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I could've never imagined what this silly and relaxing story about wandering out at night with a vampire would turn into. It has it all.

The romance is so well written, it's not constantly teased and doesn't edge you at all, and the author actually gives the couples time to develop together, all while being self aware that the end goal is in fact, falling in love. All the romantic interactions feel earned and feel like they're leading to somewhere, they don't feel out of place, and thankfully they're pretty much never interrupted. They're always executed perfectly. Even though the romance is actually incredible and ... a breath of fresh air to all the generic soulless romcoms I've been seeing, it's not the main selling point.

Just reading the first chapter, one gets filled with a sense of calmness and wonder that I haven't seen any other anime or manga do this well. The anime adaptation of this manga executes everything perfectly. That feeling of wandering out at night, breathing in the cool summer night air and interacting with the people you see every now and then. It fills me with a sense of nostalgia I can't really describe. This manga is genuinely the absolute CHILLEST manga I've ever read. That, in my opinion, is its main selling point. It such a relaxing read, but it never gets boring or mundane, things are always happening and progressing, and if they're not, it has the amazing self aware comedy to act as support. People often like to praise popular slice of life manga as being such a relaxing read, but I've never seen anything execute that feeling as well as COTN.

In addition to romance, comedy and just the relaxing atmosphere of the night and how well it's executed, this manga features some of the most suspense arcs I've ever read. If you're reading this from where the anime left off (which I don't recommend, read from the start, even though the anime is very faithful), one of the first arcs you'll read will genuinely blow you away. And it develops into newer and newer heights from there, adding in action shounen elements, throwing in mystery to catch your attention, even giving characters new final forms. All that, while keeping true to its identity, and knowing exactly what kind of manga it is, and not straying from this path trying to be something else.

Also the cast is incredible. They have incredible chemistry and bounce jokes and dialogue off each other seamlessly. It sometimes reminds one of the quality of the Monogatari series.

There's really not much to say about this manga. It's just one of the most enjoyable, relaxing, wholesome, and action and suspense packed reads ever. An absolute masterpiece.

What by all rights should’ve been the anime of the year, turned out to be nothing more than just another bland adaption led by a corporate oriented studio like Mappa.

The focus of this review won’t just be anti-Mappa rhetoric, as I’m sure people are tired of all the unneeded controversy surrounding their last couple adaptations, and I myself don’t really see Mappa as some anime boogie-man and do enjoy some of their adaptations. Chainsaw Man just wasn’t one of them. I love Chainsaw Man, and this review might be viewed by some as just another unsatisfied manga reader hating on the anime, but hear ... me out.

My biggest issue with the anime is the totally uninspired and bland direction and art direction. Take one look at the volume covers and official colored version of the Chainsaw Man manga. What do you see? Vibrant, saturated colors with dynamic poses, something with clear artistic taste and passion. While in the anime, the viewer is greeted with a mute, desaturated color palette that leaves zero impression on the viewer and simply abides by Mappa’s trend of using such color palettes. Now, some might say, dull and grey colors represent the harsh and dystopian setting of the Chainsaw Man world. But ask yourself, is this creative? If you go to Pinterest and search up pictures of east-Asian streets and alleyways, something I highly recommend, you’ll find beautifully shot images of these places all with vibrant colors that do an even better job of displaying the dystopian setting. Now I’m not saying it should look like the Wano anime in One Piece, where the colors are purposefully cartoonish, just something resembling a more Cyberpunk aesthetic. And why not? The official colored manga is colored like this and it looks great and removes nothing from the story. All Mappa’s greyish colors do is make any frame from Chainsaw Man look like any other anime, with no distinguishable features besides, like, the characters. Specifically, it would’ve been mostly fine if the boring Mappa-style colors were limited to just the environment and regular scenes, but fight scenes? I think they should take notes from Toei on this, using color and dynamic lighting to amplify the visual impact of fight scenes, because, let’s be honest, Chainsaw Man’s fight scenes rely heavily on spectacle and insaneness, would greatly compliment the anime adaptation and actually make it an even better experience than the manga.

