Special A is... earnestly cliche. It's almost a celebration of stupid elements of shoujo. At no point does it ever really try to be original or break of its shell, nor does it ever need to.
A lot of the appeal to me is how straight-faced it presents its ridiculousness. At one point there's a subplot of OH MY GOD WE ACTUALLY HAVE TO GO TO CLASS AND NOT DRINK TEA IN THE GREENHOUSE ALL DAY. At no point does anyone treat this like a joke. They are legitimately mortified. And that is funny on its own. Special A's tendency to take its own hilarious stupidity
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Dec 15, 2010
Hajimete no Aku
(Manga)
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Charm can take you a long way in making an enjoyable story, and for everything this series lacks it makes up for with that.
If you stop and think about it, the art's not that great and the story really boils down to a clueless idiot continuously pissing off a flat-chested tsundere. Yet despite that it's still a lot of fun. Kyouko and Jiro's relationship is pretty much built on mutual hostility. Hell, everyone's relationship really. But at the end of the day almost everyone's clearly friends. The whole "evil organization" thing is silly and ill-defined. But there's no attempt to take it seriously. No matter ... 
Dec 13, 2008
Denei Shoujo
(Manga)
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Video Girl Ai was written by the mangaka that did I"S. This threw up all sorts of red flags, because I"S was really, really, really bad. This made me all the more surprised when VGA turned out to be great.
For starters, it's probably the only shonen romance I've ever read where I got the impression who the main character was going to end up with was really, truly up in the air. Hell, for a couple of short blinks, the "Main Character X Nobody" pairing was up for grabs. The plot in itself is kind of generic, but that can be forgiven because the plot actually ... 
Oct 17, 2008
I"s is everything wrong with shonen romance manga. Everything.
The pacing is nothing short of brutal. Really, after a while, you get the feeling you're on a treadmill and not really moving forward at all. And that feeling holds for well over a hundred chapters. Seto is a loser. Okay, it's shonen romance, that's to be expected. You can pull out of that. The problem is that it never really does. He spends the vast majority of the series being an indecisive twat to drag this series out to 143 chapters. In the end, he never really progressed at all. He's the same loser from the very ... |
