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The review may contain minor spoilers for the first few arcs.

This is trash. Insultingly bad trash at that.

So, I've started this because I've seen a page of it in a YouTube video, and based on that I thought this is going to be a sassy, funny series. Boy, it's been a while since I've been THAT dead wrong.

Story - 2

As with most romcoms, there's not much of a plot to talk about, it's all about the characters and their interactions (and man, those suck, but we'll get there in a bit). Protagonist gets dumped by his manipulative girlfriend, can't get over her so he uses ... one of those rent-a-date services to pretend having an actual girlfriend for a while. After some shenanigans his grandma (who is hospitalized) thinks they are an actual couple, is super happy and the protagonist not wanting to break her heart leads her on.

The two main leads have pretty much no chemistry together even after 10 chapters. The only reason they interact is because of ridiculous coincidences: oh, she just HAPPENS TO attend the same university, just HAPPENS TO literally live next door to the protagonist, just HAPPENS TO visit the same beach at the same time than the protagonist for vacation, etc. You get the idea. Basically the author had to force the two characters into these situations one after the other with no rhyme or reason, or they would want nothing to do anything with each other. All the plot and character-development (what minuscule amount of them we have anyways...) happens through contrived coincidences and forced interactions, which is just bad writing in general.

Art - 6

Ehh, decent I suppose. I can't for the life of me differentiate between the side characters, but the main characters are well drawn and the scenery can be nice every now and then. Nothing to write home about though.

Characters - 1

Characters either don't have personalities to speak of or they are unequivocally pathetic excuses of human beings. So far there are 3 prominent characters: Kazuya (protagonist), Chizuru (the titular rental girl, main female lead) and Mami (Kazuya's ex-gf).

Kazuya is your typical awkward, stupid, perverted, pathetic virgin harem protagonist character with absolutely no unique traits or redeeming characteristics. The only even remotely unusual thing is that he is a university student, not a high school one, not that that changes anything whatsoever. He rents a girlfriend from one of these sugar-daddy services, then gets all pissy when he realizes that she is nice to him out of this being her job and not out of actual feelings (like, duh, dumbass) and that she is just as nice to all the other costumers. when the misunderstanding with the grandma happens, he just runs with a lie and ends up groveling at Chizuru's fate, literally begging her to allow him to rent her again and again to keep up with the ever growing pile of lies, because he cannot grow a backbone and fess up. All the while wasting a fortune on his fake girlfriend, despite not having a job and living off of the money of his parents. A real keeper, this one. Oh, and his interest in romance is skin deep: he is fine with any manipulative, mean girl, as long as she has a smoking hot body.

Chizuru is the girlfriend for rent Kazuya hires. She starts out with this saccharin-sweet, blatantly fake attitude at first, but it doesn't take long for her real personality to show: mean, smug, business-like and bitchy, who, according to her very own statement, is having the time of her life doing her job. Her job, which is basically raking in money by leading on a different creep / loser virgin every day with her faked sweet persona to pump as much money out them for her "services" as possible. Every time she does something nice or uncharacteristically decent with the protagonist and I thought ("okay, so maybe this is where she'll show some positive traits, aside of being a manipulative, mean b****"), the very next chapter always starts out with a protagonist getting a hefty check with several times of her normal fee for being nice, accompanied by an ice-cold, all-business letter. To put it simply, she keeps the protagonist around, because he is an easy cash cow for her who is literally groveling and begging her so to allow him to keep paying quite a bit of money consistently, only so that he wouldn't have to grow a backbone and own up to his shit. The only difference between what she does and a prostitute is that prostitutes at least give actual service, not just fake smiles and false hopes. But I guess that would have been too raunchy for Shounen Weekly.

Momo is very similar to Chizuru in that she puts up this cutesy persona, which the protagonist swallows hook, line and sinker. In reality, she just likes to mess around with guys and then dumping them, but then she gets all jealous and vindictive when she thinks the protagonist is over her and decides to break up their non-existent relationship. Honestly, both her and Chizuru excels and enjoys leading on morons like the protagonist, the only difference is that one does it for money, the other out of sheer vanity. Which is worse, well, I leave that up for your consideration.

