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I don't really know how to rate this manga. With the thousands of users on this site who have rated this a 10/10 perfect manga, I'm feeling quite polarized with my feelings on it. However, after reading through many reddit posts, reviews on here, both negative and positive, and taking a step back and examining the story as a whole, I have come to the conclusion that Oyasumi Punpun, in my opinion, is overrated.

I thought I would begin my reasoning by outlining my experience that I had with this manga. I had read the first volume online somewhere and was ... very impressed by how creative and clever it was when it came to displaying what depression and loneliness can be like to those suffering from both things. I bought the rest of the volumes physically on amazon and then read them straight through in the span of 5-6 days. For volumes 1-4, I was blown away with all of the characters in the story and was impressed with how relatable they all were. All of them felt very grounded and real because they all went through real struggles and the things they said reflected that. Then... volume five happened. I was already a little skeptical heading into it because the pacing of the story came to a screeching halt at the end of volume four due to a certain cult being forced into the story unnecessarily. I was still optimistic for the rest of the story and was enjoying myself up until Punpun made a decision that was completely out of character and unrelateable to anybody towards the end of part nine. I won't spoil it, but this decision completely severed any amount of relateablity that had been built between me and Punpun. He went from someone who is paralyzed by the thought of expressing his emotions and interacting with others due to his fear of hurting them to a complete pathological liar with seemingly no real reason for doing so. This was so out of character for him in my opinion and is where the negative aspects of the story started to creep in for me.

I trudged through that part and finished volume five with my enjoyment of the story still intact because the story was still grounded in reality and fairly relatable. And Then...I read volume 6. This volume sucks hard. I hate it. It takes all the best parts of Punpun up to this point, except for the art which remains masterful throughout the story, and throws them out the window and takes the worst parts up to that point and increases them to the point where they are the main focus of the story. Punpun becomes a completely unrelatable character and the story strangely takes a turn from gritty and real slice of life to a cheesy on-the-run drama. And when it's not a cheesy on-the-run drama, its back to the stupid and worthless cult plot line that is weakly held up by the relationship between seki and shimi. This continues until about midway through volume seven where the story then resumes its grounded story tone and continues this tone until the ending.

To me, Oyasumi Punpun has several flaws that are objectively bad. I can't help but feel a lack of direction when I look back on this story. It feels to me that Asano tried to shove in way to many themes and messages which leaves me thinking, "So what was I supposed to get from that?" If you love this story and related to these characters, awesome. Seriously. I think that this is the kind of story that could change someones life were they to relate fully to the character unlike I did, but for me, I just couldn't get there and felt that the last 3 volumes were not very good and tonally inconsistent when put together with the rest of the story. 6/10 which would have been closer to a 4 if the art work wasn't so amazing.