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From the author of Elfen Lied and various other manga, Parallel Paradise is a story about the delicate subject of gender differences, sexuality and society as a whole. All of these topics are handled in a delicate yet hard-hitting way that really glorify the best parts of female empowerment and feminism.

The story portrays an utopia run entirely by strong independent young women. They live in a world where there haven't been male humans in over 3000 years until a day when an unlikely male hero is transported there from our world. Now I know what you might be thinking: "This is an Isekai manga? ... Must be crap then." This is a bias I advise you toss aside for now, since unlike most isekai this isn't a typical story about a character going through an average RPG storyline of gaining some mystical power, acquiring his own harem and going on a quest to defeat some for of evil deity. While this story might feature those elements at some parts, this is a much sophisticated story that really breaks new ground in the possible potentials of isekai manga. The male protagonist in this story is merely a driving force to show you a magnificent land ruled by capable female societies. In no way does this character end up becoming a mary sue who manages all the issues of the world by himself. On his quest the MC bonds with many female warriors with whose help he manages to overcome many hurdles. The gender differences do come into play a bit but in no way does it focus on either male or female superiority in this story. The author is clearly a feminist at heart and has a lot of knowledge on this subject.

There is a lot of great things in this manga which I do not wish to give away with this review. I urge you to read this manga if you are interested in gender equality and female empowerment. An absolute masterpiece.

A short manga deserves a short review

There's 3 reasons I decided to read this manga:
1. I wanted to click on Yowamushi Pedal but my clumsy fingers misclicked.
2. People were saying it's a really sad story.
3. The girl on the cover looked disgusting for some reason, I don't know why.
and it was just a one-shot so even if it would have been bad it wouldn't have taken up my time.

I'm not the biggest fan of the shoujo genre, in fact I could probably count the ones I've read on one hand. But just because I'm a stranger to a genre doesn't mean that I have a ... negative bias towards shoujo manga. The ones I've read were mostly pretty intriguing and had a good story. Their stories however happened over the course of many many chapters, this one has only about 40 pages.

Yowamushi Meikyuu handled a one-shot romance story quite well. It doesn't waste much time with a slice of life angel and focuses on the feelings and actions of the characters. It talks about a (highschool?) girl who has trouble expressing her true emotions to the person he loves. She instead tries backhanded ways to get the boy to talk with her, the main one being asking about another boy from his class who she lies about having a crush on. However her actions cause her own defeat, as by the end of the manga she learns that if she had just been honest about her feelings from the very beginning things would have gone much better for her. The moral of the story is to be honest about your feelings, for if you hide them for too long you might lose the chance of ever obtaining them. And it does a damn good job of expressing that idea to the reader.

The two main characters, although being pretty standard romance characters, are believable and well done for the story to advance as quickly yet fulfillingly as possible. Although there is a side character that just exists to progress the story on and has close to no development, which doesn't ruin the story but is still a shame. The art looks okay, it does well in expressing what the characters are feeling visually.


In conclusion if you are looking for a good shounen manga that isn't too long or too heavy in a slice of life aspect I do recommend that you read Yowamushi Ped- I mean Meikyuu, Yowamushi Meikyuu. Yowamushi Pedal is just about sweaty men in tight clothing wanting to test each others limits, which has surprisingly nothing to do with romance.

"Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora" (or Hanbun no Tsuki for short) is probably the best anime adaption of having an actual 2 hour long painful seizure I've seen all year.

There aren't many words to describe this show, the only ones that come to mind are: fuck, shit, ass, whatever and bullshit. It was produced by a no-name studio called TAC and features many very talented people who have all done much better stuff in the past.

The story follows a 17 year old boy named Yuuichi Ezaki who is put into the worst hospital in the country of Japan. He learns that there is a ... girl in the opposite wing of the hospital who is suffering from an unspecified deadly heart disease. After invading into her room, he learns that her name is Rika Akiba and that she really likes reading books(nerd). Together they take part in a lot of booking around, mucking around but no fucking around. They start to converse with eachother and Ezaki learns about the truth of her father and the mystery disease.
Oh and they also fall in love for some reason.

SOUND
The sound was god awful. There were many times when after a long monologue there'd just be about 3 seconds of silence. If you're a professional sound designer and you do something like that you should be fired. It will ruin your immersion in the story. Luckily for this sound designer there wasn't much dialogue to get immersed in. Another thing he constantly fucked up though was audio mixing. A lot of scenes (prime ex. the racecar scene) suffered from the music levels being way high and the dialogue being so low.
And of course the voice acting... yeah, "acting". I'm not blaming the voice actors for any of it though. It was clear they didn't have much to work with using the scripts they were given. Amazing voice actor Hiroaki Hirata, voice actor of Goro Natsume, delivered some of the most dullest lines I've ever heard from him. And the soundtrack was just boring and awful and boring and awful and so on. I swear, the audio in this anime is the most abuse I've done to my ears since listening to the new Linkin Park album. And that says a lot.


