared to the other major characters he’s pretty low. That results in him being able to easily take on dozens of small fry, but when he’s put up against the major players, he’s actually pretty weak, and in such situations he doesn’t usually do much, and strength wise he never grows, which was kind of disappointing. He and the other characters do go through a lot of character growth though, and ultimately the character development overall felt really solid. Ayaka comes to have a better view of other people. Maina gains confidence in herself and a will to continue moving forward. Eiri becomes more honest with herself. Renko becomes more human and in tune with her emotions. But most importantly is of course the protagonist Kyousuke. His development is interesting and I quite liked it, though I can see why it may miff some people because I can see why it would be controversial and in the end it’s tied pretty heavily into the whole narrative and is a running theme throughout. When he starts out, he is incredibly wary of the other students, seeing as they're murderers and all. He begins to make friends with murders that aren’t really murderers and begins to settle in. The tone throughout the first five books is pretty lighthearted, wherein even though the style is pretty dark, in terms of tone and atmosphere it doesn’t feel oppressive at all and though lots of terrible things are described as having been done by characters outside the narrative, nothing truly bad happens during the narrative itself. Hence, while most all the characters are killers there’s nothing to truly make them seem like bad people. As a result, over the course of these books he begins to make friends with the true murderers, the cannibal, the serial killer, the necrophiliac, etc. That they’re killers just gets pushed aside. However, ultimately it very much is brought to the forefront, and Kyousuke has to question himself, as a normal person is it really okay for him to have friendly relations with murderers? And in the end he decides, yes, it is fine even if he doesn’t understand their desire to kill, nor does he want to, for him to respect, be friends with, like, or love them anyway, which is a tremendous shift in world view from how he started in the first book that was slowly built up until it finally clicked near the end. This shift is of course incredibly important to the main relationship in the book, the love triangle between Kyousuke, Renko, and Eiri, wherein though other characters also seem to be in love with Kyousuke they don’t seem as prominent. This relationship is what serves as the core of the ending, and probably what everyone reading up to that point truly cared about. To some degree, the ending was disappointing in that it was an open ending, but at the same time, it did everything really well, and though it was open, it wrote around that incredibly well, so ultimately I was very satisfied with the ending, and look back on the series overall quite fondly.

The art for the illustrations was really good, and I also liked the interesting character designs. I can’t judge the original writing style, but the translation by Yen Press wasn’t very good. It had a pretty stiff writing style, and a number of obvious mistakes regarding sentence subjects, and probably others that I couldn’t tell.

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May 8, 2014

MarlyTT

Not Recommended

Preliminary (9/46 eps)

Psycome is a comedy about psychos. I'm using the term "comedy" and "psychos" incredibly loosely, but I guess this is supposed to classify as both. Technically speaking, it's literally all it is and there is absolutely nothing more to it than that. And by comedy, I meant the wacky silly overdone harem hijinx that continuously repeat like a broken record. And by psychos, I meant kids who identify themselves as one while tipping their fedoras and maybe pretending Kool-Aid is blood to impress their friends on Facebook.

Here's the premise: This kid named Kyousuke gets into trouble with some thugs, beats them up, goes home, and ... gets arrested because those kids ended up being killed by someone else. So on false charges, he's sent to this school on an island that supposedly serves to rehabilitate these terrible murderers. But to not get those silly parents involved, they are taken out of the picture in a form of the MC living alone with his sister. Typical LN formula.

In his class, he encounters three relevant characters- One being his teacher. She's basically this violent little kid that likes swinging around her metal pipe while speaking vulgarly nearly all the time. Oh, joy. The other two are his classmates- Maina and Eiri. Maina is this clumsy girl who apparently kills people unintentionally all the time. Wow, that's really wacky and funny. Furthermore, her personality and dialogue solely involve her saying "I'm sorry/I shouldn't have been born" nearly all the time and just completely caters to the type of people that eat up moeshit. Eiri is this supposedly skilled assassin who apparently killed six people, and that's really all there is to her. Three volumes in, and her personality is completely flat. Just like Maina, it usually involves her saying "Go die" or something along the line. Are you entertained yet?

Look, if you're going to introduce two relevant side characters, at least make their personality fairly normal so that there is an actual interaction between the MC and those characters. One being a flat character and the other being an overly apologetic moeblob isn't going to do anything. How does this even qualify as comedy? The farthest development Kyousuke goes with these two is him saying that he'll protect them or something. Flawless. But he's not the only one that's painfully generic- Every other side character is a walking trope. Kyousuke's sister is a completely generic yandere that plays the trope down to the tee, for example- Whereas Saki is that crazy noblewoman type of character.

