Tokyo Crazy Paradise

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HOW I WAS INTRODUCED TO TOKYO CRAZY PARADISE:
"Tokyo Crazy Paradise" was one of my random finds. I don't very often read random manga, but in TCP's case, I'm glad I did.

STORY (8/10):
When you boil TCP's story down into a mere plot summary it sounds dull and overdone--girl falls for bad boy, leader of a mafia organization at that. However, doing this certainly doesn't do TCP justice. The story melds romance, drama, and action so well that TCP becomes an incredibly unique story of its own.

ART (7/10):
The art of TCP is by no means bad, but it is a little different. The ... art even seems to reflect the melding of genres--a little shounen action art flavor with the shoujo flavor. There are some areas of the manga that feel as if they have been drawn somewhat akwardly, but the majority is good.

CHARACTERS (7/10):
The characters in TCP are just short of amazing. The protagonist, Tsukasa, is quite simply one of the strongest female characters in shoujo manga. Even considering the gender-bender situation, one doesn't lose sight of her feminine side. As for Ryuugi, he is less lovingly characterized than Tsukasa, but a great character despite it. As the volumes continue, one finds that it's easier to like him more and more.

ENJOYMENT (8/10):
TCP is unique, funny, and interesting. It has romance, drama, a love triangle, and gender-bending. I highly recommend anyone to read it.

OVERALL (7.5/10)

- Spiffyish

NOTE ABOUT THIS REVIEW: Also, if you find this review unhelpful in anyway, send me a private message saying why (please) so that I can improve it for future readers! :D

Man, this is hard to write, because I love this kind of formula, and the action and the people and everything is pretty darn good. The whole girl getting dressed up in disguise and is gorgeous and super cool is one of my favorite tropes. Genderbender too? SO AMAZING. I love Tsukasa a lot, she's kind of dumb at times, but she has a nice heart and a strong will and she's great, so great.

As I read the manga, however, I just couldn't make myself like Ryuuji. Given that he's literally one of the most important parts of the manga, a love interest and everything, ... this made my reading of Tokyo Crazy Paradise hard going.

He's not a horrible person, but the way he treated Tsukasa at times was verging on sexual harassment, if not just that. He kind of bullied her a ton, which I don't really find amusing in love interests, and sure he got better, but I still couldn't find it within me to think, "Oh but look he's changed for her kya kya they're so cute/hot/adjective."

In the manga, it was always depicted in a "Oh Ryuuji and your silly shenanigans!!" way, but I found it kind of gross to get through. I didn't really want Tsukasa with anybody really, but if I had to choose, it would not be him, my sincere apologies to the 99.99% of the readership who ship it hard. It wasn't my cup of tea.

Also, while I'm ok with nudity, (if it's there, whatever man!), the constant input of "Tsukasa has breasts!, look at them, also they are huge, and she is fourteen and super hot and the way dudes look at her is totally expected, (and for love interests, complimentary). Like, I didn't need that at all. I wanted Tsukasa being awesome, kicking ass and being super pretty. I didn't want her shown as a sex thing since she was supposed to be my cool protagonist with flaws.

In general, this wasn't for me I think. Heavy mixed feelings, sorry. At times, I adore this, at times I hate it, so I have to give this a 5 overall.

I'll be honest right from the start: this review is biased. It focuses too much on only one aspect of the manga. That said, it is an aspect I consider very important and that could be even a deal breaker, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Yes, it is about the art. To say sucks would be an understatement. It's absolutely horrendous. It makes the manga practically unbearable. The illustrations are worse than bad fanarts posted by a 13 years old teen on a deviantart. The anatomy is worse than that of bad yaoi manga, and that's something. The characters are constantly offmodel with ... plenty of tiny heads, unnaturally huge shoulders and grasshopper legs. If you're into some tall characters than this might be for you, as the characters in the manga experience some serious growth. Not as a development, but as a literal growth. Through the series the main characters are more and more often portrayed as someone with legs three times the length of their torso. It goes to such extremes that random unnamed characters in background are considerable better drawn than the protagonists.

I'm a fan of stylized manga art like for example works of Yuuichi Yokoyama or Hayashi Seiichi. I can enjoy goofy illustration like ONE's Mob Psycho 100. But this, this isn't excusable by "an artstyle". This isn't goofing around. This is just plain bad art. It's that sort of illustrations that would make art professors shriek with terror when approached with it, like trying to hand the Bible to a demon. This manga took a look at the already low standard for shoujo manga and told to itself "boi I can sure do it even worse while still avoiding being axed". It's so awful I have to question whether there even were editors in the times this was made, as it looks like literally nobody except the author has seen the pages before they went to the print. The characters are often abominations and the final product looks like there was zero quality control involved.

Of course, this work also falls into the pitfall that usually ensnares shoujo manga - bad backgrounds. Or to be more specific, no backgrounds. This manga can go PAGES without having a properly drawn background for a single panel. This combined with the already horrid art makes for a comic that is quite hard to orient in and to gather what and where is happening, adding to the enjoyableness. But this manga takes it even further - not just backgrounds, it can go without using even the already easy to add filters, making the panels just ugly drawn characters on a blank white background. Such a low-effort product. Sometimes I got baited by one or two pages being passable, thinking that the author finally improved, but this was always just a false hope as the art quickly got back to its usual state of being poor, sometimes even worse than previously.

The panel composition itself is also unsurprisingly a failure, with no reason and rhyme put into it most of the time. Often there is just wall of a text on a page with smaller illustrations, making it seem like that larger amount of text is there just so the author doesn't have to draw more. Sometimes only half of the page is filled with some small cringy chibi drawing on rest of the page. Honestly this manga might have worked better as a novel. I'm sure some established and respected publishers such as Harlequin would be happy to take upon themselves to publish it.

Which gets us to the story itself. Not gonna lie, I wasn't able to focus on it much, spending most of the time either snickering or facepalming to the the hideous art. When I was trying to find out why do people even like this manga, what I got was basically "it features adult themes like mafia and drugs even though it's a shoujo, so it's good", which is just plain faulty reasoning. It's not the themes alone that make a work good, it's how they are portrayed in the work. "Iz gud coz for adults" is just an Elfen Lied/Another/etc. mentality all over again. What I can say after reading this manga that no matter how serious your plot might sound on a paper, craftily added shoujo elements such as "le random xddd" super deformed facial expressions and badly timed comic reliefs are perfectly capable of destroying the overall atmosphere.

I wanted to say that this work didn't age well, but it's actually bad even when compared with its contemporary works. This is among one of the worst drawn manga I've ever read, and I've read my deal of bad manga. Definitely a waste of time.