To Love-Ru is at it’s core an incredibly simple manga. There’s some veneer of there being some sort of romantic plot involving the protagonist Rito being in love with his classmate Haruna but an interstellar princess named Lala suddenly appearing in his life and falling in love with him. However, the romance just kind of sort of there in the background and doesn’t matter most of the time. The setting involving space is somewhat important because although the story takes place in contemporary Japan, there’s still a lot of futuristic and really bizarre technology ass well as a myriad of crazy lifeforms. Still, that’s the only source of the supernatural aspects as the manga is fine with veering into other areas like ghosts and such at times, so it’s not like the setting matters all that much either. Thus, ultimately the manga is simply about Rito getting into various ecchi hijinks with the myriad of girls that surround him.
The girls that surround him have a pretty decent amount of variety and overall I found them pretty likable. Reading the character profiles, it’s clear that the author put in a lot of effort trying to make each girl stand out and not seem to similar to any other, and it very much does show. However, the effort seems to extend to as far as their personality and role in the web of relationships of the cast. In terms of background, story, character arc, and relationship arc, essentially every character is the same in that there’s not much there at all. Some characters have a minor amount of background and story, but it’s mostly confined to their introduction with very little expansion beyond that and thus not enough to feel like actual plot threads. Character’s become closer after spending time together and there are hints of characters acting differently from how they usually did at times, but it isn’t really focused on and doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere.
These issues largely stem from the way the manga flows in that nothing about the manga is long term. Essentially every chapter is a full short story. Each story may take elements from previous chapters, but it gives less a feeling of there being any sort of long term plan. Rather, it feels more like it’s just taking toys it’s put in the toybox out to play with them for a bit. And it just playing around can certainly be fun, a lot of fun even. How much you’ll enjoy it will depend on how fond you are of the heroines and how much you like the continuous stream of lucky pervert type gags. And although the execution of both of these aspects is as solid as it can get with really high quality art to boot, it still starts feeling pretty repetitive eventually. This feels like a manga that works really well in short doses, such as in the weekly format it was originally published in, but reading through it volume by volume it definitely feels like it’s dragging on and getting kind of dull. This is even true for the ending which doesn’t really seem to stand out from the rest of the manga at all and is ultimately a complete non-ending. Though there’s a direct sequel so that’s not that much of an issue.
