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I started reading it because I wanted a dungeon R&D comedy, which this technically is. It's just that instead of being a proper comedy it's basically a parade of hentai cliches.

It's one of these series that thinks that naked tits make it a comedy. It's pretty sincerely boring if you aren't looking for titillation. The main reason why I'm giving it 3 instead of 1 is because the first chapter was actually willing to call out the impracticality of the hentai style dungeon traps.

The only way I could see somebody enjoying this is if they wanted to read a softcore hentai with some comedy attached. ... It's just not worth my time to actually read it or to write a longer review.

Honestly, it's a story built on a peculiar premise that had several good chapters and decent arcs that showed a real promise until it started straining against its own premise.

Stories with a naturally limited setting, in this case a cheap restaurant on the province being run by a former elite warrior, can’t keep on increasing the scale of the conflict to raise the stakes without either abandoning or changing their setting or having the whole world bend itself out of shape to keep it intact. The Restaurant of the Outcasts made a weird choice of trying to take both options and paid the price for ... that. The conflict has escalated far past what would be contained in a provincial town but simultaneously it’s still inexplicably focused on cooking. Or rather on chefs and their involvement in politics.

This shift in later chapters has left the story adrift. Several characters are rendered effectively useless, villains start to feel convoluted and the obstacles main characters face feel like the authorial fiat. The biggest reason I dropped this series was because MC decided to suffer through his troubles alone, despite being able to end it just by accepting help from his loved ones within a single chapter. This has more or less shattered the emotional core of the story, which is about helping each other.

Also, the whole point about slavery being a key part of the story’s initial premise seems to have been abandoned so suddenly you might actually forget it was even there without reading the story’s description.

Overall, it feels like a series is struggling to merge escalating conflict with its initial premise. I don’t recommend reading it past volume four.

Honestly, it’s a very lackluster season. It has both some of the best and worst episodes of the series, but the worst episodes outweigh the best in terms of how strong the impression they leave.

In particular, I think that this season is overly reliant on shock factor for its humor. Some episodes feel like the author was sticking in random fetishes just to make the plot more shocking. In the same way, I feel like the author really overdid nudity related jokes this time around. The second age regression episode in particular left a bad taste in my mouth.

While I enjoyed the return of the ... core cast of vampires, I feel like this season failed to create worthwhile long term additions to it, with one possible exception that I can’t describe further due to the character in question being too important to reveal their identity. As for the human cast, the best new addition was Sanzu. Her inclusion alone is the reason why I didn't rate this season even lower.

Overall, the quality of the best moments didn’t disappoint me. It’s the quality of the weakest episodes this season that made me give this series a rating this low. This season is a sadly common example of a series becoming too reliant on shock value humor for its own good.

The series became a harem in the worst possible way. If the series ended with the main couple's marriage, I would give it 10/10. If it didn't turn into harem in 10th volume, I'd probably give it 9/10 due to spending too much time without the best girl, Lefi. But now, the series literally crossed the line into a full on harem mess, complete with several young girls waiting till they are old enough to join. I don't know what caused the author to decide to make such a drastic, absurd turn after the main character was already married and I don't want to know. ... I'm still leaving a relatively high note for the series, due to my sentiment for the good times I've had. I know that from now on everything will just keep going downhill, so I'm dropping this series.

10/10 when it was good, 1/10 when it went bad.

May the series be remembered for its good and may the harem nonsense parts be forgotten.

Every revenge story has to deal with difficult questions: "Is vengeance justified?", "How many moral lines can one cross before they become as evil as his enemies?", "Would a person being avenged want all this bloodshed in their name?". Hametsu no Oukoku is unique in sense that it answers these questions very early on by making its protagonist an irredeemable monster getting off from gunning down innocent women and children from the get go.

With this shocking opening to draw your attention, I want to make one thing clear - this story is a slaughter festival about one man natural disaster willing to betray everyone just ... to avenge his master. It is also a story about somebody so monstrous that he had literally rejected the very possibility of bringing his master to life. Without spoiling the actual events, MC is a bloodthirsty psycho who actually decides to become exactly as evil as his enemies, right down to butchering innocent children. In a story of the war between genocidal empire and one man genocide machine there are no actually moral position.

