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What can I say without spoiling the whole thing? It's beautiful. Fujimoto's done it again. There are some fun little Chainsaw Man references within the story, too.

Fujimoto, as usual, does a great job with the characters. They're instantly lovable with great chemistry. They grow throughout the story and you can never really predict what they'll do next. They feel alive; they're written as humans, not as archetypes.

Their expressions convey their feelings well and can be kinda funny at times. For example, the teacher's slack-jawed, "another day, another dollar" face on the first page and Fujino's smug expressions in the beginning. Fujino's shocked face on ... page 7 and frustrated face on page 10 are pretty hilarious. I love Fujimoto's art and the way he draws these expressive faces without compromising his style. Other manga will have the characters turn chibi and get giant eyes/mouths, or just have "angry" slanted eyebrows that move as if they're not connected to the character's face, but Fujimoto always stays the course with his realism.

The story is an emotional journey. It kinda leaves you heartbroken and satisfied at the same time, as with Fujimoto's other works.

For some artists, drawing is tedious, boring, and time consuming. A feeling I know well. So why do these artists draw? I suppose this story offers some explanation. I wonder if Fujimoto hates drawing?

The story follows some underdogs trying to form a baseball team from scratch. They spend the majority of the story scouting highly skilled players who aren't committed to a team yet (for various reasons). Just as the team is finally assembled, they pretty much get to play one real game before the manga gets axed!

It takes 16 chapters to assemble a full baseball team - that's with rushing at the end and just recruiting a few generics. I can imagine the axe was probably already set in stone by that point. Too bad 'cause things were just starting to get interesting. A specific villain was ... introduced, as well as a team with an interesting (?) gimmick that gives our heroes a challenge.

The story didn't have a bad premise, but I guess the startup is a bit slow - a flaw of the premise itself. How can you assemble a team of unique, quality players from scratch in a short time when baseball requires 9 players on a team? Compared to One Piece, for example, where Luffy's half-assed "pirate crew" can function in some capacity even with just 2 or 3 members. One Piece could take its time assembling the crew and write in new characters when it's interesting; this story, however, did not have that option. It might've been setup to fail from the start!

The final chapter is actually pretty high quality and wraps things up decently. I don't care about baseball and there's a lack of villains for the majority of the story, maybe that's why my score is low. It was an okay manga while it lasted and you probably won't feel too burned if you decide to read it (despite the axe).

- - - SPOILER WARNING - - -
There are some spoilers here. The spoilers basically involve the premise of the story, but not the ending.


- - - STORY - - -
It's your average high school slice of life romance thing... except some of the characters are gay. So, we're basically here to see if a gay romance can be written well or to see what struggles gay people face in a straight society. Sure, I'll bite. What's it like to be a gay teenager trying to find their place in this world?

The story and drama is generally fine and moderately entertaining. The matchmaking stuff ... is a little dumb, especially when we know it's pointless for a straight character to try and win the affection of a gay character of the opposite sex. It adds a little bit of drama fluff for amusing scenarios, I suppose.

I think the writing kinda tanked in the later half of the story. It got really preachy and the debates between the characters didn't really feel like a genuine conversation. Throwing words such as "like" and "totally" into a preachy wall of text just kinda made it hard to read, like it's really hard not to just skim through those parts. I read manga for character driven stories, not for detached essays on tolerance.

The ending is certainly underwhelming. I'm not upset about the ending itself, I just don't think it was delivered well. They didn't lead up to it properly.


- - - ART - - -
It's fine. Frequent chibi drawings are kinda low grade and cheap. Some characters are occasionally drawn with a lot of detail, but it's not really clear why. Masumi probably had the most detailed drawings, like they're trying to make her look really pretty or something. Is this from the character's perspective - the way they see her? It kinda gives some flirty undertones that are never explored in the story.

Toma's "simpleton" face is fun to look at (basically just a generic smiley face). His hair looks good despite not being a cool haircut.


