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This review may contain some spoilers.

"Emergence", as I've known it since I read a few pages months before it became so widespread, is easily one of the darkest and most depressing manga, let alone eromanga, that I've read. The outlook of it is very bleak and pessimistic, possibly to a fetishistic degree. It's not terrible, but I'm not saying it's good, either.


Beginning with the most attractive feature, the art is fairly good, with a distinctive style. It's very expressive, perhaps a bit too expressive, as I generally found it to bear a bit more resemblance to art that would better fit a more light-hearted and ... "mainstream" (i.e. not hentai) manga; however, this expressiveness did help some of the darker scenes to feel more "grotesque", making them less bearable than a more "standard", for lack of a better term, art style. As for the more anatomical aspects of it, while the proportions are fairly mild, the art is a bit more exaggerated than the average eromanga, Saki's body or poses sometimes looking downright silly in my opinion.


Moving onto the story, as you may glean from the synopsis, it's essentially the downward spiral of Saki's life after her high school debut that she changed her image for. A more accurate way to describe it may even be that it's a story that repeatedly beats Saki, and likely the reader too, down. The story is told in what could be called a chain of struggles and tragedies, each one involving sex in one way or another, understandable as it's an eromanga, and the degradation of Saki's mind (and eventually body). It's rather predictable in that things go terribly for Saki, though, of the manga I've read so far, it's unique in that the story is told from start to finish, going beyond where other hentai mangaka would leave off.

The writing is highly pessimistic in nature, and not above toying with the readers' emotions, for better or worse; personally, while I cried reading this, I admit that I'm susceptible to such writing methods, and will not guarantee anything. I found the ending more or less fitting of the manga, but I enjoyed a particular small moment of dialogue within the last few pages. Overall, though, I found the writing to be weak, and too reliant on easy gimmicks. While it was certainly tragic, since I've started thinking about the manga while writing this review, I've considered the possibility that an eromanga this sad is specifically so for fetish purposes, as simple shock value seems too simple.


As for characters, I feel as though there are no truly likeable characters in this manga. For a series that has the official English title of "Metamorphosis", the main character, Saki, seems to change the least in terms of characterization, remaining hopelessly naive even through the chain of tragedy involving her; many of the characters that you see less of in the manga show more change, in a few cases, very drastically. Even giving this manga the benefit of the doubt for being a hentai, no characters show anything beyond the role they were meant to fulfill, not even fleshing out that role beyond the bare minimum.


Personally, I did not enjoy this manga, and I primarily read it all the way through so I could understand what a few people I knew were talking about. Unfortunately, this manga was rather memorable, and further eromanga I've read have reminded me of this series, though I don't have any particular feelings about this other than regret.

I would recommend this manga for emotional masochists and those who like to cry, or, in the other hand, those who like to see fictional characters suffer beyond what is believable.


Overall, my experience with this manga was poor, and I feel as though it was trying way too hard to get a reaction from the reader, or that its tragic story was more meant as fetish bait than reaction bait.

To lighten this up a bit, in terms of hentai manga protagonist's suffering, Saki has nothing on Mai-chan.