The first 13 chapters have shown us enough of protagonist's evil that the literally genocidal empire seems like a viable moral alternative, simply because their goal of magic free, human controlled world is so much less bloodthirsty than MC's goal of causing humanity's extinction. Reading this story feels like exactly like reading a story about Nazi fighting against Cthulhu. Both sides are irredeemable monsters casually butchering innocents, but one side at least doesn't want to eliminate the whole mankind.

As for the dark elements, the series is absurdly tasteless in its use of shock content, mostly sexual violence. Look, I get that some stories are dark, but shoving random rape and gore just for shock value is genuinely bad taste. I actually don't have much more to say about it than calling it out for being bad taste and serving no real purpose beside making readers wish for empire's destruction enough to ignore the fact that MC is literally butchering women and children while crying from joy.

As for the action sequences, they are beautifully drawn but feel awfully empty. The series fails to provide the framework for the story beyond "grand magic cool, power armors cooler". All the vivid details, all the grand choreography and all the potentially cool elements are negated by the fact that for most of the time we just have people throwing unexplained attacks at one another. It feels like two kids making up super moves while playing with action figurines, just with more gore and edge than usual.

Overall, this story is very disappointing and leaves me with a bad aftertaste. It's a solid 1/10 review.

Why? Why did I even picked up series featuring graphical sex with completely non anthropomorphic monster with two spike covered cocks? I don't know, but I do regret what I have seen there. Frankly, this series is utterly disgusting. I could have been a cecent story, if it spared us, viewers graphical sex scenes.

Is this series unique? It's a series where chick marries and bangs a giant snake monster. That's pretty unique, in a horrific sort of way. It's like watching riding forward and occasionally plowing straight through random cars left on tracks. A total disaster.

Do I recommend it ? No, why would I? It's ... basically a mental equivalent of bashing your head against the rocks.

At first glance, Kimi to Pico-Pico is a story about a video game otaku suddenly finding himself in the same gaming club as a gyaru brought up on classical NES titles. Looking at it from a broader perspective, it's a story that’s less about the video games themselves and more about the gamers. Old school gamers, competitive gamers, even gamers modding their peripherals or trying to make their own short works in the Game Maker. Of course, it’s also a rom-com filled with references to Japanese computer games.

At its core, Kimi to Pico-Pico is a comedy about video games first, even if Japanese peculiarities about ... effective lack of fair use force them to use very blatant ersatzes for many game titles. We get jokes about searching for easter eggs, trying to circumvent modesty shadows to peek under skirts of 3D models and people pointing out the inherent hilarity of the existence of a co-op video game wholly based around parodying stereotypical Japanese politeness. The games referenced are varied, though the series has clear bias towards both the older titles and the works seen as iconic or at least peculiar enough to warrant their mention. Overall, I’m pretty sure that the wide variety of game related topics and jokes will reach anybody with interest in them, even if some references will likely send you for a wiki crawl.

As for the second pillar of comedy in this series, our gamers, the series doesn’t disappoint either. Characters are both vivid enough to perform their comedic roles and down to earth enough to be relatable. Without spoiling the later developments, the main cast consists of four characters: our main duo of Taichi Oota, introverted gamer otaku and Ageha Onisaki, gyaru girl who got into gaming playing with her father on NES, and the secondary couple of their two seniors at club. The most important thing to know about them is that they have great chemistry, especially the main couple. It’s refreshing to see romantic leads of the series genuinely enjoy each other’s presence this much, especially since it makes their slow progress towards becoming a couple much more believable.

It’s worth pointing out that this comedy makes full use of both quid pro quo misunderstandings and dramatic exaggerations showing us games from the perspective of the already immersed characters. This gives this series decent levels of fanservice and innuendos, while usually keeping it from overtaking the plot. Though I personally felt like one fanservice arc in the middle was a bit too long and a bit too on the nose with suggestive, exaggerated expressions. I particularly enjoy the fact that Kimi to Pico-Pico occasionally ventures out with its jokes outside the realm of gaming, providing a pleasant and refreshing change of pace.

