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This review will spoil a first-chapter twist and vaguely touch on plot points, but is otherwise spoiler-free.

As of this review, this manga has only been about half-translated. At the pace of the current group's releases, they're projected to take over three years to complete the rest of the manga. This means that unless you can read Japanese, you can't read it to the end yet. Fortunately, I can, so I have the honor of writing the first complete review of this manga.

Before anything else, I must say that the MAL entry as well as some of the preliminary reviews are misleading you. Toss aside any ... expectation of this being a serious, disturbing, psychological drama about bullying, because they will only result in disappointment. Ijimeru Yabai Yatsu is an absurd, goofy manga that is structured similarly to a battle shounen. For the most part, it does not take itself very seriously, and any reader who does will only be met with questions and confusion. Now onto the review.

The first-chapter twist is interesting. From the perspective of Tanaka, we see Nakajima horribly bullying Shirosaki. Perhaps this is the kind of story that involves Tanaka attempting to stop Nakajima's bullying, or otherwise saving Shirosaki somehow. It's a premise that has been explored many times by other manga that take themselves far more seriously. But it's revealed that Nakajima is actually a kind person, and is being forced to bully Shirosaki by Shirosaki herself. This nicely turns the story on its head, reestablishes Nakajima as the protagonist, and sets up a far more unique premise, one where the bully himself is actually the victim.

The manga's goals seem to be in conflict with its premise. While Nakajima's grave circumstance with Shirosaki is given some importance early on, the story does not attempt to address it directly. It instead chooses to go in a different direction, having Nakajima confront other "genuine" bullies, with the rationale being that they would get in the way of his bullying Shirosaki. The story sidelines Nakajima's suffering, keeping it as a constant throughout the plot rather than the driving conflict of the narrative. To anyone wishing to see a story in which Nakajima searches for a way to escape his situation, this will definitely come as a disappointment.

Looking past the premise and towards the rest of the story, it becomes a bullying-themed battle manga, in each arc of which Nakajima meets increasingly threatening foes whose goals relate to bullying others. Everything about these storylines is absurd. The characters' powers, the premise, the setting, everything. The absurdity can often be funny, such as the school campus being so large that it takes thirty minutes to run across. It can also lead to endearing characters, more on that later. But the liberties that Nakamura takes to achieve this often gets in the way of the narrative.

For example, one story arc follows a merger of two schools into one, and involves a student council election where Nakajima runs for president to stop a competing bully from having his way with the newly-merged school. The manga claims that Nakajima has already secured the votes from everyone from his school pre-merger. Considering every student in the school sees Nakajima as an evil bully, it's hard to believe that everybody would vote for him instead of the other candidates. In another arc, Nakajima needs to procure a flash drive containing compromising footage of him so that it won't be shown to the public, but in this case, it's hard to believe that the arc's antagonists wouldn't keep several backups. Furthermore, it's especially hard to believe that despite literally the entire school being aware of systematic bullying, no information about it makes it outside the school. Including more would require more heavy spoilers, but the point I'm trying to make is that Nakamura hand-waves away or often straight up ignores inconsistencies, kinks in the story, and potential continuity errors for the sake of progressing the plot or to make a character look cool. There a large "anything goes" attitude, as if the universe has no rules or limits.

Furthermore, a lack of rules can result in a lack of stakes. Why should I ever feel that a character is in trouble when the definition of "trouble" isn't even agreed upon? When deus ex machinas are permissible and commonplace, tension is lost. Goofiness isn't an excuse to ignore rules and stakes, and a story with all of the above could have been achieved had it been given more thought.

Despite all this, Ijimeru Yabai Yatsu has one fantastic redeeming aspect: Its characters. Where many others fail, Nakamura has successfully written a cast of characters that is endearing and interesting to watch. The manga contains many dynamic characters that drastically change as the story progresses. Nakajima himself is thoroughly interesting, which is the most important quality that any good character must have. Despite placing quite low in the power ranking of characters, he doesn't come across as underpowered. His outward appearance as a ghastly bully contrasts well with his good nature, letting him have his cool moments while also preserving his role as the kind hero-type character of the story. His circumstance with Shirosaki also earns him sympathy from the reader, letting us easily root for him. He's calculating enough that he earns the respect of canonically smart characters, yet not so all-knowing that he can easily outmaneuver any challenge on his own. He's balanced and easy to love. He's not very complex or multidimensional, and grows relatively little compared to the rest of the cast, but the most important thing is that he is interesting and has agency.

