Jul 15, 2024
TLDR, this is basically the most mediocre of mediocre manga.
The plot goes about as follows: Nomura gets into a brawl with a bunch of delinquents and is forced to transfer to Aichi High School, a school with a lengthy history of martial arts wherein all the female students carry practice swords, seldom for the 5 top swordsmen who carry real swords, whom he will obviously fight all of eventually.
Now, this premise is not necessarily bad; it's a tad bit generic, but it serves the manga well enough to give justification for all these elite swordsmen high school girls to be here and/or why this
...
is even happening in the first place. The thing with this premise is that the aforementioned statement kind of applies to the entire manga, being that "it's not insulting, but it's not really great either." Essentially, everything that happens serves to forward the manga to the next fight or lucky sukebe moment, which isn't the worst thing in the world, especially if you go into this manga (like I did) kind of knowing that it's just going to be exactly that (fighting and occasional tits/panties), but from a critical literary perspective, yeah, this is kind of hot garbage.
As for the art, I don't think it's spectacular, and some of the side characters can be drawn particularly egregiously badly in some of the earlier chapters, but I think it does look decent in the fighting/ecchi scenes (which, let's be honest, are the only points of this manga anyone cares about), and it does notably improve as the chapters go on (although I also think the number of pages decreases, which makes me wonder if maybe from the start, decreasing the pages and increasing the quality would've helped a lot).
Not everything about this manga is bad, but one thing I do have to give the mangaka credit for is their extensive knowledge of swordplay (be it Japanese or Western), which makes some of the fights and scenes more interesting than they otherwise would have been. Although even this can be a downside, sometimes reading through literal paragraphs explaining a sword technique can slow down the otherwise breakneck pace this manga typically takes.
I think if you want to turn your brain off and read a 2010's-esque harem ecchi battle manga, you'll be happy with this and find it enjoyable; otherwise, though, yeah, it's kind of just whatever.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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