All three of them are horrible people and the supposed romance between the two main leads is pathetic and basically non-existent. I suppose, in a way, they deserve each other.

Enjoyment - 2

Reading this is like watching a trainwreck: you know it's horrible, it pisses you off, you know you'll have bad memories of it, but it's still so fascinatingly terrible, that you can't just look away. That's why I might keep up with this one out of bile fascination, because I'm somewhat curious how many more total asspull "coincidences" will it take for the mangaka to try to make some form of chemistry exist in between the two main leads and to, heavens forbid, try to do the impossible and make me not despise them with a passion. It kinda gets close to the "so bad, it's good" territory, though it's mostly just bad.

Overall - 2

Again, trash. Bad writing, tired and unoriginal jokes, terrible characters with zero chemistry... it fails at every aspect.

Don't get me wrong, I know that the characters will eventually be changed into something resembling decent human beings (note that not "developed", but forcefully "changed", because the gap here is way too big for natural character development). As I said, run of the mill garbage so I expect zero originality. At this point I've only read 12 chapters, so these are not spoilers, just my personal guesses, but I'd willing to bet my bottom dollar on them with how predictable these stories are:

- the will they / won't they will go on for a long time, both finding more fun in each other's company, but that won't stop the protagonist from being pathetic or the female lead from fleecing the protagonist for all his worth

- After some time some crisis will come along, that will push the protagonist to come clean, if I'd have to venture a guess, Plot Device Grandma will come down with a serious case of UTDNPC (as in Unidentifiable Terminal Disease of Necessary Plot Contrivance), that's where hospitalizing older parental figures usually go

- this will push Chizuru into facing the feelings she developed for the protagonist by then and after some drawn out bullshit melodrama they will have their happily ever after

- at some point we'll have some family melodrama about Chizuru just pretending to enjoy the constant dating, that she is just really lonely, maybe had some traumatic experience, yadda-yadda, basically some made up nonsense about how she is not as much of a manipulative b**** as she looks and really is an innocent, pure girl at heart (this seems to be a growingly popular genre with the entire "pure gyaru" archetype and all, might as well try to ride the coattails of a trend, not like the mangaka has a single original idea anyway)

- there are going to be random side-girls being attracted to the total failure of a guy the protagonist is for no real reason, because we have to have harem antics and melodrama in a romance story, right? They gonna play up their antics, then get pushed to the sidelines for new ones to replace them once the mangaka runs out of stereotypical jokes to crack at their expense

Again, I don't know any of this at the time of writing this, so these are not spoilers. Still, I'd be genuinely, REALLY surprised if I'd be wrong even on a single point.

Overall, just don't waste your time, not worth it.

I really don't like when people are writing reviews by the truckload after only reading the first dozen or so chapters of the manga. And considering the age (and the scores) of the reviews currently present on the site, all of them seems to be from the time when only the first half of the manga was available. That explains all the 9s and 10s. Heck, I would've give it a 9 or 10 around the 30th or 40th chapter. But after the strong start the quality only goes down until the end, which is quite honestly the worst trainwreck of an ending I've seen ... in a long while. So, let's get started.

Story - 3 (Poor)
The set up is good. A bunch of high-schoolers stranded up on a strange, mysterious and quite hostile island. Add together the first season of Lost and the Lord of Flies and you get the early chapters of Eden no Ori. Awesome? Yes. Promising? Yes. The problem is, that the manga never really fulfils this promise. In the early chapters there's no real story to speak of: our heroes move from one place to another trying to survive, while constantly expanding the settings and the characters. However, this becomes kind of stale soon enough: in every arc, the manga introduces a bunch of characters, some good guys and a greater number of douches (yes, it's that easy to distinguish). By the end of the arc, the good guys usually survive and join up with the protagonist team (and becoming insignificant almost instantly), while the baddies get eaten by something nasty. Rinse and repeat for around a hundred chapters. There are a few surprises along the way, but what keeps you reading is the number of mysteries piling up. You want answers. You want explanations and conclusion for the also increasing number of plot-threads. And this is why I gave such a low score: you'll get NONE of these. The explanations come in a form of science, that does not work that way. Some plot-threads get completely forgotten (Hades for one). And as for conclusion, the last few chapters were supposed to be the big reveal, putting everything to place and explaining all the mysteries. Supposed is the keyword here: they explain nothing. They just add to the number of question marks. The entire conclusion is illogical, rushed and nonsensical in general. I could rage on for pages why and how, but I don't want to give away any specific spoilers, so I refrain from doing so. Now add complete asspull plotwists, cardboard cut-out, cartoonishly evil bad-guys, ridiculous monsters, science defying the laws of nature, abundant fan-service and the fact that all of this is played 100% straight; so you are supposed to take everything here seriously, when some parts would be just too stupid even for a parody, and you get the reason behind the score given for this segment.

