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Here now, I decide to leave my mark in MAL Internet history. On a manga that most people have definitely not heard about before.

Sora Ga Haiiro Dakara (Because the Sky is Gray) is manga that follows a “Monster of the Week” format. Featuring a collection of short stories that are all unique and never the same. Each story is different in the emotions it conveys, the characters there are, and the actual story it sets to tell.

The stories that Sora ga Haiiro Dakara tells at first would give off the appearance or feeling of being cliche and simple. Yet they are unexpectedly realistic ... and mentally complicated. Whenever others mention this manga in any way. They might say that the stories are dark, harsh, and overwhelmingly negative. However there is a better way to describe it.
Life is full of positives and negatives, we as humans live with regrets and sometimes we learn to just move on.
The stories that are being told in Sora Ga Haiiro Dakara are awfully relatable. They’re just normal stories as if someone was telling someone else that story in a conversation. Thus I do not see it as negative or dark but as real instead and one must give credit to the writing for that.

The writing is what makes these stories far from simple. The author does nothing short of an excellent job of writing each and every single character out. Most characters in the way they talk, think, and react, are very real and authentic. This manages to make the characters that are usually always someone different, relatable to the reader. Sometimes the reader may understand the characters' frustration, their emotions. Because the reader was maybe once in their situation, or could still be. This helps the reader to connect, understand, and appreciate the story being told.
Most of the stories shocked me with how down to earth they were. The stories are heavily based on reality and situations that may happen to people in their own lives. Usually they don’t rely on fantasy elements but there is the occasional story like that every now and then. Life can’t always go the way we want it to, we all have our own small problems and moments. The author understands this and adds that element to the stories, as if they lived through it all themselves. It was all done remarkably well.
There are a few characters and moments that may be over-exaggerated just a bit in typical manga style. However these tend to hardly get in the way. Usually they don’t hurt the story either, and they might occasionally add a bit of a comedy element to it sometimes depending on the reader's humor.
So the author manages to EXPLAIN emotions awfully well, what about showing?

Art style can be very crucial and important in any manga. Although it’s difficult to mess up, it can easily go wrong. With that said, the author, who is also the artist, does an excellent job. Sometimes the characters' emotions are shown in a very special and specific way using art. Displaying how they may feel exactly, or to further illustrate their feelings that may be obvious to the reader. The art truly may come off as simple at first, but there will be moments where the art will catch the reader off guard. It’s nice to look at and it really gets you thinking about the feelings that the characters are having.

In a manga where we never meet the same character more than three times at least. It can be pretty important that we never feel bored with the characters, or think that the author is being lazy and lacking creativity. With that said, Sora ga Haiiro Dakara does a great job at making every character feel unique, individual, and different from each other. It’s a very small detail that really goes the distance and helps to make every chapter interesting. The reader may have a hard time trying to find anyone that looks exactly the same.
Of course the writing is what majorly helps this too. A lot of characters are unique in terms of personality. This was briefly mentioned earlier. Characters speak differently and have their own thoughts. Some of them are meant to be quiet, loud, and stereotypical. It’s someone new, different in a small way and never the same, like us humans. The art helps to push that. While some personalities and characters aren’t that fleshed out, this is mainly because they’re not the main focus of the story being told, thus they don’t have much dialogue. Background characters if that’s what they’re meant to be.

In the end, Sora Ga Haiiro Dakara manages to be strange, real, and so genuine. I loved it, and enjoyed my time reading it.
However after everything, there will always be someone with a different opinion, and just not think the same way that I or others do. This is definitely a manga that may not be a hit with everyone. If anything that I mentioned sounds even the slightest bit interesting to you, then please, give this manga a shot.

9/10

Yeah hello reader, I’m a manga reader! You’re probably sick of hearing that specific phrase especially for this anime. But I’m gonna be real with you here, this is a.. “alright” adaptation of the manga at best. I would recommend the manga instead of course because to be honest, you just won’t get the same experience as the manga then watching this. But I will attempt to give off.. my best review that I can for this. I will try to be strictly just the anime and try not to say too much.

