Peach Boy Riverside

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Ah, this is the cool-kyou shinja story telling that keeps me coming back.

Story : I've had bad experiences with fantasy stories before, mainly due to the author dumping an entire novels worth of concepts to try to explain the world in a few words as possible to the reader. Not only is this boring to the reader, but it'll lose appeal... But does cool-kyou have talent when it comes to stories and writing. Some of his stuff flops, but this manga is a great example of when he gets it right

Art: very well drawn. Great attention to detail and not overdrawn. The style is very ... appealing and everything flows together nicely.

Character :the strongest asset cool-kyou has, is character writing and development. At first I was skeptical due to how some characters look (frau), but the character was written so perfectly, and in the very least amount of words or actions you understood the kind of character she is. That's a great talent.

In the end, I finished the third volume and said "I need more". This would be a great anime. I know that's what every manga fan says, but this one would do very well... Or has the perfect amount of mystery, and the character interactions are so well written its perfect for the small screen. Highly recommend you giving this a try.

Let me say this first: I usually do a lot of research before starting a series. I'm the kind of guy who wants to know if a show is worth my time before I start it, the Problem is, that I get spoiled some major plottwists if they happen early on in the story.


Luckily, at the time of this review there exists ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that could spoil me about this Manga. I read it because it was recommended, and oh boy I do not regret it.


Whille I cannot say much without spoiling, this is an Adventure in a fantasy world, but it's a dark one. ... There are sudden shifts in tone - to the better or worse.

The ongoing storyline is how to understand each other and get along, burry old hatred and discrimination. Just because you're a human it doesn't mean you're good. Just because you're an Elf, it doesn't mean you're bad.

But it doesn't mean all Elves are good either. Things like that.


It's about true companions, exploring the world and losing entire Kingdoms.


The MC is a princess who lived her whole life sheltered in a city - but she really wants to see the world. And so we start to learn about the world with her - she has no prior knowledge to it either. And it's fun. And sad. And exciting. And horrifying.


I won't give it a 10/10 yet but it's a 9.5 for now.

PBR is a bizarre fantasy-action-drama. The worldbuilding and premise is a frankensteined mess that grabs whatever it pleases from other other settings, refuses to elaborate, and moves on. It's got humans, witches, demi-humans, talking dogs, oni, demons, and angels, all as distinct agents to the plot. From JRPG it's got the generic fantasy continent, human vs non-human strife, swords and magic. From Naruto comes magical eyes and from Attack on Titan, a revenge-obsessed edgelord that would make Eren Yeager blush. Humans with the Geass are granted almost total physical immunity against Oni (which are apparently born of human hatred), and can one-punch (exorcise) even the ... strongest Oni, but these powers are useless against non-Oni creatures, like some card effect from MTG. The Oni on the other hand, are the primary antagonists and have shamelessly devil fruit-like powers. The human exorcists move the plot, traveling around the continent, one obsessed with genocide, the other one crusading for a peaceful coexistence between the races, while the Oni cabal/World Government manipulates them on their chess board.

Sound fascinating? It gets even better. From an episodic story telling perspective, PBR is stupidly good. The foreshadowing, the pacing, the character dialogue, the little details in the panels, the suspense building, the cliffhangers, they are all excellent. But what pushes it into insanely good territory, is the quality never drops, unlike most works that start strong but then coast off their readers' investment. It's as if every chapter treats itself as the first chapter of a shounen. You can test this yourself. Open up a random chapter and you will notice it doesn't require you to already know or care about the plot, to communicate the weight of the pages. This alone makes PBR worth reading as a case study for storytelling.

Tragically, outstanding storytelling makes not an outstanding story. As hinted by its unapologetic premise, GBR struggles to synthesize those chapters into something greater than the sum of its parts. The prioritization of every chapter being exciting on its own legs demotes the overarching narrative to the backseat, which would still work, as in Konosuba, if there wasn't simultaneously, an obvious buildup toward the Final Battle. If every character interaction has to feel profound, they all end up blending together. If every deuteragonist and tritagonist needs to have their struggle and redemption arc, then who cares about the angst in this chapter, if we know everything will be peachy within one or two episodes? The weak protagonist motivations stand out like two sore thumbs and are baffling-ly low-effort in contrast to the rest of the work, and rather than subverting expectations by confronting and leveling up the protagonists' banal ideologies, their developments have been ironically neglected so long it would be awkward to address now.

Written by Cool, who is better known for his misfit-SoL works, PBR is a surprising but welcome genre swerve, as it manages to be both refreshingly eccentric, and moderately ambitious. Although I heavily criticized the paradoxical storytelling that is at odds with its narrative, it is at the end of the day only 50-some chapters in thus far, and has plenty of time still to fix its flaws. If you enjoy stories at the creative level, then PBR is surely great food for thought. If not, there are still plenty of worse ways to spend an afternoon.