Back to SophieSquid's Profile SophieSquid's Profile

I don't care what people say, this manga is peak. It's fucking amazing, with really well written twists and characters I adore dearly. I wish it were more well known and more respected, because it's easily one of my favorite stories of all time.
Every chapter has a cliffhanger to leave you on, with every twist genuinely being well laid out in advance without also being obvious. If you like thriller, this is PEAK thriller. I'm a thriller junkie, so I may be a tad biased, but still. The mind games, the mysteries, the twists and turns. This manga has it all and never lets up.

And ... that's the best part for me, is this manga never feels to me like it loses its way. Other thriller mangas and stories like this I feel often write themselves into a corner, where they don't know exactly where to go from here or how to up the stakes. But Talentless Nana from the very beginning you can tell they *knew* where they wanted their story to go and it works. The first arc of the story, that being covered by the anime, starts off being pretty standard, but slowly shows it's deeper complexity as it comes to a close, and suddenly this whole narrative that had just been constructed is taken apart, but in a way that makes sense *and* continuously raises the stakes. The story doesn't get stale because it allows itself to change, but unlike something like The Promised Neverland, it doesn't stray so far from what made it's first chunk so special in the process. I'd argue that as it goes on, this story just gets more and more interesting.

Really the only downside is that it's monthly releases which can suck to wait for, but it's honestly worth it if it means getting the level of quality writing that we have.

This manga got an anime adaptation not too long ago, and I got absolutely hooked on it. So much so that I couldn't wait for the episodes to come out, so I decided to read ahead in the manga. As I read the manga, however, I started to slowly fall out of love with the story. Whenever the new episodes of the anime came out however, I was once again in love with it. There are a lot of people out there who defend mangas over their anime counterparts, but I'mma be real here, I think the anime elevates this story a heck of a ... lot.

I am aware that pretty much everything the anime does the manga does too, it is the source material after all, but what the anime does is it focuses the pacing, and adds a few details here and there that make the story feel cohesive. I get frustrated by romance stories that never go anywhere, which is why I was drawn to this series in the first place. It has a sense of progression. I find the manga has a lot of fluff that bogs down this sense of progression, especially with it's little bonus chapters that they sprinkle in constantly. They're all fun to read, but at the same time they feel pretty much tonally indistinguishable from the chapters that actually do matter. There's often a feeling in romance stories that revert to the status quo of hanging threads being unanswered, which I really dislike. Like, something happens between the characters and there's a moment of ooooo I wonder how they're gonna resolve this tension and then.... it just tangents onto something else and we forget the prior thing ever happened. This is my biggest complaint with stories like komi can't communicate (but let's get back to the focus at hand). The problem with the pacing of the manga is there's a lot of padding, and various plot threads feel like they go unanswered for a little longer than you'd expect, even in actual full chapters sometimes. There's an episodic feel to things with occasional continuity, which can be a little frustrating. What the anime does is it cleans things up, and rearranges some of the events in a way that makes them actually feel like they are cohesively flowing into each other, day by day. That was the biggest reason the anime even stood out to me, is there never felt like a moment where the continuity just got reset. There were also occasional details that were modified in the anime that I felt better suited the character developments. Generally I just find the progression in the manga a little haphazard in comparison. I ended up dropping the manga around episode 8 in the anime's continuity (I think it was either ch30 or 40, somewhere around there) in favor of experiencing the show blind, because I felt like it executed everything better, and I plan to do the same with its season 2. If you are someone who is interested in watching the anime, I'd say watch that instead, and if you have seen it and want a little more content between these two, the manga does have the advent of having the extra little bonus content in its bonus chapters, but it's nothing you haven't seen elsewhere, so idk, it's up to you if you read it.

Also somewhat unrelated complaint with the manga, but it has a decent amount of somewhat creepy art of Yamada. Like, when Yamada is being romanticized/sexualized from the perspective of Ichikawa, it makes sense because that's from his perspective. But the manga has a lot of non-canon panels that feel more like pandering for the audience and... need I remind you all that Yamada is a middle schooler? This kinda made the whole manga reading experience a lot more uncomfortable, and I couldn't end a review on it without at least mentioning it

I can't decide between a 6 or a 7/10, but I'm leaning 6 just cause it's okay, but there's a better version out there in my opinion. However, I cannot deny that the manga came first and did write the baseline for a story that I really enjoy. To those of you manga fans of this one, if you like this one I can totally see why. It does have a lot going for it, it's just not my preference.