Reviews

Dec 17, 2024
Mixed Feelings
This manga is an ecchi harem rom-com that also has a good amount of action. For the first half or so of the manga it simply tells the story of the daily life of the protagonist, Kogarashi, as he deals with various hijinks centered around Yuragi-Sou, which is a hot spring inn that had been converted into a hostel for those of the supernatural persuasion. Kogarashi is a pretty fun character during this portion because although he’s a pretty generic good guy and lucky pervert, he’s also incredibly competent at pretty much everything due to having been possessed by ghosts that were experts at pretty much everything. He’s great at everything from baking cakes to taking out youkai. There is some action in the first half, but it’s mostly just centered on showing how overpowered Kogarashi is.

The heroines introduced are also pretty great and very likable with good starts to their character arcs. It’s also a nice touch that unlike the vast majority of manga with lucky perverts, after the first volume the heroines don’t blame or attack Kogarashi for all the crazy stuff that ends up happening. While for the most part the manga is a pretty straightforwardly focused on simple ecchi and harem tropes, there’s enough variety surrounding that to keep things pretty interesting. Still, that can only take things so far and things do start getting kind of dull eventually.

That’s probably why in volume 14 the manga starts changing quite a bit. It begins to take itself more seriously and has a much larger focus on drama and action. There’s still a good amount of the harem ecchi comedy stuff that serves as the core of the manga. But intermixed with that there’s a real plot with real stakes. Unfortunately, the serious side of the manga isn’t very good. There are large scale plot threads with intrigue, mystery, suspense, and big twists, but they feel pretty rushed. It moves through major plot points way too quickly without fleshing anything out properly. The world building in this manga is really weak, which wasn’t an issue when it was just harem ecchi comedy, but it becomes more of an issue once the overarching plot becomes important.

The action is also too messy. How supernatural abilities work is played too fast and loose for most of the manga, so in the moments where it actually takes them seriously and tries to properly structure things, it just felt inconsistent. For example, the numerical power levels are completely absurd and make no sense. There are a few great fights, but they don’t fit into the manga all that well holistically. The serious parts of the manga are pretty good in terms of helping with the pacing of the manga and in terms of preventing it from getting repetitive, but don’t really elevate the manga all that much on their own. And thus the parts that emphasized the serious plot lines over the harem rom-com hijinks felt like it was putting the cart before the horse.

The cast was also a mixed bag. The writing does a great job with all of the main heroines with most having good character arcs. However, Kogarashi felt mishandled. It doesn’t really flesh him out at all until volume 18 and even then, it doesn’t really feel it does all that good of a job with his character arc. And while the writing does a good job on the heroines’ side of relationship development, Kogarashi’s side is very underdeveloped. While he’s great as a simple harem protagonist, during the latter portions of the manga to the change in tone and atmosphere it felt like he should be more than just that, so his lack of development is pretty disappointing. The side characters could also have been handled better. Most of the important ones weren’t really focused on enough to have any substance, but were focused on enough that the amount of focus they got in the absence of anything substantial felt like a waste of time.

I also can’t say I’m fond of the ending and epilogue at all. It’s somewhat hard to describe this in such a way that there aren’t spoilers, so my apologies for this being kind of weirdly written. Near the ending of the manga, there’s some convoluted plot events that result in basically going through an omnibus of different endings with one for each heroine. However, after everything has been resolved it picks one of those heroines as the true heroine that Kogarashi ends up with. I feel like I would have been okay with either one of those things, but both together don’t work.

While my favorite heroine wasn’t picked, I honestly wasn’t expecting her to be, and I was okay with who was picked as she seemed the most obvious choice. However, the endings for all the other heroines were pretty decently written, and the main ending felt like it was undermining them and any emotional impact you felt from them, which was pretty unpleasant. After showing the possibility of endings for all of the heroines, I feel that this became one of the rare manga that would have been better with an ambiguous ending. The epilogue was also really weak. It was essentially an image and a paragraph of text describing what they were doing for each member of the cast. This resulted in spending more time than necessary on most of the characters, but not enough on the most important.

The art in this is excellent in terms of style and quality. The art for ecchi is great from the beginning. The art for action starts out a bit weak but it also becomes great by the end. The character designs were great too with a lot of fun outfits as well. Translation wise there was some really weird word choice at points, though I can’t say for sure whether it’s due to the translation or the original text. There were also some minor mistakes, such as the wrong description being in the text box for Hiyori in the character introductions at the beginning of volume 24. Also, for some reason volume 15 says “Older Teen 15+” on the back in yellow, despite all the other volumes saying “Older Teen” or “Older Teen 17+” in orange. I don’t see anything different about the contents of volume 15, so I suppose it was a mistake. But I suppose now I’m just being nit picky.

tl;dr: A harem ecchi rom-com manga that intermixes its light hearted and serious parts pretty well, but the serious parts are pretty weak and the ending is really messy.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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