I have heard this statement being thrown around very often:
"People see what they want to", I had come to realize this long ago but this manga reaffirmed this.
When I read the synopsis before going into the manga I expected a Hajime No Ippo or Ashita No Joe like manga but what I got was very different. You see I'm really into underdog stories which I guess are found a lot in sports manga/anime so what I'm saying is I've seen a lot of sports anime and read a lot of sports manga (Though I haven't yet added them all to my MAL list yet). When I went into this I hoped that the protagonist would come through all the odds and succeed somehow, that he would beat Aoyama, that he would finally get laid, that he wouldn't run away, that he would change but NO, I didn't get any of that. Each time his life got better; it just got worse (Usually because he did something stupid). At this point I'd probably been through 70 odd chapters (I was reading it in one go you see) so I started wondering why I was reading this?
It wasn't what I'd come for, then I realized (Not that it hadn't occurred to me earlier). This story was real. The Characters were real. This was life. There were no miracles. Our protagonist had to work and he still failed, Not once, not twice but almost every time. He tried, he ran and he shit himself. Despite this every time our protagonist was in a dire situation I did not lose hope. For some reason I felt that he would make it despite all the pages that I'd read before in the manga. I'm not sure if this is just me or this is the manga.
What I'm saying is that I was able to connect to the manga.
If you are a person who is looking for the usual type of manga you won't find it here. If your looking for something different I would suggest this.
P.S:
I didn't go into technical details about the art and story in the review because of 2 reasons:
Primarily because that wasn't the point of the review and second because I'm not very qualified to talk about that.
But just to mention the art is alright though it can be epic at certain points and story really does not have a lot in terms of actual development but it kept me guessing at places. Go ahead and give it a shot.