- - - CHARACTERS - - -
One character changes pretty drastically at one point in the story, which I found a bit annoying. They basically go from being a generic annoyance to being a complicated "you don't know me" type with their own unique gender role to explore (complete with their own essay). Really, it just feels like the author is talking to themselves instead of two characters talking to each other. It mainly just seemed dumb for a one note character to suddenly act like they're really complex.

It seems weird that the popular kids are casually talking or hanging out with the shy nerd protagonists at times. I swear they started tossing in some generic new characters at the end of the story just so the heroes could be antagonized by someone. You'd think the popular kids would have more control over the school's general atmosphere.


- - - OVERALL - - -
It's okay. It's different compared to other high school romance stories, maybe it could give some people at least some small insight as to what homersexuals think about or go through. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't recommend going out of your way to read it.

Mod Edit: This review was originally posted for Burn the Witch (One-shot) (114700) and has subsequently been merged into Burn the Witch (Manga) (129370).

Story:
There's a bit too much world building and crap getting explained for a one shot. Nothing very interesting. Some schoolgirls in London go to a secret underground world to grind dragons and escape from incels.

Art:
The old guy they call "director" has a nice design, it's a display of where Kubo's art shines. Everyone else is either plain or trying too hard to be generically unique. The guns look like really crappy toys, it's an embarrassing step down from the unique sword designs ... from Bleach.

Characters:
Characters are cringey and unlikeable. Guy wants to see underwear, girl is bashful about underwear and breaks every bone in the guy's body using her black belt martial arts techniques. Gee, I've never seen that before in an anime/manga.

Overall:
A waste of time. Writing "BLEACH" at the end was laughably dumb. Give it a rest, man! You're living in the past!

It was pretty mediocre as a one-shot, so I was surprised when they introduced it as a new series. The concept of "building peace" by smacking bad guys with a hammer is really stupid. Terribly wasted potential. If they maintained a little more realism with construction, I feel this could've been interesting and somewhat educational. Instead, they opted for being able to do construction work by shooting energy beams. I guess when you get really good, you don't even have to touch tools or materials - or even be anywhere near the building you're working on.

Build King tried to incorporate a dumb rainbow of ... attributes, giving it a Pokemon-style strength/weakness system. This was really half-assed and convoluted, then it was immediately undermined when they introduced additional colours that aren't part of the standard rainbow.

Art is kinda bad. Tonkachi can range anywhere from a RIPPED toddler to a RIPPED teenager. His body size is very inconsistent. If he's gonna be RIPPED like this, he should always at least look like a teenager. At least!

Toriko and Komatsu make cameo appearances in this manga, which is just kinda laughable. You can feel the author desperately trying to grasp his former glory. Build King should've just stayed as a one-shot and nothing more.

With the philosophical themes involved, you read on, anticipating an ending that'll knock your socks off and leave you thinking about the character motivations and choices. Y'know, like Death Note. Because it's from the guys who made Death Note. That's probably the only reason anyone would go out of their way to read this.

The characters are a fairly dull lot. For the majority of the manga, they act like they're in a haze; devoid of emotion or ambition, they just kinda suffer along for the ride. The main characters always have this dead look in their eyes, too. They did kinda give up the ... will to live, so it's not too surprising, I guess, but there's nothing particularly interesting to recall about the characters. They become Power Rangers for some reason, the most interesting villain gets defeated, then we get a new villain who should be way more interesting, but he's not.

The commentary on society and religion ends up being way too forward and preachy; the manga doesn't really give you much to think about. By the end, each candidate tells the world what they will do as the new god; they each say something confidently and a little out of character, each one summing up a different ideal. It feels pretty cheesy that there's no overlap and that they're all such different extremes. How did this group of people ever cooperate this long?

Anyway, I'd say it's reasonably interesting up until the first big villain dies. After that, it's just very pretentious and fails to deliver. There are some decent little twists and turns here and there, but nothing incredibly outstanding.

