D.N.Angel

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This manga holds the record of making me hate one of its main characters the fastest. That is, within the first 7 pages of the very first chapters.

And it’s not just the characters, the whole premise doesn’t make much sense altogether. I was so disinterested that I would really prefer to just drop it and not waste my time, but then I couldn’t write this review, so let’s get to it. To answer the opening remark first – we’re introduced to heroine, one of the two main love interests in the series – she rejected the protagonist because he’s too average and wouldn’t help ... gain her social standing. She states that she would only go with someone really hot. The manga does not present this as a bad thing, but rather just brushes it of as normal. This is a manga mainly for young girls. Not exactly the greatest rolemodel. But that’s more of a pet peeve compared to rest of the complaints.

So the basic setting here is that the protagonist has another “personality” within him that comes out when the protagonist feels love. The protagonist has to hide this secret. Now you might see a problem here – the personality comes out when the dude thinks about his crush. Dude is 14. Do you know how horny teenagers are? The secret would be out in 2-3 days at most. And it doesn’t even make sense to tie the feeling of love to DNA instead of heart (or if you want to be more realistic, brain) and feels like this was done only to justify a pun in the series title. To add to the problems, the other personality turns out to be the famous phantom thief, one that has always been a part of the protagonist’s family, in a way. Just a moment goes by between the mother explains this to the protagonist and before telling him to go on his first heist. And our man just rolls with. I guess if your family tells you to go steal shit, you just do so? With no training of course, but magically it works out, because of course it does. One think I like about the setting though is the explanation for not running out of art pieces to steal, as the phantom thief’s rival is an artist making these pieces.

The major plot point, at least at the beginning, is that the two personalities each have a crush on a different girl. This setting could have made for an entertaining short romcom series. Unfortunately, this is neither romcom nor short. And we’re not even given any context as why do they love the love interests. They just do so because the plot will so, I assume.

The art is easily the worst part, often making it hard to understand what’s going on, resulting in quite unpleasant reading experience. This is not helped by the fact that the plot itself feels somehow chaotic, like the author herself isn’t sure where to go with it. To be fair, considering the 20 volumes took 24 years to release, yeah, I’d get lost in what was I supposed to do too. But to give credit when it’s due, the manga actually does improve after the second hiatus, the one that took 7 years. The most jarring difference is an art improvement, as the manga is now actually readable. Great progress. The story also seems like it now knows where it wants to go. This last part made me up my overall score by a point. Had the whole manga been like this, the score might have been even higher, alas the damage is already done and three quarters of this manga are bad.