Shinryaku! Ika Musume

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Ika Musume is a fun comedy/slice of life revolving around of course, our one and only, squid girl.

I watched the anime a long time ago, and I finally picked up the manga. Let's just say it didn't take very long to finish. Despite being 419 chapters long, the series never got super stale or boring. It's true that some chapters are a lot better than others, and some of the characters do end up like they were wasted potential (like Cindy and the alien research team).

In a way, the episodic short chapters mean that each chapter is basically going to be a different story, ... but that also means that there isn't a lot of room to make a long story arc or anything like that. I think the series could have improved if there was longer story arcs here and there, or changes in setting that lasted more than a chapter or so.

It's still very fun to watch Ika Musume being drawn and shown in a lot of random situations and scenarios, and it's a pleasant read. The anime takes too much melodrama and sometimes the pacing is a but weird, but the manga is well paced and more light-hearted. A large variety of characters means more variance in the amount if situations that the story can handle, but I always felt like this manga played a bit too safe, and while nothing was particularly stale, there weren't a lot of "out of the box" chapters that would have been a nice change of pace.