With all the anime hype going around, I figured I may as well check this out (I haven't watched the anime). I was quite disappointed.

Paripi Koumei (Ya Boy Kongming) manages to take a reasonably interesting premise and turn it into a bland by-the-numbers story. The character writing in particular stands out as dull and uninspiring - Kongming mainly just does some basic "all according to keikaku" stuff, Eiko is textbook waifu bait (and extraordinarily characterless for several volumes), and everyone else is pretty one-note. The story is decently plotted but nothing especially impressive - it tends to bounce around a bit awkwardly sometimes, but it's not a big issue. The artist is not bad but they clearly are not fast enough to handle a weekly serialization. The one thing the story is good at is in making a story that should be a total chore easy enough to read that I was willing to get 7 volumes in, so credit where due I suppose.

Overall a very mediocre 5/10 manga. If you like the premise, I'd say skip this one and just read Shiori Experience instead.

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It's rare that I say this, but the anime is much, much better than the manga. Everything that was good about the anime is just not present in the manga.

The production value of the anime is actually quite good. Little to no CGI, dance choreography, editing, and scene panes were quite good. Music was mediocre, but professional indeed. The manga just has the exact opposite features.

The anime's storyboarding is pretty boring, but beyond that is the character design and especially atrocious are the backgrounds. I think it should be noticeable to anyone paying attention, but 90% or more of the backgrounds in any of the panels are real life photos with a crappy filter slapped on it. It really frustrates me to be looking at poorly rendered real life photos that went through large amounts of filters against characters and objects that are clearly drawn in a pretty average or even below average manga style. If there isn't a real life photo being scanned in, then the background is then almost guaranteed to be extremely simple, or just be a white background. I've read doujinshi with more elaborate background design. In fact, anything at all would have been better background design since THERE IS NONE. (chapters 34 and 37 are good examples of this)

Characters, when the mangaka feels like it, can look pretty good. Their designs are fine, as was in the anime. However, the mangaka cuts corners. A lot. Facial expressions are basically a couple of lines if they can be, and maybe none at all if the mangaka is overly ambitious. The attention to detail is not there, and all of the drawings in any of the panels feel like a storyboard draft rather than a final product.

Do I even have to say that with sub-par artwork and production value, minus the music, lyrics, colored animations, and dance choreography in the anime, that this manga doesn't even stand a chance to it's anime adaption?

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