First off this is Strategy, Psychological, Drama, and it’s supposed to be ... Intense because of all that. Does it succeed at doing that? Somewhat.. the first two games don’t really hit like they should. Honestly these were the boring parts of the manga too anyway; so it’s expected to also be boring in the anime adaptation as well. But with a poor set of visuals and poor choices made overall. The first two games felt.. extremely underwhelming to say the least and was overall boring to watch. But near the end of the second game things get impressive and better and that’s where the story gets interesting too.

The story is simple at first, a high stakes game, high school students must play. Because one of them has a huge debt they must pay off! Simple at first but because of certain twists and characters it starts to become something much more than that. You’ll notice it and you’ll love it. Originally the reader/watcher will be given a simple idea of who the traitor is to begin with. Then that idea was confirmed but then low and behold there’s a curveball thrown at you and you’re given a completely new different idea. Not only that, the drama, strategy, and all that good stuff. You finally get to notice all that stuff and it actually feels like it. One thing Tomodachi Game likes to do is make some big twists and reveals constantly. Even throughout just 12 episodes they fit as many twists as they could into this honestly. Which was impressive to see. The story will get different in ways like that.

But this studio.. I know they’re not experienced enough but the choices that were made during this are incredibly poor and is what brings down this anime score for me. From poor visuals and leaving certain parts out for time saving, then there’s the overall animation and quality. They fail to do all 3 of these and it just really doesn’t make it enjoyable and really just makes it bad to watch. Though I understand that studios will have to leave out parts sometimes in order to save time; there were some parts in this anime that literally did not need to be cut out and probably would’ve been better if they left them in. One of the parts was during the end of the second game, instead of leaving in a simple humorous panel which would be.. a rather fitting ending to THAT game and episode, this panel would’ve left off with another cliffhanger ending and a future twist to be revealed. They instead leave it out and decide to spoil for you the twist and reveal which now has been told early and there’s no impact upon it whatsoever. Then the animation is just.. poor and so underwhelming, sometimes I felt like I was just reading the manga again on my TV screen, but I understand that there’s not a lot of big animation opportunities, especially within the first two games. But it does get better once they get more opportunities, nothing amazing.. but also nothing downright terrible in my opinion.

One little thing this studio likes to do is change the filter on a lot of scenes throughout the series.. which I honestly just didn’t like and thought kind of ruined the scene.. but hey man you got poor visuals you gotta try and do something else to make people forget the visuals. The only time where I liked it was the last episode.

The characters I can say weren’t as interesting in the beginning, could care less for them. Oh but near the end there I start to really like some of these characters. The main MC that we follow seems to be just a simple high school boy at first but then things take a turn and suddenly we’re introduced into some manipulative cold genius apparently. Realizing it in the first episode you start to think if he can live up to that. Then he does and starts to become a super entertaining character to watch. He also has these crazy face expressions which aren’t as detailed as they are in the manga which is just a bit disappointing and honestly kind of ruins how “crazy” they are but again, inexperienced studio. Anyway, the characters, I liked some of them and hated some of them in the end, which is really supposed to happen to be honest.

But the music. Oh man they nailed the music in all honesty, it was one of the upsides in this show and is what really added that extra little seasoning to some scenes. Sometimes I was just jamming out to be honest instead of actually paying attention to what was happening. Great music. I liked it very much.

But at the end of the day it’s only 12 episodes. It obviously ends on a cliffhanger and with no news about S2 it seems like this is all we’re getting. There isn’t much you can do with 12 episodes and you obviously can’t fit the entirety of 101 chapters ( at the time of typing this dumb review out ) in one season. Did I enjoy this? There were some ups and downs, it was mixed constantly. That’s the annoying part about this adaptation, it was bad and good and then at the end; the best I could give it was a 7 out of 10. That’s being generous honestly. It was close to a 6 for me. Then do I recommend this to you? Not the anime adaptation.. but I do recommend the manga instead. It’s a much better experience and I’m sure some of you will enjoy it.

This is gonna be a long one.. because I have a lot to say about this “Manhwa.” First off it’s important to establish something before we talk about anything.
You’re either gonna really love this or really hate it, that’s because you’ll either see the problems it has and not care; or you’ll absolutely hate it right away because of those problems.
This was hyped up A LOT, after reading review after review and seeing the ratings this got. I was basically allowed to assume that this is one of the best. But I just can’t really agree with the side of people that love ... this, which is fine; we all have different opinions.