The quality of being interesting to watch is shared among many other characters. Be it the pathetic underdog-type character who grows into a respectable person who earns the respect of other characters, or a prior villain, crippled, changing his ways and becoming an ally to Nakajima, whose fights are exciting to read. Nakamura has done a fantastic job of writing truly endearing characters.

A final note on art before the conclusion. The art is very simple. The way Nakamura draws his characters is very distinct, and should he continue his manga career beyond Ijimeru Yabai Yatsu, his character designs will no doubt be very recognizable as his own. However, there is a very low level of detail. Backgrounds are very sparse and almost resemble liminal spaces. There's basically no rendering to be found, making the art seem very flat and two-dimensional. As a result of all this, the panels contain a lot of white space. The manga doesn't take itself very seriously, and is very goofy, so this by no means detracts from the experience, but at the same time, the art is nothing to write home about.

For what it's worth, I personally enjoyed this manga. With all the criticisms I have about how little it takes itself seriously, I ended up loving the characters so much that I overlook its downsides. But in being objective, I have to be fair, and the fact of the matter is that this manga's narrative is relatively poor in quality. Its goofiness makes it difficult to be truly invested in the plot, and for many, the characters simply can't make up for that. So in the end, I can only conclude that this manga is mediocre.

Considering this manga has a full official English release, I found it strange that its MAL page is so empty. For that reason, I will leave a review.

My conclusion is that this manga is worse than mediocre. This review will contain spoilers, but the manga is so short that if anything about the synopsis interests you, you might as well read it.

The first few chapters were promising. It had a tone to it that made it unique and set it apart from other manga, reminiscent of many of those Japanese horror RPGmaker games. This is a result of Okutsu leveraging the art style in many ... scenes. The inking is sketchy, with very dark lines, and many pages would have a very smeared appearance that was unsettling to look at. It's rare and genuinely impressive for imagery in manga to be unsettling without resorting to gore and body horror. One page had the main character with a scribbled face juxtaposed against the otherwise usual art style. This is all to say that the art made me optimistic about this manga. A mystery with a psychopath of a protagonist and unsettling art that would deliver said mystery with a horror tone. This did not end up being the case. The artistic quirks that Okutsu incorporated were lost partway through the first volume. Even if they persisted, they wouldn't have elevated the mediocre story.

The story begins with the main character, Iori, waking up with amnesia and a dead girl in his washroom. I find amnesia a particularly lazy plot device, so from the start I was unimpressed. During the exposition, we learn that the true protagonist, Hirama, is the one who killed the girl in Iori's washroom. She did so because she wants to be Iori's girlfriend, and took advantage of Iori's amnesia to kill his current girlfriend and take her place. The story then follows a very typical amnesia plot, where Hirama discovers who Iori truly is. Iori never regains his memory until the end of the story, so this truly is the meat of the story. Predictability is a death sentence for mystery. The story leads us through a gang, murders, drugs, and the climax of the story and the origin story for Iori ends up being a cannibal cult. These are generic, yes, but there are two other large issues with the course of this story.

The first is that the events in each part contribute very little to the mystery at large. The story gets sidetracked, Hirama plays at an arcade, she pretends to join a gang, she has a match with a genius computer girl. None of these things contribute to the underlying mystery of Iori. From the exposition, we already know that Hirama is a psychopath, but her murders and threats stop a short while into the story. Light-hearted scenes like her playing games make her seem sympathetic, and her taking down the cult at the end makes her seem heroic. One could argue that these contribute to her characterization, but it's made clear that Hirama never stops being a psychopath in the end, and she doesn't grow as a character at all. These "side quests" are simple distractions, and make the story that much more of a slog to read through.

