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While I don't usually write reviews, when I do, It's either because I feel like the novel deserves more attention, or because it was a complete disappointment. "Dokuzetsu Shoujo no Tame ni Kitakubu Yamemashita," or "I Quit the Going-Home Club for a Girl with a Venomous Tongue," falls into the first category. It's a story that I went into with low expectations, thinking that it would just be some cheap fast food, but I ended up getting a whole A-5 wagyu steak. For the sake of this spoiler-free review, I'll refer to it as "Venom Tongue" for the sake of convenience.

Venom Tongue is a very ... short novel that was originally a web novel published in Shousetsuka ni Narou, a self publishing web novel site that also gave birth to famous titles like Mushoku Tensei and Re:Zero. Kadokawa eventually picked it up and released a single volume, revised light novel version of it in 2018.
The story revolves around our two main characters: Sakaki Sui, our protagonist, and Hiwa Arina, the girl with the venomous tongue. Sui is an extremely entertaining joker who on the surface, is always joking. His jokes and monologues are filled with random references to things such as anime like Haruhi Suzumiya and Evangelion, western movies like Platoon and The Butterfly Effect (this movie plays a big role in this novel), and bunch of other miscellaneous things. He also often talks to the reader, breaking the fourth wall as one would say. Sui is an extremely colorful protagonist who never gets boring. Arina is the girl with the venomous tongue, and probably the best written character in the novel. She's often referred to as a rose in the novel, beautiful, but thorny. Like the title suggests, she verbally abuses almost everyone who approaches her and has an endless bag on insults ready for anyone she meets. She's what you would call a tsundere, but she doesn't get restricted by that character trait. Arina had issues in the past (won't mention because spoilers) that led to her current personality. As the story goes on, we learn more about Arina and the events in the story allow her to grow as a character and better herself as a person.

While I think the story is very good, it still has it's flaws. The two biggest flaws in my opinion are the pacing and the sudden plot twists. At times, the story feels like it takes too long on things and it has a lot of things that could be a lot shorter or cut out altogether. On the bright side of this, at least Sui is always there to make the reader laugh. The second issue, the plot twists, come extremely suddenly whenever we have one. They come from out of nowhere with almost no foreshadowing so they always catch the reader off guard and leaves them a bit confused. None of the plot twists were "bad" per say, but they were just extremely sudden.

Sadly, I can't go much into the story without spoiling, so I'll talk about the tone instead. For the most part, the series is a well done romantic comedy drama that has melancholic undertones, giving the reader the constant feeling of uncertainty as to whether we'll have a happy ending or not. At times, it'll have you crying tears of laughter, and at other times, you'll be crying tears of sadness. The author does an incredible job of balancing the comedy and the drama without making it feel unnatural.

Overall, I think it's a great, extremely touching read. It's short enough that you can read it in 2 days and it'll stick with you for a lot longer than that. If you like romantic comedies, quirky and unique characters with a side dish of depression, then I would recommend this to you. If you made it this far, thank you for reading my shitty review.

Before I get into the review, I just wanna say two things. First, I’m a big fan of the Tower of God manwha, and I had high expectations for this anime adaptation. Second, this is my first review, so yeah... Let’s just jump into the review now

Story: 4/10
Tower of God is supposed to be an epic adventure with great world building that should make the reader want to know more and more about its world. However, the anime fails to accomplish this, mainly due to cut content, changed dialogue, and horrible pacing. The anime is very, very rushed. This was to be expected however, as ... they had 13 episodes to adapt a whopping 79 chapters, averaging out to about 6 chapters per episode. That’s way more than other shows with long source materials. To give you an idea of how absurd 6 chapters per episode is, One Piece is about 1 chapter per episode, Hunter X Hunter is about 2 chapters per episode, Yu Yu Hakusho is about 1.5 chapters per episode, you get the idea. From the start, it was absolutely ridiculous to believe that a good adaptation would be possible when they’re cramming 79 chapters into 13 episodes which resulted in a good amount of cut content that is important for the world building of Tower of God, such as completely removing the Phantaminum incident from the anime. Pacing and cut content isn’t the only issue either, the rules of the games were poorly explained and confusing, resulting in the viewers not knowing what the characters had to do in order to win. The dialogue when explaining the rules was modified in a way that just made the already complex manwha rules even more confusing in the anime.

Art/Animation: 4/10
I should give the anime props for wanting to make the characters look like they’re straight out of the manwha, but the animation itself is very poor. Some of the fight scenes just look plain ugly and the rest of the show isn’t exactly visually pleasing either. The animation does look very nice for a certain scene on episode 12, but that’s just one scene out of many

Sound: 8.5/10
Now this is definitely the best part about this show. Kevin Penkin, also responsible for the ost in Made in Abyss and The Rising of The Shield Hero, did a phenomenal on the ost for Tower of God. The opening and ending songs were also very nice.

Characters: 6/10
The characters are one of the bright spots in Tower of God. The cast is full of likable characters that each seem to have their own motives and somewhat selfish reasons to climb the tower. Some want revenge, some want power, and some want something that transcends all of these things. The reason why the characters are still a 6/10, which is still above average by the way, is because season 1 doesn’t allow the characters to get enough development and the bad pacing comes up here again to speed up some of the backstories and thus making them less impactful. I should also mention that the main character Bam comes off as extremely obnoxious in the anime.

Overall: 5/10
Tower of God is an anime that ends up being just about average, despite its tremendous potential. It could have kickstarted a new era of anime in which webtoon adaptations become common, but its pacing, animation, and the director himself, let it down. If you wanted to get into the series, I’d personally recommend the manwha over the anime. If you made it to the end of this review, thanks for taking the time out of your day to read this :D