These problems I mentioned are unavoidable by the way, what I mean by that is that you’re gonna notice them eventually. As long as you think about it and have developed your brain, you will see the problems.

Let’s go fishing.

First and foremost this is the “MC becomes extremely OP and the strongest thing alive” kind of story. You figured it shouldn't be difficult to create a story around something like that. But you’d be surprised.
Moving on, what I think is important with stories like these is the characters and MCs motives. If you nail those then you got something good with a story like this. But neither of those are there and that’s the biggest knife in the chest this Manhwa has.

Let me talk about the story first. This story isn’t good, it mainly follows the same pattern and cycle a lot of the time after the first arc.
1. Jin-Woo enters a dungeon,
2. levels up,
3. finds stuff and asks questions, then leaves.
After this an outside event happens which most of the time isn’t really interesting or intriguing enough to make you want to continue reading.
Then after that some outside events happen. He goes back to another dungeon to repeat the same thing! This supposedly “story” follows this same cycle over and over with barely any character motives or actual story to go off of ever.
When the actual outside events happen, guess what? They’re super uninteresting and I could care less about them. They are just character interactions that aren't really that good because they’re mostly just the same thing over and over again. Which is mostly praising Sung Jin-Woo, or wanting to hire him.
It doesn’t end there however after the author becomes tired of the whole dungeon cycle, he then decides to move onto a new pattern.
1. World or People are in danger.
2. Only Sung Jin-Woo can stop the danger.
3. Comes in and Stops Danger.
4. World saved.
After the whole dungeon cycle you’ll notice this is essentially the same cycle but to be fair it only gets repeated like two times, so not bad considering the almost 10 times the dungeon one got repeated right?
After these it seems like the story is finally doing something, it’s finally building off something. What is that something!? It’s the system. It finally uses something that it made and uses it to develop a story. Finally after like 110 Chapters I’m intrigued and entertained hopefully they don’t botch this!

They botched it. That is all. In my opinion it was botched because of the still somewhat poor characters and their interactions still, although not as bad as they have been; it was still bad nonetheless. It was also rushed, and didn’t feel right at all.
Also you like never get an explanation for things they kind of just assume that the reader can figure it out? I think they wanted to try to make the reader interested in the topics or questions and leave them with little hints to figure that out. But it’s not really an interesting topic and is the least of my concerns when reading.
Again that has to do with me not caring about the characters as well I think.
Well finally after 150 something chapters you get that explanation with the final chapters. A explanation about what is actually going on with everything.
An explanation long overdue about a topic or question that I really didn’t care about either. Because the question was brought up so late. So the reveal wasn’t really that nice either.

Let me tell you about the characters, I don’t care about them at all. They’re not interesting, and why are they here? These characters just overall feel empty, there really isn’t a reason to like them; is the reason supposed to be because they’re cool? That’s such a poor excuse, sometimes they’ll throw in this random character that you will not remember the name of and kill them off.
Was I supposed to feel some sort of shock or sadness when that happened? Frankly I didn’t, because I didn’t care about that guy plus I didn’t remember their name. I was once told, if you don’t remember the characters name then they’re most likely not important. That was like almost every single character here.
Of course when they switch from supporting character to supporting character, there is little to no development that happens in these characters. Even when the main supporting characters get beat up, I still don’t feel bad or angry whatsoever. I’m mad that the author decided that they’re gonna do that and thought it would do something.

Think about it carefully when reading, these side characters don’t change that much when they’re introduced. You don’t feel or see the change that should happen, they literally just exist and they feel like a background character that randomly just came in for a dialogue. I am telling you literally the truth: all of these characters follow only the same 4 paths and motives.
1. Kill or Fight Sung Jin-Woo.
2. Promote Sung Jin-Woo to Their Guild.
3. Geek out about Sung Jin-Woo or Praise Sung Jin-Woo.
4. Beg Sung Jin-Woo for help.
That’s all they do continuously throughout the entire story. It's so damn annoying and boring to read, and it’s not even funny. I almost dropped this Manhwa because of these characters. I cannot think of a character that existed in this entire Manhwa that actually was there for something else besides Sung Jin-Woo. You figured that instead of focusing on Sung Jin-Woo all the time we would at least get to see what these other characters do, if they have any other motive that isn’t Sung Jin-Woo. Get this, that does happen we do focus sometimes on the life of others, but guess what? Those events still are focusing on Sung Jin-Woo somehow in some way.
Please can they at least attempt to give these characters other motives that don’t involve Sung Jin-Woo, can they give them some backstory or background? They don’t even feel relatable. I don't know why they just don’t.

