Good Morning Call

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Cute and funny, Good Morning Call is a manga I'd recommend to any shoujo fan that is looking for a upbeat and lighthearted story to enjoy some time and laugh a little.

GMC is the story of Nao Yoshikawa, a 15 year old girl who stays behind in the city when her parents move to the countryside. Excited at the prospect of living alone for the first time, she soon encounters a problem: the apartment where she's going to live has also been rented to a boy, Hisashi Uehara who (of course) is one of the most popular guys at her school.

Unable to decide who should ... keep the apartment (and also faced with a raise in the rental fee), these two decide to become roomates, even though they have nothing in common and didn't even know each other until then. You can probably guess what happens next.

I really like the way this mangaka draws her characters, especially when they make silly expressions. The heroine in this is quite silly, but likeable, and her relationship with Uehara provides some really funny situations, most of them thanks to the fact that he is probably one of the least romantic and cheesy shoujo heroes ever.

The low point is probably the extension. Most readers might be put off by the lack of real plot in the second half of the series. Some volumes are actually full of fillers that, while funny, don't really bring that much to the story.

Wow... I'm not sure I've ever read such a mediocre manga before. =( I kept reading, thinking "OK any moment now, the girl is going to mature and stop being so dumb" or... "OK any moment now, the guy is going to transform and become warmer to her" but then before I knew it, I had hit volume 11 and that was it. There was NO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT at all. AT ALL. Except for the fact that they liked each other, which seemed to be completely based off of teenage hormones and the fact that they lived together. There was never a moment of "Oh, ... she's actually not so bad because ______" or anything for Uehara.

Even the adults in this manga are total kids, like Yuri? "I wanna have an affair"??? Are you 10?

If you're looking for romance, don't bother with this one, it's more about school and slice of life than romance, I felt. There was hardly any development between the characters... I think that side couple, Mi(t)-chan and Marina was better off than the main couple.

So bottom line was: wow, I can't believe that was 11 volumes and I felt hardly anything happened. And Uehara should wipe that frown off his face, he's handsome except that frown just got really annoying.

They also never really had major problems, her parents never visited or anything, there was a lot more they could have done with this but they didn't. And the problems resolved themselves by the culprit COMING to them and confessing, I mean, wow, way to be undramatic there...

There was never any kira-kira, beautiful moments where it was like WOW, he really put himself out there for him, the whole manga was very mediocre and anti-climatic. The ending was very cliche as well, but whatever, happy happy joy joy.

I think the target audience for this manga is like... young teens probably, under age 15. I guess I'm a bit jaded and beyond that age, so I did not enjoy it at all. It was humorous at least, I'll give you that... and thus, I end on a positive note. ^^

Good morning call is a mediocre manga, one you'll feel like you've read before. I doesn't do anything new, and it will be very forgettable. The story isn't just slow to develop, it never really does. There isn't really a central story being told outside of the "love story" between the two mains. Despite the series being 11 volumes, nothing really happens. Once you start getting towards the end, you'll start having deja vu over and over again, as the author begins to recycle the few things going on outside of the lead characters' apartment. The ending is also very unsatisfying, it's left completely open ... ended. While it does kinda have a "feel good" ending, it was disappoint to see the author not take advantage of the one piece of plot she was being to write in the last few pages. If you want a manga that had anything near a conclusive ending, this isn't for you.
The art is one of the higher points in the manga. It switches between a more realistic art style and a more comical one. I personally did not like the comical one as much, and I wish the author would have used the realistic one more, but I do have to say that it was well done from a technical standpoint.
The characters develop exactly the same as the plot, in that they don't. How characters are in the beginning is more or less the same as they are on the last page. They seem to have a few epiphanies here and there, but it never actually goes anywhere. They keep doing the same mistakes, and continue to live their quite static lives. The author also introduced two new comic relief characters towards the end. It's rather strange, as they don't start off as comic relief, it just sort of happens in the following volumes. Eventually, they get an entire chapter devoted to them. It felt very out of place to give such importance to these characters towards the end of the manga, when I felt it should have been climaxing. Once they served their purpose to the plot, they should have been phased out instead of turned into relief characters. The one relief character from near the beginning is also one of the worst in the entire series. The same joke is made about the fact that he can't get a girlfriend is made in what seemed like a majority of chapters, sometimes in the same chapter multiple times. Towards them end I started skipping over sections which contained him, as I literally could not bear to hear the same joke anymore.
The manga can be funny at times, especially in the beginning when the jokes are still fresh. Even as I was starting to lose interest in the manga, the author did find a way to keep me going with a few well placed humorous sections. There was also a few moments where I believed a plot was going to form and advance that I really did find myself enjoying the manga. Despite the fact that I was forcing myself to finish the last two volumes, the author did add just enough enjoyment to the rest of the manga to keep me going, hoping that it would get better.
Overall, the manga is not bad, but it's not good. If you've got nothing better to do with your time and you really, really like the slice of life genre, then you could find worse. If you are looking for a manga where the romance is more center stage, one with something that could be considered a real plot, or one with deep, developed characters then this one is not for you.