May 24, 2023
Hinowa ga Crush is the spinoff/sequel to Akama ga Kill and Akame ga Kill Zero. The early sections of Hinowa ga Crush do make improvements over previous installments like better world building, slower pacing, and a better character work on certain characters. Throughout my time reading however I thought it was mostly mediocre, even during some of its best moments and by the end it just felt like a waste of time.
Problem is as time goes on, they introduced too many minor characters aside from the main group and the screentime and character work felt so spread thin between all of them to care
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about 1 singular character. The main group in particular got a lot of screentime early on, but as time went on, they felt like strangers who just met each other instead of the close friends there supposed to be and moving on too quickly after major losses. This manga also repeated a lot of the same writing mistakes of Akame ga Kill, but it felt more annoying and frustrating in Hinowa ga Crush because it's the 3rd instalment in the francize. Things like overreliance of shock factor over story and character development. Some characters even dying with unfinished character arcs just invalidated a lot of improvements made in the early sections of Hinowa ga Crush.
For this example, I am going into spoilers relating to the main character herself Hinowa. After losing a major battle Hinowas' reaction to losing a bunch of her friends, homeland and possibly the family of her remaining friends was "oh well time to move on", the reaction just felt so underplayed. It was a massive change in the world and almost immediately we are already setting a new goal and moving on. It felt too quick and underplayed for the massive shift, at least for the main groups' reaction. You could excuse this by saying it's a way to demonstrate how Hinowa is becoming more coldhearted and adjusting to the battlefield. But even that feels too rushed in the context of the story especially when she goes back to smiling a couple of chapters later.
Akame herself is in this manga and is one of the few saving graces. Despite Hinowa and her groups storyline getting better in latter chapters I found it boring in comparison to Akames' storyline. The idea of Akame, a child soldier trying to find happiness while at the same time only finding fulfillment on the battlefield is interesting, but again not enough time is dedicated to it or any of her remaining plotlines relating to the Akame ga kill and Akame ga Kill zero characters.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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