I don’t even really like Sung Jin-Woo himself, which brings me to the next point. The MC himself and his motives are really poor and depressing as well. He has no motives at all, and when he finds a motive that the story can actually do something with, it gets rid of it within like 10 chapters and when that mission is complete the impact or accomplishment is just so.. not there.
This guy's motto every single time he enters a dungeon is “I need to get stronger!” Which was really cool and touching the first 3 times..but got tired quickly when he could now easily kick everyone's ass after the first 3 dungeons.
At first this guy was everything a good character should be, nice appearance, good personality, and an unoriginal but still nice backstory to him.
Most important of all he was relatable, but when he becomes strong he loses almost all of those perks. Even the backstory and background doesn’t become too useful because they don’t ever really need to use it after he gets strong. Because we get it now you’re literally stronger than everyone, you used to be that now you’re this.
The only thing he has going for him is that he looks pretty badass at times, I’ll give him that but that mostly goes to the art.

Well speaking of which the Manhwa does have its good points, which is the art. The art was really good to look at, sometimes I just sat there and didn’t care wtf was actually going on. I was just looking at the art and appreciating it. That is one thing I can guarantee you will like, the art is very respectable and is what carries the Manhwa mainly.

But that ending is not there either, the actual light novel ending was like 20+ chapters. You wanna know how many chapters there were in this Manhwa for the ending? It was one. One that I’m not really satisfied with, one that doesn’t feel good enough, one that could’ve been so much better. The actual pacing overall isn’t really that good, because with the first three dungeons he’s still learning and becoming stronger which was nice and pretty cool to see. But then he immediately gets stronger so fast right away, which then makes everything so predictable and uninteresting now.

After all that, it’s difficult for me to say that I can recommend this to you. I really wanted to enjoy this and like this and put it as one of my favorites. But I just can’t because of the dumb repetitiveness and cycle this Manhwa continuously gives me. Although I managed to finish it and I did enjoy some of it, I mostly felt bored and empty a lot of the time too. Especially when other characters were around and when characters died, still felt empty and annoyed. Like I said in the beginning, you will either like it or hate it. I’m in the middle, so I don’t know what to tell you. I would recommend reading the first 1-50 chapters, and see if you can go on from there.

5/10.

Did you like Classroom of the Elite? Yes? Well, did you like Horikita? Also yeah? Well guess what! You still shouldn’t read this.

There was no reason for me to read this, it was literally on hold for 2 weeks until I said “screw it let's get it over with.” I ended up wasting my time, I would rather make a sandwich instead.

This is a “what if?” As described by the description on MAL. Even then it’s not that big of a difference or anything to really be called a what if. When it comes to a what if you want it to really grab ... your attention and get you saying, “huh, what if that did happen?” That’s how a what if should get you hooked. But essentially this isn’t interesting. It’s also useless because why do we need this?

It’s supposed to focus more on the relationship between Horikita and Ayanokōji. That’s not really important or that big of a what if. As a matter of fact this has the romance tag even though nothing happens between these two, it’s just Horikita really acting out of character; which just isn’t right to see. I’m pretty sure even the author was thinking to themselves, “Why am I doing this?”
They gave up during the end because what the heck kind of ending are you supposed to give this?

Let me tell you something about the art, that’s the one thing this manga has got going for it. The art is fine and not totally insulting or anything. That’s all.

No one asked for this. Literally no one. This is not one of those cases where it’s “the hero we never knew we needed.” Instead it’s more like “this is a mistake, can we take it back?” No you can't, it's forever stuck here and now we have to suffer the consequences.

Don’t waste your time reading this if you’re a big Classroom of the Elite fan, of course I can’t tell you what to do. But I can try and stop you and warn you. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.

“Maybe there's a place I can't reach, but if it still makes your heart fluff a little, that makes me happy.”

