Reviews

There's a website you can access at midnight. It's a connection to the underworld. In there, one will find but a single prompt where you can write down someone's name to be quickly dragged to hell. The entity in charge of actually taking the person there is Enma Ai, a high school girl in beautiful kimono sets. That's the premise. Each story we follow a different revenge plot where a person is bullied or have something terrible done to her and that drives him or her to ask for hell girl's assistance.

Hell Girl has a very odd thing about it. The supposedly main character is actually just a minor character that receives no development whatsoever until the very end. On the entire run of this manga, Enma is featured as the main character in maybe 2 or 3 stories. All the other ones she just appears briefly to do the same thing over and over again; drag people into hell. This is rather frustrating given she's the only character connecting all this stories together and someone reading Hell Girl will probably want to know more about Hell Girl. We get some development and resolution for her but it's just not enough in my opinion.

Then there's the problem with many of the stories themselves. They can get very, very formulaic. Student is bullied, contacts Hell Girl, bully is sent to hell. Perhaps that's half the stories here. A few here and there really stands out as being interesting but you really have to be the patient type to reach them all. Hell Girl's friends also get pretty much no exposition even though they should be really important as well.

I'm glad I read it but I feel I won't be revisiting this title anytime soon nor did it inspire me to pick up the other ones that came after it. The art has its own thing going and might not be to everyone but it certainly has a particular charm to it. I just wish Hell Girl was more about Hell Girl.