Back to Totalphantasma's Profile Totalphantasma's Profile

Overall just a very strange manga
I picked it up about 2 years ago, dropped it because it stopped getting translated, looked through my drop list and noticed this was finished, and decided to just close it out.
The story starts off pretty well and interesting. I genuinely enjoy how the story ties in the actual behaviors of insects as an allegory for society, even if having a literal bug doctor exposit these behaviors to you was a little overt.
The premise in general had a weird lack of identity that i Cant quite explain, but it just seemed to be unable to decide if it wanted ... to be cold and bleak "survival of the fittest" and "I am the best hero fantasy"
Its very edgy. They make the girl shit herself in anti-shitting underwear. Plenty of gore, a little vomiting.
The art is very very nice. The gore isnt the best I've seen, not because it wasnt well drawn but because it lacked a sort of emotional impact. It was gross, but not gut wrenching. The author puts a lot of effort into making beautiful gory bloody messes out of characters I dont particularly care about.
I had fun reading it. The plot continued to spiral out of control and the "next big reveal" was just always entertaining. It wasn't good but by god I couldnt put it down. It was always just trying to one up itself.
All in all, a good premise, good art, but absolutely screwed character writing and plot development. More or less a Tarantino Movie.

Monster fails in most of its attempts to be interesting.
The story is completely predictable. Up to the point where i dropped it, there was not a single plot point which i did not guess. I could probably accurately guess which chapter a character will die in.
Many people call this a suspense and i think it does this very very poorly for several reasons.
First, the characters are not interesting and i do not care about any of them. They are one note and flat. For a story which is about the darkness within people and how everyone can have a monster inside of them for every ... character to be " i was bad but now im kind of good" or "im good and just framed" is incredibly dull. The characters have no individual identity and many characters exist only to make expository statements about other characters behaviors/
And thats the biggest problem with the writing. The author is incapable of conveying a feeling without TELLING you what youre supposed to be feeling. This is a common dialogue exchange which occurs once every 2 chapters.
"He simply is... <character trait>"
"How do you know?"
"I can see it in his eyes"
"heh, whatever, i dont believe you"
Congrats thats the crux of every arc.
The thing that annoys me the most of this trait is specifically the way they use it for suspense, hence its mention in the section of the review. When it comes to the murders or interactions with killers they always write "It just looks like a monster did it." Me, as a person looking at it with eyes with knowledge of the context, would never get that feeling without being told thats how im supposed to feel.
The characters deaths are also largely inconsequential. Characters are introduced to either die or move the plot. None of them teach the protagonist anything, or reflect any lesson that the first few arcs didnt. They are there to die and say "theres a darkness... theres a monster." Thats it.
At the end of everything the tl;dr is that I dont care. the manga couldnt make me care. Things just happen. Its all just an uninteresting plot. You could take out the characters and dialogue and jsut tell me what happens and the manga would be better for the fact that it wastes less of my time.

Redo of Healer reviews are usually split into 2 camps. Everyone is either giving it a 1, or theyre giving it a 10.
The one reviews say "its literally nothing but rape"
the 10 reviews say "its literally nothing but rape"

Redo of Healer is not very good if you try to analyze it. The villains are not nuanced and are just objectively evil. The plot is just a side quest to the main character, so long as he gets to rape the people who did him wrong.

But for that reason, its stupidly enjoyable and fun. I watched this with my friends. Were all in a voice call ... together and one episode just started with them fucking in a river for like 5 minutes. It sounded like he was mixing a bowl of mac and cheese. It was hilarious. Its hilariously edgy. Its like going on facebook and seeing a picture of some dude from highschool replacing half of his face with the joker and thinking its cool. It isnt, but its so fun to point and laugh at.

If i were to give this any explicit credit, the lengths it goes to are absurd and creative. In some places there is some very palpable malice that i would say supersedes the pure edginess and is genuinely terrifying/ grotesque.

This version is FAR inferior to the comic and novels in this regard, however. The anime is only good if the only way to enjoy dumb things is with friends. If you can laugh at dumb shit on your own, i recommend the comic instead.

Setsuna best girl.

I have a foot fetish.
The art is actually insanely good even not accounting for that fact; the artist has an incredible mastery over anatomy thats honestly awe inspiring. The fluidity of the main character's foot work, the implied dexterity without the bodies looking strange, and the character staging/ physical interactions are genuinely on tier with many renowned martial arts manga.
The story is nothing to write about, got axed so it ends super shitty. But its just engaging enough and even if youre not into feet the haha funny of lol feet is probably enough to make this worth your time, given it can be binged ... in like 3 hours.
Feet.

This is definitely a disappointing season for me. Note that my viewpoint and enjoyment comes from being a webtoon reader.
To start, I think this show is gorgeous. Its legitimately one of the prettiest fighting shows I've ever seen and one of the fights honestly goes in my top 10 short fights of all time. The visuals alone make it, in my opinion, impossible to give this show any less than a 7, unless you don't like action.
But the problem is, the show is way too rushed. Tower of God was 13 episodes covering 80 chapters. God of High School is 13 episodes covering 110 Chapters. ... A lot of important character info gets cut, fights get altered to be more succinct.
The comic relies heavily on the explanations of how fighters fight and what they fight for to give the side characters depth and give them meaning. The anime cuts most of that. Most of the characters are incredibly bare bones. The overarching plot is very rarely explained and many important character interactions are completely lost. The show takes the fastest route to get to fight from fight, even if that means cutting through other fights.
I enjoyed the show a lot as a webtoon reader because I had the info. It was basically just watching my favorite fights get animated. But its nothing more than that.
If you enjoyed the fights I beg you to read the webtoon. If you havent watched the show yet, I ask you to read the webtoon first.
The anime is not the definitive way to consume this portion of the series, but I still wouldn't say its bad. Its just a lot less than I would've wanted.

I will say as much as I love this adaption, if you didn't enjoy it I completely understand. This is 13 episodes of prequel content. Not a whole lot happens, the main character is ass for this point in the story and you just spend a lot of time confused.
If you haven't read the comment, I would say its a 6 or maybe a 7 if you're optimistic.
But in terms of it being an adaption, from someone who is caught up with the comic? It's phenomenal. Its gorgeous. The characters come to life like I dreamed they would. I have 0 complaints about the anime ... that to not come from the source material.
I really hope that those of you who at least somewhat enjoyed this will pick up the webtoon. The whole series only gets better from here.
#prayforseason2

Ok so my review scores might be a little biased I'll be the first to admit. But it comes from a place of love. I loved this manga and for the longest time I held it as the pinnacle of character writing and romance. It was a 10/10. But then the story hits something like chapter 180 and it just... isn't great. It slowly gets worse after the main character graduates high school. The author spends something like 2 years just wasting your time, creating bullshit plotlines that mean nothing and doing nothing.
But god even that couldn't take this below a 6/10 for an average ... non invested reader. It was still enjoyable.
But the last like, 30 chapters? Some of the worst shit I've ever read. Over the course of chapters 271-276 the author manages to more or less ruin the narrative she's been setting up for 5 years. Completely scuffed and irredeemably bad. Even if the girl you wanted won you can't say the writing was sensible in any way.
So I feel like I'm being generous with a 3 overall. While the sum of its parts, if taken individually might still be a 5 or 6, this is a romance. In my opinion, the ending to a romance is the most important thing, and if your ending involves undoing every bit of personal character development of every character in the entire story and just returning everyone to how they were in chapter 50... you did nothing but waste time and I cannot, in good faith, give a score any better.
Any enjoyment I've gotten over the past 6 months of reading this weekly was just freaking out by how much harder the author can botch her story.