Strategic Lovers

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This show is, for what it is, very good. The mystery concept isn't super bad but you will be disappointed if you expect them to have particularly varying motivations. Girls in this series are motivated by love, desire to live happily using higayashima's wealth, or both, pretty much exclusively. Usually it starts as the second and then turns into love.

What this show presents it as and what it seems to be are very different. It presents itself as an ecchi drama/mystery harem where each girl has secret motivations such that if the MC picks the wrong girl, he will lose. There's also a lot ... of chess references that make it clear the author doesn't actually know how to play chess(at least they tone down the chess references later on).

What the series is ACTUALLY about is just our main character conquering women by leveraging his status and his existing solidified harem. Towards that end, he slowly builds a harem of loyal girls and devours the disloyal ones, while overcoming his lack of self confidence. If you interpret it as a story based on this, it actually does a really good job at it. If you stopped reading around chapter 15, you would certainly think that this is just a series doing a really bad job. But actually, the characters are consistent within the narrative, the themes and motifs are very consistent, and there does appear to be a developed lore.

Ordinarily, this would receive a 10/10, but a major issue I have with the story is the pacing. Reorganizing a lot of the exposition of the story and slowing down a bit would make the story a lot more enjoyable. The development of his relationship with the girls doesn't make much thematic sense in the beginning, and feels disorganized and chaotic. There's a lot of exposition which *does* become relevant later, but feels like it should've appeared later on. The character relationships, as in whose parent is whose should have been shown as a growing diagram so that we as the audience could understand better who is related to who. The student council arc should've been longer and been given more buildup. It feels like the results of that event didn't really result in much, as I can't even remember that girl's name. It feels like another girl was forgotten about by the author for like 15 chapters almost immediately after she was introduced.

These various writing errors did make the enjoyment worse, but only to the degree of an 9/10, but objectively I would have to rate this a 7/10 as the art and "scenes" carried a lot of the enjoyment of this series.

The manga presents itself like every character has secret motivations and are scheming to get what they want. However by chapter 3 it just falls flat and devolves into Orgy House: Otaku Edition. Our MC is a mastermind because he plays chess very well. I knew a kid throughout school who would shart his pants and then touch it and smell his hands afterwards, and his favorite game was chess. So your mileage may vary whether you can suspend disbelief. Although to be fair some of MC's facial expressions reminded me of Sharting Shane.
The girls are pretty cute though. I wouldn't mind giving them ... some of my rich conglomerate if you know what I mean.

3.1/10

“If Andrew Tate made a manga,” no truer words have been said to describe this dumpster fire. The purpose of harems are to make a reader choose a ship and sink with the ship. Instead, in this manga, the characters make me want to burn the whole port down so no ship will or should ever sail. The plot and characters are equally appalling.

The plot is so scattered, disordered, and chaotic that it’s hard to follow or connect any sort of reasoning to create a logical read. Besides for the harem and diluted doujin scenes, there’s not any memorability or impression in the manga. ... Oh, I can’t forget about the constant chess references that half of the time don’t make sense because it’s not applicable.

The characters are made so weird as they barely get any background, but if they do it’s hard to remember solely because THERE ARE FIVE OF THEM. A five person harem? It’s already hard enough to follow five separate characters, but to introduce them at the same time while giving them a panel of screen time to elaborate is pushing it. Realistically, there’s only two fml while the rest are going to get banished to the shadow realm.

The only saving grace of this manga is the artwork and even then it gets out of hand with the unnecessary ecchi scenes. I’m baffled on how this gets serialized and even translated as every event feels like a fever dream. Honestly, it’s not that bad of a read, but definitely not worth investing over.

PS: I don’t hate Andrew Tate

Reading Rankings (Portnoy inspired & A Huang Teizan Original)
10 – God’s penmanship
9 – Must-read. Drop everything else.
8 – Instant bookmark
7 – Entertaining
6 – Good to pass time
5 – Why are you reading this?
4 – Bad.
3 – Typical garbage.
2 – My head hurts.
1 – Retirement is a thought.
0 – “Did they even give you a story?!”