ART
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. That's the review, thank you.

I've seen flash animations with better visuals then this. It looks like wet ass. I really don't know what to say more about it other than childish insults. I guess those 4 years of animations school really went to waste huh...


STORY
This script was not written by someone who 1) has any dignity or selfesteem 2) was also in a hospital bed while writing it, most likely in the middle of brain surgery 3) is lazy. Honestly, I don't know where to start. Maybe I should start with the fact that the writer has no idea how a hospital works and who work there. In his hospital, patients (who are minors, let me remind you) with grave diseases can just walk out whenever they want willy nilly. Ezaki and Rika must have left the hospital on their own at least 6 times and nobody gave a flying fuck. Any patient can just go up to the roof and swing about on the walls. And the staff physically and mentally abuse their patients. This paints a pretty nice picture of how much the author didn't give a- I mean how creative the author was to think of such a whacky hospital.
For the first couple of episodes nothing important really happens aside from some """"""""""funny"""""""""" gags. A ballsy move considering they only have 6 episodes to tell a tragic story. Why, the ending must be a surefire masterpiece! (spoiler alert: It wasn't...).
There isn't really much I can talk about without getting into spoiler territory, so you’ll have to take my word that the ending is definitely not worth it.


CHARACTERS
Probably the root of all evil for this show were the characters. All of them were lackluster and the horrible voice acting and art did not help. I think it would be best for us to examine these characters one by one to see where the biggest problems really lie. Characters will be listed in order of importance to the plot.

The MC: Yuuichi Ezaki
Probably the best character in the series depth wise, but that doesn't mean he was any good. He falls in love with Rika even though she only acted like a bitch to him, so I guess hes a masochist? We don't really know that. In fact, we know fuck all about Yuu(nickname for Yuuichi) other than he's a troublemaking pervert. He might have been the only one with a comprehensive character development. But that doesn't really matter since he lacks all charisma and is way too boring for an MC. He's also an absolute cuck who let's women step over him.

Rika Akiba
Oh god. She is one of the main reasons I hated this show so much. She has no consistent character and none of her actions ever make any sense. She got incredibly upset when she found out that Yuu had massive amounts of porn and just didn't speak with him for a week. Nobody really knew why that upset her, so we just had to make something up like "she thinks porn is disgusting and can't express her feelings". She constantly pulls shit out of her ass and does the most senseless things which led me to do something else whenever she was speaking.

Goro Natsume
This man does not have a PhD. Unless by PhD you mean "pretty horrible douche", that he certainly is. One of the first things he does in the show is beat up a minor for seemingly no reason. We later learn that it was all for a good cause (Spoiler alert: It wassn’t). Because of a tragic event that happened in his past, he decides to abuse the two MCs so that Ezaki wouldn’t end up like him, a psychopath not fit for his profession. It turns out all right though, as by the end of the show he has grown into a slightly less sociopathic bastard who’s whole life had been a lie.

Akiko Tanizaki
She was supposed to be a „comic relief“ character in this show since other than introducing the two main characters she had almost no major role in the plot, other than yelling at people sometimes. She also helped her bed ridden patients escape the hospital multiple times. Was it so that they could get some ancient medicine that can cure her disease? Was it to defeat an evil warlord set to destroy the hospital? No, it was just so Yuu could go get his polaroid camera for the next time they snuck out of the hospital.
Side characters
The side characters had no character. They couldn’t bother, they were too busy making jokes about old man’s porn mags. Isn’t it funny that an old man had many porn mags? Hilarious.

ENJOYMENT
For the first couple of episodes I wasn’t really sure if this was supposed to be a comedy or a drama. The setting was calling for sadness so I thought it might be a drama but none of the characters were well written enough to care for. There were a lot of failed attempts at humor that had no place in the mood of the story. What I did appreciate however was the tiger mask reference and one scene very scene in the show, the latter for a very wrong reason. Don’t get your hopes up, it was only entertaining because of how stupid it made the writers look. It was of course the scene where Akiko’s friend randomly picks Yuu up on the street and takes him to her place. Jokingly, I thought „here comes a sex scene“. Never in a million years did I think that this would happen between 17 year old MC and 20 something sidecharacter who we know nothing about. I could not imagine anyone, no matter how gullible, to put something like that in your story.
And I shit you not, they did.


In conclusion, I say that watching Hanbun no Tsuki feels like putting your genitals in the sharps container in a hospital. If you’re lucky, you might just prick yourself on a needle filled with heroin and have yourself a jolly time. However, it is definitely not worth the 30 other needles stabbing you in the shaft.
(ps. Dont actually try doing that in a hospital. They will kick you out.)

Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora gets a generous 4/10

Metallica Metalluca (or as I like to call it "The Thing That Should Not Be") is a shounen manga by amateur mangaka Teruaki Mizuno. It was the mangaka's first published work that he released in 2010. Usually, the debut work of an artist is their most important, since it can be very hard to Escape from a work if it turns out to be Some Kind of Monster. It can leave you Broken, Beat and Scarred both mentally and critically. Sadly, this is exactly what happened to Teruaki's debut manga, which ended up being like Cyanide to his career.

Now I'm not one to jump ... on a Hate Train when a work is largely disliked by the people who read it, but I hated this manga so much that I had to give it 2x4 ratings. What truly was the Fuel to me giving this manga No Remorse was that this, in my opinion, was a pathetic attempt to make a quick buck with a lousy shounen. Now with fairness And Justice To All, he might have just wanted to create something he really wanted, but The Struggle Within me really does not let me believe it. Shounen is a very easy genre to do, but one that's very hard to do well. It has a very clear template to follow but you can't only follow that template or else it'll become One of many uninspired shounen out there. Sadly, that's exactly what happened to this manga.

Alas, nothing in this manga could have been a Cure for lackluster characters, a redundant plot and an extremely Frantic ending. The Small Hours I wasted on reading this manga could have been used to Seek & Destroy my daily chores.

I really do think that if he would have put in a little more effort to this it could have turned out to be something other than me Wasting My Hate. I'd be lying if I said the idea of him having Death Magnetic abilities didn't seem interesting to me. After all, talent (or a lack of it) isn't Hardwired into our minds. But until The Day That Never Comes when he will pull together and make something decent, The Memory Remains of the Bad Seed that is Metallica Metalluca.

First of all, since this is my review it's probably not going to be very deep or anything so don't expect a Roger Ebert level review incoming. This is just some losers thoughts about a manga that he read.
Secondly I'd like to mention that the only reason I started reading this was because there weren't any new Hajime no Ippo chapters at the moment and I thought this would be good filler for the mean time. I tried to judge it as fairly as I could while reading but HNI sets a pretty high standard for boxing manga.

STORY: 6/10
The biggest problem with the manga is ... the ending. About 50 chapters in you realize that the manga is progressing at a considerably low pace. This is good because boxing stories need time slowly showing the character develop his abilities. The very bad thing about this is that the manga is only 106 chapters long. So if it took our main character (Rikitarou Iwamaki) 60 chapters to get to his debut match, it would be downright silly to think that he could become the Japanese champ in the remaining 40. The final fight in the manga is obviously very rushed as it skips many of his not so important fights and training sequences - something that so far had been the main source of intense sensations. The ending itself is very anticlimactic and dull, especially for a boxing manga.
This is a real shame since the first half was very promising. Riki was put in a very stressful situation and seeing a person who up until now was characterized by being very easy-going and evasive of his problems slowly develop a sense of responsibility was very intriguing.
The worst part is that it probably isn't even the fault of the artist. Sadly a lot of great and underrated manga just have to rush out an ending because they don't have the funds to continue through with a project. This seems to be the case with RRR (or the mangaka just got lazy).


ART: 7
The art is okay I guess. The mix of realistic bodies and simple shounen style faces doesn't look good. But still,overall it looks pretty good.

That's all folks.


CHARACTERS: 4.5-
The characters in this manga are... not very good. Almost everybody except for the main character is a regular cookie-cutter manga stereotype that you'd expect from some awful B-rate manga. The villain, Asahina, has a big ego and treats people badly. His whole character ark is that he does a lot of bad things. Aozora (Riki's Nephew) is just annoying. He constantly does illogical, cringeworthy things. The author tries to develop him into a likeable character and fails horribly. There are some characters that do sometimes have something interesting to say or do but almost only when interacting with Riki. Riki himself is a great character and the biggest redeeming factor in this manga... up until the end of course when he suddenly starts acting the complete opposite of his character. He starts putting his own ambitions ahead of Aozora's, something that at this point we know he'd never do.
HNI(and Holyland to some extent) show that boxing manga can only be as great as its characters. It's amazing how I could still enjoy this manga as much as I did with such lazy writing. Speaking of which...

ENJOYMENT: 7.5+
Might be hard to believe considering how much I just "shat" on it but I actually did have a very good time reading this manga. Riki's character just emits such enthusiasm that it's hard not to be invested in the story. I was capable of reading through 10 chapters in a row an still have the appetite for more. That might not seem like a lot to some but I can't even read through a single chapter of some Dragon Ball volumes without catching agonizing boredom. The fight scenes might get a bit silly but it contains action that might give you an adrenaline overdose. I'm a fan of any fictional media of boxing at all, Rocky is my favorite movie after all. I love underdog stories. I was totally hooked the whole time until the end came around. I flipped through the last few chapters as quickly as I could.


OVERALL: 5/7
In conclusion, if you are a fan of HNI or other boxing manga I recommend this to you because it will be a satisfying read for the most part. If you don't much care for them and are looking for a great seinen drama don't get your hopes up.