The second issue with this structure is that the few bits of the plot that contribute to the greater mystery are predictable to the point where the reader can very easily figure out Iori's backstory from the few details that are given from the start. While it's generally a good thing if a mystery is told in a way that lets the reader decipher it for himself, a reader will figure out this mystery because of typical plot devices and cliche, rather than a careful interpretation of clues from the author. In fact, I doubt Okutsu even planned all the details of the story from the start. There is a scene that illustrates my point, where Hirama and a couple of gang members explore Iori's condo, finding washbasins in strange places throughout the place, eventually uncovering a tub hidden underneath the floorboards. Said washbasins are not present in the exposition when the condo is first shown to the reader, nor are they present in any other scene the condo is in until this one. While the story refuses to reveal the purpose of these washbasins, cannibalism will no doubt be one of the first things on any reader's mind. It's predictability that makes this mystery a slog to read, and the plot itself is not interesting enough to hold up in the mystery's absence.

The tone is all over the place. Avengers director Joss Whedon famously believes that a grim, dark story ought to have a joke here and there. I despise this take, and I believe it commonly destroys stories. This applies to Watashi (Kari). While it may be "funny" that Hirama is an expert at fighting games (debatable), the "joke" is completely out of place here. The entire scenario of her being at an arcade to begin with is out of place. Humor isn't entirely unwelcome in a story like this if done right, but spending entire chapters on these "side quests" is a huge blow against this manga, as short as it is. Furthermore, the purpose of humor in a dark story is to provide the reader with some relief between the grimmer moments. Humor can provide contrast, and make grim moments grimmer. This story does not have nearly enough dark moments for humor to add anything of value. The story also practically changes genre, as Hirama plays a high-stakes game with a little genius girl. Were this Kaiji, perhaps this would be entertaining, but here it suffers from the exact same issue of wasting many of this manga's precious forty chapters.

This manga has no true characters. The "characters" we see do not grow in any meaningful way, even by the end of the story. Iori regaining his memory isn't a character moment but a plot moment. Kei cuts her hair but the uselessness that she beats herself up over before doesn't go away. As I stated before, Hirama never changes as a person. Every character in the story is introduced with a quirk: a psychopath, an innocent and sweet girl, an obsessive gamer, a child genius. But when a character doesn't change or grow, they cannot be called a character. What they are is a plot device. That's every character in this story. There is no satisfaction in seeing Iori regain his memory, as he is not a character but a plot device. This is made doubly true considering the story revolves around him despite how little time he is actually given.

This leads me to a final point. This manga has far too many characters; a very common trapping that plagues many manga. Watashi (Kari) is only four volumes long, arguably barely enough to thoroughly develop even a couple of characters, let alone the number it has. Given its length, a character-driven story is simply out of the scope of this manga, even if Okutsu intended it.

I believe that if Okutsu had put a hard introspective focus on only a couple of characters, done away with the "side quests", leveraged the art style, and kept the style and tone from the early chapters, Watashi (Kari) would have been a much higher-quality work. But as it stands, all I can say is that the early chapters tricked me intro reading a generic mishmash of cliche story beats and stagnant characters.

Tsumugi is extremely cute. That's about it, to be honest.

The "dad raising a cute child" setting is one that tends to really stick with me. But unfortunately, Amaama to Inazuma couldn't deliver a solid experience. Its biggest problem is that it's boring. As the series starts, Tsumugi's overall cuteness and her personality are good enough that I'm kept interested for a few episodes. Endou Rina, as young as she is (10 years old!) did a fantastic job at voicing her, and watching her interact with her dad and meeting new characters with the viewer makes for interesting exposition, but apart from a few select extra-cute ... scenes, the novelty of it all quickly wears off after the first few episodes.

The characters show next to no growth by the time the series ends. Inazuka-sensei showing some improvement at chopping food is the only thing that comes to mind. It's mostly episodic, so I don't expect specific plot threads or much of an overarching plot, but if the one thing that's shared between ever episode (the characters) is next to stagnant, there has to be something else in each episode to keep me watching.

That something would most likely be the food. One of the series' major focuses is cooking. Learning a bit about the recipes is interesting, but every episode's cooking segment follows pretty much the same pattern, so they also quickly get quite tiring. The recipes themselves aren't particularly unique, we see a lot of common foods, though there's particularly wrong with that. The most disappointing part here is that despite being a major focus, the art for the food itself is not great. It's passable, but doesn't reach the mouth-watering heights that some other anime have reached, and to repeat, it's more disappointing than anything else.

The manga is completed, and perhaps it addresses my gripes with the characters, but as far as the anime is concerned, it failed to keep me interested for more than a few episodes, and while I enjoyed some scenes here and there, I felt a bit like I was forcing myself to watch until the end.