It's a pretty mediocre Dr. Stone spin-off. It turns out Byakuya is such a genius, he invented sentient AI. He's also such a weeb that he was working on a prototype to put his AI into a waifu. You'd think he'd focus on the programming, but his priority was to build the robot's bust. Yet, for some reason, he decided to be an astronaut instead of a billionaire selling AI waifus to the masses. Think about that again for a moment: Byakuya is an actual inventor while Senku just builds stuff that humanity already invented. It's a mystery how Byakuya didn't accidentally invent the revival ... fluid and bring Senku back earlier.

Anyway, so Byakuya has apparently read Dr. Stone before flying into space, so he knows that his team's top priority has to be leaving gifts for Senku when he wakes up a thousand years later. He barely has any idea what happened when mankind turned to stone and has no idea how long it'll last (or if all the petrified people are just plain dead, which would be the normal assumption), but oh well, I guess.

Conveniently, Byakuya convinces the crew by telling them Senku counted every second for 2 months without losing count. How do you even verify that when it's possible to calculate the number of seconds based on how many days passed?

Anyway, despite all the plot convenience and Byakuya's omnipotence, there's some decent additional content added to Byakuya's story, which might enhance the Dr. Stone experience a little bit. Equally, it throws the Dr. Stone story into the dumpster by allowing Byakuya's robot to be such an unreasonably incredible piece of technology. It's a somewhat enjoyable read on its on if you think of it as non-canon, perhaps.

Some kid with a split personality plays shogi against himself. That's a pretty fun idea. One personality comes out at night, the other comes out at day. That being the case, only one of them got to go to school and make friends. Due to a freak accident, their night/day cycles get swapped, putting our goody-two-shoes Taisei on the night shift. The story mainly follows the uneducated Taisei as he chases his other half's shogi glory.

Anyway, so it's a decent idea for a story, though I don't know how to play shogi and don't care about it at all. The opponents are all heavily ... exaggerated with special abilities. One of the school kids has such a high power level that he can transform Osaka into a large crater in the Earth's surface by slamming down a shogi piece onto the game board. Buildings, spectators, wildlife, all wiped out in an instant.

They take the special ability thing just a little too far towards the end. I guess they were desperate to try anything to keep this from getting axed. It was a mildly amusing read while it lasted.

The artwork is rather amateurish at the start, but you can see the artist's abilities improve as the manga goes on. There's a little pointless nudity in an early chapter (not particularly sexual); maybe because it's Shounen Jump or maybe because the writer is a child predator. In any case, there's no fan service beyond that, which is good.

The character designs can be ugly at times (what is Takemitsu's hair?), but generally they're pleasant to look at. I like how the artist gives several characters little imperfections, like moles on their faces (and not just a single, typical "beauty mark").

Anyway, Act-age is all ... about some pretentious bachelor who likes to film schoolgirls. Sound familiar? I can only imagine where the writer got his inspiration from! Beyond that, it's a surprisingly enjoyable story about a girl on the path to become an actress. Some interesting concepts are explored, like Yonagi having a job where she has to promote a product for a commercial - a product she doesn't personally like. All in all, it was a nice change of pace from the usual stuff in Jump and fun to see what happened next.

It's too bad the writer couldn't keep his hands off of the schoolgirls while he was riding his bike. If that was his idea of getting inspiration for future chapters, I suppose it's for the best that this manga got canned and pulled from Jump's website. Shame on him!

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Earth's last survivors. Their continuing mission: to explore the strange world they're stranded on whilst establishing friendly relations with various alien races. Or something like that.

The premise of Agravity Boys is reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation where our homeboys from Earth are being tested and harassed by an omnipotent being that is bored. This manga doesn't take itself very seriously; there's basically no story, it's just day-to-day tomfoolery and running gags. It has its funny moments, though it's kinda hit or miss. Running gags put a lot of focus on Chris being perceived ... as a girl and sexual kink-type stuff.

I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to read this, but it can be somewhat amusing if it happens to be in front of your face while your eyes happen to be open.