The one and only decent character is Renko, and that's about the only positive thing about the series. While she's not exactly well-written, she at least fits with the theme of the story. She has a wacky personality and does a good job in giving off that strange vibe which is reflected by her character design. So yes, she's the only good (relatively speaking) character in this series because she's the only character that feels remotely psychotic without being a trope copypasta cardboard. Unfortunately, a single character cannot carry a series, and because of how utterly awful the MC is, the entire thing just gets dragged down.

Kyousuke's relevance in this series is excused by his false charge- Since he is labeled as a killer who murdered twelve people at the same time and that's apparently a very impressive record at the school, he is instantly given the 'popular' badge without him doing anything relevant. And at that point, it really does feel like a forced characterization because it's not about him interacting with other characters, but other characters just magnetizing towards him. All he ever really does is resolving a conflict by being fairly sensible and nice, and that's his entire character. The most generic of generic harem protagonists- There is not a speck of personality to be found. If there is one, it would be him being a complete puss- He actually legitimately cries and gets depressed when his little sister refuses to cook for him because they got in a small fight. The most significant thing he does in the first three volumes involve him calming down Renko all the time whenever she goes berserk. Incredibly interesting. And despite his complete lack of character, every female character is magnetized towards him- Renko, Maina, Eiri, Saki, Bob. I don't think there's enough wish fulfillment in this series yet.

As for the tone of this series- As I claimed earlier, this series is absolutely not "dark" or "grim" in any shape or form. Despite it being about a school full of murderers/assassins, there is very little to no murder/killing. In fact, what these characters like doing the best is talking about murdering/killing than actually doing it. You know, like those edgy middle school kids you see all the time on the internet. Because of that, the "threatening" tone of these supposedly terrifying characters is nowhere to be found because it doesn't feel real. In fact, it wouldn't be all that surprising if all these characters were sent to the school on false charges- Because that's what it feels like. And when there are actual murder attempts, they are usually just easily taken care of and are just glossed over like they were irrelevant. Clearly the series is not trying to be comedic in this department, so what is it doing, exactly? There is a huge difference between talking about doing something bad and actually doing something bad because the latter actually affects the characters in the long run, so why? What's the point?

Unfortunately, the problem doesn't end there. All the conflicts in this series have been so far, inconsequential (and mostly solved by Renko instead of Kyousuke), and the most significant character out of them all is Renko. Outside of Renko, there is little to no mystery or anything worth speculating over- That's how little plot this series has. You can argue this is a wacky comedy series, and that's fine- But if it's trying to present a plot, it's doing so at the pacing of an amputated snail. This is all the more offensive when Kyousuke just simply doesn't care about Renko's past and the school's shady intentions. He doesn't even care about the fact that he was enrolled on false charges that was likely caused by the school itself for his supposedly "impressive physical talents," which he barely makes any use of. Even the whole thing feels forced- It's like they couldn't come up with anything that made Kyousuke stand out, so all they could come up with was "eh he's strong I guess."

The school doesn't particularly care about him getting killed either because he has been under those threats, no matter how inconsequential they have turned out in the end, and later the shady people behind the school even regret having him enrolled in the school in the first place for interfering with Renko. Why not just kick him out, then? Oh right, they can't. He's the MC. All he cares about is graduating because he was promised to graduate normally as long as he doesn't commit any murder. This small possibility that he might commit a murder is also completely eliminated because there is very little to no murder outside of flashbacks and character backgrounds, so there is no speculation over that either. Completely boring.

Don't read this series expecting anything good- In the end, it's just yet another generic harem series with wacky unfunny overdone harem hijinx and unoriginal gags involving tit size. The supposed dark/gritty setting that this series promises is nowhere to be found, and is pretty much played for jokes nearly all the time outside of character TALKING about murdering people than actually doing it. And because of how mediocre this series is, it's guaranteed to get animated. I sure love this medium.

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Poll: Psycome Volume 3 Discussion Stark700 - May 13, 2014	24 replies	by Potimas »» Apr 16, 2021 10:50 AM
Poll: Psycome Volume 2 Discussion Stark700 - Feb 20, 2014	14 replies	by Potimas »» Apr 15, 2021 10:47 AM
Poll: Psycome Volume 1 Discussion Stark700 - Feb 9, 2014	13 replies	by Potimas »» Apr 13, 2021 5:14 PM
Poll: Psycome Volume 4 Discussion Stark700 - Dec 22, 2014	3 replies	by animejas »» Mar 12, 2021 4:14 PM
Side Stories DJBay - Aug 17, 2019	0 replies	by DJBay »» Aug 17, 2019 1:47 AM

Psycome
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