If I were to point out the series' main weak point, I’d say it’s the feeling that the ending felt a little compressed, like the series needed two more chapters to properly finish the denouncement. Still, I consider it as distinctly above average with how the series handles it, especially compared to the unfortunate tendency of rom-com manga series to end right at their emotional zenith. While this vague description doesn’t do the series justice, it’s the most detailed one I can give without revealing the key details of the plot.

Overall, I believe that Kimi to Pico-Pico is a masterpiece of a nerd culture rom-com manga. I can honestly rate it 10/10 and recommend it to others.

Lets get one thing out of the way, it's a series about a married couple. They get married in the first chapter and they enter their married life. Somehow, this setup gets equated with an amazing rate of relationship progress, where the story skips the awkward will they or won't they. Yet despite that, it's still the series about two milquetoast, awkward teens who struggle with the basic intimacy so much you'd think that they are grade schoolers.

Reading this series is like seeing a beautiful bird stretch out his wings, fly up high and then fly head first into a window and break his ... neck. It has all elements it needs to success as a romance and chooses to waste them for being just a cutesy slice of life. To elaborate, it's a story about the married life of the two extraordinary people that bends over backwards to keep their relationship from properly developing and to squash the actual interesting parts about their characters. In the 54 chapters I've read, the series somehow manages to actively add elements that seem to serve no purpose other than acting as random roadblocks to ensure that main characters relationship stays at the level of teenage dating, despite them living together. They are much closer to roommates than any married couple.

This series is ultimately a rather mediocre slice of life, made worse by all the wasted potential it has. Yes, I've only read 54 chapters and I'm aware that this series teases some greater secrets. But lets be honest, if a series feels like a boring chore by the chapter 54, it's not worth reading more more of it.

Some people compare this series to Overlord since both of them feature a random guy being sucked into a surprisingly dark fantasy world as his overpowered skeleton character from MMO RPG. The similarities end there. Thankfully!

First, let's make one thing clear - Arc isn't half as overpowered as Ainz. He's still legendary, but he lacks the endless layering of cheats that let Ainz trivialize each and every fight in series. Arc is still overwhelming but he actually works within the narrative confines of his story.

Second thing I would like to discuss about Arc is his personalty. Arc is one of the most earnest and ... heroic guys in you'll find in modern isekai. People call him bland and uninspired, but I've never saw him that way. It's clear that his main motivations are his lust for life and sheer love of adventure. He's a guy given power of a titan and willing to use to save others! Watching this dufus enter grim and dark world and start to carve his way through rapists, bandits, slavers and monsters is pure pleasure. Arc is the kind of guy to obliterate a group of bandits purely because it's a right thing to do. As we can see in the first episode, the only hesitation he felt was trying to figure out the right tactics. He's not a perfect paragon or even a particularly uptight one, but watching dude shamelessly help himself to villains' treasures makes him feel like a proper old school fantasy hero.

As for the rest of cast we have his main party: Lalatoya, the dark elf warrior seeking to free the elves taken by the slavers and Ponta, kitsune forest spirit hanging out with Arc after being healed by him. Their recurring allies are the beastmen ninja: Chiyome and Goemon working on their own quest against the slavers.

Plot - the spoiler free description of the plot is: Arc arrives, tries to learn more about this new world without revealing himself and then, due to his desire to help people in need, gets involved in a conflict against slavers. All I can say without giving up too much details is that slavers are surprisingly good opponents, since dealing with corrupt nobles and saving prisoners requires something more than a raw power.

Overall, this series is a genuinely great series, even if the initial premise is rather cheesy and all of the explicit content warnings shown are very much justified. I can recommend it, especially if you are bored with the recent influx of amoral and cynical protagonists.

This anime adaptation manages to improve upon the source manga making it merely very bad instead of appealing. It's still a bad series, it's just better than the original, mostly due to cutting out a lot of incest related content. Don't watch it, it's not worth it.

In all seriousness though, the author clearly knows how to make a joke, it's just that the genuine humor in this series gets buried under the avalanche of the cheap shock value. The main concept of series - the cool beauty being hentai poisoned loner, isn't that bad of a set up for the comedy. It's just that the ... whole series suffers from the distinct lack of non sexual humor, lack of the straight man characters and from not utilizing characters enough before introducing new ones.