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For as massive of a multimedia franchise as Pokemon is, it's interesting how romance is both something that's often touched on but rarely ever taken seriously. There's a massive shipping culture in both the anime and game's fandoms, one of the main characters in the anime's biggest running jokes is hitting on every woman he comes across, there's even a pseudo love interest in Black and White 2. Despite this, there is no cannon partner for Ash, any pokemon protagonist and even most adults that aren't a parent, Lenora or Kukui.

Enter Pocket Mosters: Pipipi Adventure (Named after Pikachu, Pippi (Clefairy) and Purin (Jigglypuff), or ... Pokemon Magical Journey in the west, a shoujo manga that takes place in the Pokemon world, and one of three Pokemon manga that's targeted towards teenagers rather than children. Does it take its romance seriously? Well, Yes and no... somehow.

It centers around the daily life of a Hazel (Maron in Japan) and her constant vying for Almond's attention. Unfortunately for her, Almond is only interested in catching Pokemon (though he doesn't seem to be very good at it) and not much else. They run into and have misadventures with several Pokemon that can talk. Pokemon Magical Journey is more of a gag manga with Shoujo elements than a serious romance manga.

The art is very silly and cute and the whole thing has a very nonsensical vibe to it. It introduces more and more side characters as it goes on and often feels more interested in exploring the relationships between the side characters than it does the main ones. As cute as it is to see the blossoming love between a talking Arbok and a Wigglytuff, the chapters are really at their best when they're about Hazel but with so many side characters and chapters about said side characters she starts to feel a bit pushed out of the main focus.

The takes on the Pokemon as characters are quite fun though, there's an Articuno that runs a shaved ice shop, a ditto that's a ninja master and many more. As a light-hearted, cozy read, It's a pretty fun manga though it kinda falls into a trap a lot of shoujo anime/manga can run into of introducing a few too many side characters. If you like Pokemon and you're looking for something unique, fun and cute, give it a shot, it's worth a read for how off the wall it is.

Sadly on most manga websites I could find, I couldn't find a full translation and viz media only translated 8 of the 10 volumes. So I have no idea what the last two are like but I don't expect them to be too different.

If you're reading this review, you're probably wondering the question "This anime looks kinda cool, should I watch it?". The short answer is no. The long answer is NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. There's gonna be spoilers in this review but trust me, you don't wanna watch this anime anyways.

I should probably start with the presentation since that's the easiest to talk about. The best word to describe it would be mediocre. It has that weird early 2000's art style where it just doesn't quite look right. Of course every character that isn't an adult has the exact same face and the characters all look generic as hell. The ... music isn't bad, but other than Lithium it doesn't have any real memorable tracks, not to mention Lithium is played in just about every important scene. The animation also isn't anything to write home about, there's a lot of places where there could have been a really cool fight scene or a really cool gory scene that they would just skip over, like Bondo's final confrontation with Lucy, or the second fight between Lucy and Nana, or in the infamous dog scene where they skip over Lucy killing all the kids that beat her dog to death. I suppose there are a few scenes where there's some decent animation with the blood splattering everywhere, the best one in my opinion is the scene where Lucy kills Kouta's sister and father, the suddenness and the brutality is really amplified by the animation and that's probably the only good thing I'll say about this show in this review.

Next let's talk about where this show really falls apart; the writing. I wont go into too much detail about the plot since you can read that above. But tldr, there's mutants with with 4 invisible arms named after the best character in Sonic, and they're all trying to find the computer room. And when I say computer room, what I mean is your heart, so they can kill you. The queen, the only one that can reproduce has escaped and ended up in a small town and with a split personality where she's mentally disabled. She gets taken in by a really bland anime protagonist with no personality and his cousin who wants to fuck him. The whole show revolves around her switching between her original serial killer self and her mentally disabled self, known as Lucy and Nyu respectively. Early on, she seemed to switch after being hit in the head, but later on it became super inconsistent to the point where she sorta just switched whenever the writers felt like she needed to switch. As the plot goes on, they add more characters that also have no personality, but instead they have tragic backstories to try to make them interesting. If you couldn't already tell, this plot is total dogshit, so they try using child nudity and gore to substitute good writing.

Tldr, the characters are all boring as hell and the plot doesn't have any consistency so they just use gore and child nudity for shock value

Elfen Lied just isn't enjoyable to watch, it's not even the so bad it's good kind of fun. I can't even jerk off to the nudity cause it's mostly children and I'm not a pedophile. If you want an edgy gorefest that you can laugh at for being complete trash go watch deadman's wonderland, and if you want a porno with action go watch high school dxd.