Oct 26, 2021
tl;dr: A series of solid supplemental slice of life side stories that tries to be something more but really shouldn’t have.
I am going to start off by immediately stating that this absolutely isn’t where you should start with Shinmai Maou. It’s best to have watched the entire anime before reading this though having read the other manga adaptation will also suffice. As such, this review will essentially assume you have done at least one of those and will lightly spoil them. If you have not done either of them, don’t read this review or this manga and go do one of them instead. I will
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also be making some minor comparisons to the other manga, which I suggest you read before reading this manga even if you have already seen the anime, though it’s not as strictly required.
This is essentially a supplement to Shinmai Maou that’s slice of life focused. It basically takes the slice of life portions that existed between the plot focused segments and makes an entire 5 volume manga with just them. It features mainly Basara, Mio, Maria, and Yuki, but also has a decent amount of Chisato, Zest, and Kurumi. This will be heavily dependent on how much you already like the cast of characters from other Shinmai Maou media, but I thought that these slice of life segments are just as solid as they are in the main story, being a solid blend of comedy, ecchi, and some light character and relationship development. It was a good amount of new content with new scenarios but felt like it portrayed the same tried and true cast pretty well. And thus, they were decently enjoyable in and of themselves and I think would mostly make a solid addition to the main story as side stories.
The biggest issue with this is that this isn’t really just a supplement though. It’s an alternative plot line that’s supposed to exist on its own with only the lighter portions. So, you may be wondering how exactly that’s supposed to work considering this is just slice of life while the main series also has a lot of action and drama. To put it simply, it really doesn’t. Even though none of the serious plot events from the main series happen, it still essentially forces through the situations that they lead to. The beginning basically just skims over why Basara accepted living with Mio and Maria and starts with them after they’d already made the master-servant pact, which is perfectly fine as at this point it’s just supplementing the main story, but after that it basically comes up with forced reasons for all the other changes to their living situation to occur. There’s never a battle against the heroes trying to exterminate Mio or any of the developments that come about as a result, but Yuki and Kurumi start living with them anyway. Zolgia never kidnaps Mio so there’s not much of a conflict against Zest either, but she too begins living with them under the same circumstances as if there was.
In order to accomplish this while remaining slice of life, at times it uses pretty bad writing that feels incredibly forced with many of the characters behaving in ways that feel incredibly inconsistent with their character. The actual side stories independent of the plot are great and that’s what most of the manga is composed of, so if it was properly a series of supplemental side stories that just threw in quick summaries of the serious plot portions whenever it added characters that were added in the main series as a result of those plot portions, I think that would have been far more preferable. Instead, this does have an actual alternate plot and this alternate plot is not good which I think detracts from how enjoyable the manga is because though it does feature the same characters, it doesn’t really feel part of the same story as it would if it was just side story additions. It’s also kind of ridiculous how the only major part of the story that was original in the other manga, the ending, did what this manga was trying to do better than any part of this did, other than maybe some Chisato portions, as that was a major missed opportunity and the ending of this falls flat in comparison.
The art is solid enough. The artist isn’t very good at drawing action, but there’s essentially none of that so that isn’t much of an issue. They are solid at drawing the slice of life portions, even better than the artist of the other manga I’d say, though a good portion of that comes down to the artist on this manga having much more freedom. And of course of the character designs are great as always. I will note though that unlike the other manga which had a lot of good color art that was a solid improvement over the art in the rest of the manga, the only color art in this manga is the covers which are at about the same level as the art in the rest of the manga, just in color, so that was kind of disappointing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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