Yumekuri is a manga that’s somewhat different from the first impression it gives. The basic premise is that the protagonist, Yukami falls in love with the goddess of a hot spring, Shirahane, and ends up working at that hot spring alongside a bunch of other girls. Based on that, my expectations would be a romance focused manga with some light supernatural elements and a harem subtext. However, the vast majority of this manga is actually just cute girls doing cute things (CGDCT) with a romance plot thread on the side.
It starts off with some focus on romance and in the end it focuses on romance once again, but in the middle while the romantic thread persists to a degree very little time is spent on it. Thus while it does have its cute romantic fluff moments and the heroine is pretty adorable, the romance overall really doesn’t feel developed enough. This is especially true for the ending, wherein in terms of romance it has some really strong points, but it simply doesn’t feel like its showing enough and things just happen too quickly without really spending enough time on them and thus it doesn’t properly feel like things have been properly resolved, which is a bit unsatisfying.
Instead of focusing on the core couple, the manga spends a considerable amount of time focusing on the rest of the cast, which is composed pretty much entirely of girls. However, it’s important to note that this really doesn’t feel harem like at all, as it mostly focuses on the girls themselves and very little on their relationship with the protagonist. The protagonist often has very little involvement in their stories and the focus is very heavily on the girls themselves and their bonds with each other. And thus, the manga is mostly just slice of life where girls deal with various lighthearted events and become better friends along the way without anything too heavy or any real plot arcs or major character arcs occurring, which is pretty standard CGDCT. The manga isn’t particularly exceptional in this aspect either, but it has enough heartwarming, amusing, and cute moments that it feels that it does what it needs to and thus manages to be solid enough at this.
As an additional note, how the manga handles supernatural elements felt kind of weird, in that they’re in this middle area where they felt prominent enough that it was strange that they weren’t more prominent. I was also somewhat disappointed in how at times it felt like the manga was going to go in the direction of having more in depth in providing information on hot springs and how they’re run but it never really committed to it. Lastly, the art has a really nice style that fits the manga really well and is overall pretty high quality, especially the color pages.