Art - 8 (Very Good)
Ok, I admit that this is not my field of expertise. I'm a writer, but I couldn't draw anything to save my life. So maybe I go too easy on the manga in this aspect, but I loved the art. The ancient mammals really came through as fearsome animals. The surroundings are also really atmospheric, sometimes downright eerie. My only serious complaint would be that while the main characters are well-drawn, some of the sidecast (especially the guys who are only around for one arc) are not so, and sometimes I got them mixed up. But with this huge cast, that's forgiveable I guess.

Charactrer(s) - 4 (Decent)

Decent, although barely. The characters are flat and never really get any development. They're go through this typical shounen change: shit happens, and they are suddenly either become complete jerks, or heroes. Now, in the first part, this isn't too much of a problem, since it's somewhat compensated by the number of characters getting introduced constantly. However around the time when the survival part ends and the evil doc comes into the picture, the constant flow of new charactes stop and the manga focuses on the already existing team. And this is where it becomes painfully obvious, that beyond the little background info shared in their own arcs, there's nothing else going for any of the characters. The relationship between them is just as stale, as the characters themselves. Take the "romance" between the protagonist and his main love interest. Both of them are donkans. Yay. At one point, while protecting Rion's (supposedly) unconscious body, Akira literally shouted this in one of the antagonists' face: "This is my woman! Got a problem with that?!" And even this didn't pushed their relationship even an inch forward. No comment.

Enjoyment: 5 (Mediocre)

Well, on an average at least. The survival part is friggin' awesome, I loved every chapter of it. After that, as the story was becoming more and more idiotic and I lost interest. In the last few chapters the only "enjoyment" I got was awkwardly laughing between facepalms. So starts out as 10, ends as 1, thus on average 5.

Overall: 6 (Overall)
It's a real shame what has this manga become in the end. When it started it had some much potential, showed so much promise. Hell, it easily could have been a timeless classic. But as time and chapters passed by, it descended lower and lower in the abyss of asspull and bad writing. I could still kinda-sorta recommend it as long as you don't have any expectations. It's awesome in the beginning and even later it's still kind of fun for a while.

Sometimes I'm just in the mood to read something easy, short but still interesting. In one of these occasions I just happened to stumble upon A Girls.
Interesting basic premise?
Check.
Short?
Check.
Easy reading without obscure philosophies or hard-to-get scientific mumbo-jumbo?
Check.
Alrighty, let's dive right in...

STORY 8/10
...
A story is well paced and keeps you interested form the first chapter to the last. It even has a few surprising plot-twists here and there, which is quite an accomplishment from a manga of this length. However, quite a few things were never really explained and the ending was such a convenient cop out. It was still good but I would have been happier if it were whom did Kazao actually choose in the end. I can't get into details without spoiling the entire manga, so let's just say the ending was a bit more open then I'd like it to be. Also, toning down fanservice a bit would've made the manga better.

ART 7/10
Well, nothing to write home about here. It's good but nothing special really.

CHARACTERS 7/10
The characters are interesting enough to keep you on with the story but that's all. After their first introduction you pretty much know all about them. No significant character development, hidden traits or anything the like. But hey, for 15 chapters this is enough and I have no serious complaints.

ENJOYMENT 8/10
Did I get what I was looking for? Mostly. It was an enjoyable ride but the background info on the island and it's "mysteries" were a bit too vague and, as I've already said the ending left me hanging.

OVERALL 8/10
If you want an interesting, easy to read love story with some mystery twist in it, go for it. You won't regret it. Chances are that this won't be the manga of your life but it's definitely an enjoyable and fun way to spend an hour or so.