Kamibukuro-kun wa Koishiiteru is a very short 2 volume manga. Literally you can finish this in under 30 minutes if you really chose to, which I did. Because I randomly remembered out of nowhere that this manga existed, I then decided to read it and to my surprise there were only 17 chapters. So to read I went.

And I enjoyed every minute of it.

This is a very simple comedy romance manga. A very simple story to understand. Very simple everything as a matter of fact. ... It’s not confusing to understand it’s literally 17 chapters ( technically 15, there’s extras ).

But just because it's super simple and what not doesn’t mean it’s bad at all. This is a very cute and nice manga. The quote at the beginning is a message from the author, making my heart fluff they did indeed manage to accomplish. They made more than just my little fragile heart fluff. Reading this manga is such a nice fun experience, you read it and it’s just a cute manga overall. That’s about the only way I can describe it.

The characters are also very enjoyable, to be fair you only get to see the two main characters the entire time. But still that doesn’t matter because they’re super cute to see together and very likeable anyway.

The art here is fine, it’s nothing crazy or complicated, but it’s not something so bad that it’s offensive. It’s just nice simple art for a nice simple romance manga. It’s just very “in the middle art.” That’s how I would describe it.

Like I said, I really enjoyed this for how short it was and I’m glad I read it overall. It was a nice read and made me laugh, and give my heart that “fluff” feeling that the author wanted.

If you have nothing better to do, I would recommend this to you or someone. It’s a very short read and it’s enjoyable and likeable.

8/10

Here, I sit down, on my 1998 old office chair on the brink of collapse. As I type out my first anime review ever. I’m more than 11 years late to the Nichijou train but whatever. But 11 years later did this anime still deliver and be great?

It did.

Let me tell you this as an anime watcher, there will never be another show like Nichijou. Everything about this anime is just super well done and completely right on the spot. I walked in with expectations from other people, expectations that screamed, “You need to watch this show, you need Nichijou in your life!” They ... were right. I needed this show in my life, I can’t think of another anime or show that I enjoyed as much as this one.

Let me start off into the official review by saying. If you like story development or good stories overall. There’s not really any of that here, they’re just a bunch of mini stories that cover everyday life essentially. But of course trying to make them funny, I didn’t mind this but I think it’s important to know that.

Now moving on, the characters. The design of them isn’t anything too special, it’s nothing too complicated but certainly it’s nothing that’s bad or ruins the show. The main thing I want to say about the characters here is that they’re all unique and different in their own way. Different personalities, different goals, different mindsets. Really and I mean really, these characters are all different and they’re each likeable as well. I don’t think there’s a single character I can think of that I hated. Sometimes I find myself thinking, “When will we get back to these other characters?” I ended up liking even the background characters that don’t play an important role, so much that I couldn’t get enough of every character, even the main ones we follow. Literally a cat, yes cat, was one of my favorites in this show.

Moving onto the art and sounds, the art was just so amazing and nice to look at. It was pleasing and beautiful. The show has these breaks after the little episode or scenario was over. These breaks just had simple background or art pieces. I actually would find myself looking forward to these breaks because the art was nice to look at. It was a nice break after I was laughing my ass off at the previous scenario or joke.
Honestly let me tell you I’m sure Kyoto Animation showed off a bit for this show. They definitely did more than they needed to, but I’m glad they did. They really wanted to seal the deal and make this really good.
Moving onto sounds, definitely one of my favorite OSTs by far. The way this music really fits every scene and really adds to the feeling is just.. breathtaking almost. Even the simple scenes have music that just goes well with it. They nailed it on both of these and certainly earned my respect for it.

I’ll tell you what as well the feeling this anime gives you is just non-stop happiness. I don’t remember a time where I wasn’t smiling when watching this show. I’m pretty sure I always had a smile on my face when watching this show. Then there’s the moments where I just straight started laughing my damn ass off, a show like this that was set out to make me and others laugh; they sure as hell did that a lot. But there’s also those heartwarming moments which even make me start to pull a few tears. That was totally unexpected but I liked it. The message they sought out to deliver in those moments was nice, and comforting for some reason. I enjoyed every minute of this show fully.

Nichijou - My Ordinary Life is a masterpiece and did everything right to me. Right enough that I give it what I think it is deserving of.
A 10/10.