Hakutaku

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The manga started strong, offered interesting characters and technical insight into the indie game-making process, it failed to maintain characterization (except for the main girl and the industry leader who resembles a boy), leading to characters who would be forgotten between chapters, and spent the bulk of its time on niche uninteresting concepts like VR-Games/ ARG games. At times it delivered on the premise (the neet girl who goes around, only doing what will benefit her in making games was interesting), but usually, there was too much text and too few interesting details, you could tell it was going to be axed 10 chapters before. ... I got the feeling that maybe the author didn't plan it enough before starting serialization, and was too stressed to think of anything once it begun. It's unfortunate, since the first few and last few chapters were pretty interesting. Best of luck to the author in his next work.

Welp, this manga became one of my first U19 manga. [If you didn't know what U19 means, it just means that this manga is canceled and barely scraped the 19th chapter.] Such a shame because I actually enjoy this manga and it's one of a kind. I wish this manga could be more than just... this because I'm not that satisfied with this ending. It's basically like they're about to begin their epic journey but then get cut short.
And what pissed me off the most is that this reminded me of one of my fav webtoons called "Brothers and Sisters". Like sh*t man, they also ... didn't finish it properly, they ended that series in the most bizarre cliffhanger ever, making me question why? Why would you make an interesting story but can't finish it properly?
Now I do understand why these events happen, especially since I have heard a lot of stories from these creators behind the scenes. {Popularity=more chapters} Hakutaku and "Brothers and Sisters" both didn't quite catch the larger audience therefore they had to force themselves to finish quickly and got canceled.

I'm not going to review this manga except for the illustration. I want to shout out to Noto because, my goodness, her design looks stunning. This is actually the main reason I read this manga in the first place. She captured my eyes immediately upon seeing her. Nothing can beat her looks. Other than her the other characters don't really capture my eyes. (Sorry Hikuma and Seo)
And also the background kind of looks blunt. It doesn't quite capture how good the environment surrounding them especially when they show the AR game.

Overall, I had mixed feelings. The story could definitely make this manga great despite its generic look and illustration, but it got canceled. Oh well.
5,7/10

Bonus: I actually have a request if anyone has read this manga. If you can, could you make all of the games that are featured in this manga? I would definitely play it and support it because they were absolutely interesting.

Hakutaku commits the cardinal sin of...just being an incredibly boring manga.

Hakutaku is about a team of incredibly young students making video games together. These students have varying levels of knowledge in making games to begin with, but somehow they manage to create games far beyond what they realistically should've been able to make with the time period and knowledge they were allotted in each circumstance. This is the first huge problem with Hakutaku: suspension of disbelief is extremely hard to pull off when your work is not entertaining. It's okay to do things that are unrealistic in a work, even in a more realistic setting, ... but if there is nothing to pull the reader in, then their suspension of disbelief is not going to kick in and the work's logistical problems are going to be in the center stage, and that's exactly what happens here. It does not help that the story has no real goal or aim to it, making the characters just kind of float around and make random games and further preventing the reader from making an emotional connection to the story.

The characters are generally one-note with a singular personality trait given to them if they're lucky. If they're not, they just kind of exist in panels to advance the story and do nothing else to make the reader care about them as characters. The main character is a pushover who seems to get weird, creepy positive feelings from people enjoying his games. The female lead is pushy and generally rude but somehow has way too many industry connections and knowledge despite just being an ordinary gamer who was kind of intense. From there everything else just doesn't matter, and once you've seen the main character and the female lead interact once, you know how all of their future interactions are going to play out, because neither of them develop as characters. I guess they're too busy developing games.

Despite being a manga about game dev, the manga frequently fails to go into detail about the actual necessities of game dev and to a degree seems to be actively avoiding going into any serious detail and instead just nudging things along to show the next bootleg of a popular game that the cast has made. Because of this, Hakutaku feels lazy and as though it isn't particularly invested into its own subject matter. The main character just kind of goes, "Oh, can we make this?" The other characters look at him like he's a genius, maybe a few other panels showing them poking the game, then oh it's done. Many things feel like they are given to the characters on a silver platter.

There are certainly comparisons to be made between this and Bakuman in terms of the kind of tone they were trying to aim for, but that would honestly be a disgrace to Bakuman. I would highly recommend just checking that manga out instead of this.