“So how did you guys meet?”
Fred’s cold dead eyes light up instantly and his mouth carves into a big smile as he begins to recount the story . Every so often Lucy weighs in and they look into each other’s eyes and playfully argue over the details while you stand there wondering what you did in a past life to deserve this torture. You nod every so often, smile and laugh on cue, but it become clear that their story is boring and uninteresting; the twists were predictable, the story was generic and what could have been a 5-minute story turned in 45 minutes.
This is exactly what Kanpeki na Kanojo was like. Realism does not mean a story is interesting. When I sat down to write a review on this manga, I was going to have a go at the fact that the characters are so childish and simple but that’s actually because they are middle school students; they are childish because they are children which is fine. Unfortunately, the story’s premise is about a perfect student and perfection to a middle school student, told from the perspective of the same middle school student sounds more like delusion than fact. I hated the characters: a delusional perfectionist, a generic ken whose best quality is he is ‘kind’ and an assortment of characters that feel like the author had a checklist for character tropes he would use. What’s worse is the story was almost entirely fluff. like the author wrote the beginning, a middle scene and the end then cut them up and stitched in a bunch of side stories to complete the finish product.
If you are thinking of reading this, I recommend you don’t unless you want to give yourself a point of reference on how manga shouldn’t be done; the character’s thoughts and feelings change with the wind, the story is about as deep as a kitchen sink and it is wholly not worth the time you spend reading all 36 chapter of 36 pages. 4/10