On that note, this anime, literally, and I mean this, does not add anything new to the Chainsaw Man experience. Except music, but we’ll touch on that later. In the first episode alone, during the first action scene, the viewer is greeted with an obvious CGI Denji, whose animation alot of the time just looks plain unnatural and overdone. 2D anime doesn’t usually have that much movement, and suddenly introducing a heavily dynamic 3D model into the scene really distracts. Especially when that 3D model is suffering from aliasing. The choreography during the fights is honestly pretty good, but they do take some creative liberties (which I completely support, if it’s done better than the manga), where they do their own shots and angles instead of adapting the manga 1:1. They do remove some rather iconic panels from the manga in their adaptation, and seeing how most of the anime is just a 1:1 adaptation, with some variations in angles and detail, all I can ask is why? Why remove some of the iconic spectacle if you’re going to keep everything else?

The cast. I did say my biggest problem was the direction and art direction, but the thing that annoyed me the most was the cast. Why does Makima sound like a 12 year old girl? Are they trying to make her sound cold and emotionless with a superficial element of kindness and an inviting nature? It would’ve succeeded, if Makima literally wasn’t built up as this dominating and controlling (hint hint) figure who Denji essentially treats as his master. Whenever she says something like “I don’t need a dog who says no.”, why should anyone take her seriously when she sounds like a child? When we had that rather explicit scene with her and Denji in the office, with great emphasis on Makima’s physical appeal, I just personally didn’t buy it. One of the worst things an anime can do is fail at creating convincing characters, which is what they did with Makima, who is arguably the most important character of the story besides Denji. And on the topic of Makima, why did they make her smile during the train scene and the scene at the mountain shrine? That was an unneeded change that just simply screams cheap attempts at creating a “creepy” character. “Oh wow, she’s smiling, but doing a totally nefarious thing, how original!!!”.

Now many of the cast members are perfect castings in my opinion, like Aki and Himeno. Denji is fine but I wouldn’t mind if they changed him. Now where the real spice touches my tongue is Kobeni. Kobeni’s voice acting performance, and I don’t say this lightly, is genuinely the worst performance I’ve ever heard in my life. It actually pained me to sit down and listen to them butcher Kobeni’s character like this. She’s originally built as this timid and shy girl, something like Sengoku Nadeko, but with a comedic twist, while the people at Mappa thought it would be funny to have her be the loudest most obnoxious, physically ear-damaging character I’ve ever seen on screen. The worst example of this is the scene where she goes “ehhhhh?”. Mappa probably thought this would be the funniest moment in anime history. It wasn’t. Even in her non-dramatic scenes where she’s just talking, she sounds so synthetic and fake. Obviously this is just a personal gripe, and butchering just one character isn’t the end of the world for an anime adaptation, it was just something that needed to be said.

The music is great. The opening visuals are awesome, and the endings are some of the most artistically creative and passionate things I’ve seen in any anime. Does that add to the anime experience? Somewhat. But mostly it removes from it. Why? Because when you start an episode and are greeted with something with clear artistic vision and creativity, like the opening, and immediately afterwards you go back to the bland and lifeless animation of the actual anime, it feels like a slap in the face. Mappa definitely was qualified to make Chainsaw Man, they proved that with the opening and endings, but they chose not to make it anything substantial, and instead went with a safer approach that would appeal to the most amount of people.

And here’s where we get to the meat of the story. This anime is lifeless, corporate, and feels like an adaptation made to make the studio money, and to sell more of the manga. It doesn’t feel like a passion project directed by artists, because it isn’t, it’s just another mass produced piece of media meant to appeal to the greater anime audience. I think the opening song itself is proof of this, I’m not going to go into whether or not I like the song, and openings don’t really have any relevancy when it comes to the quality of an anime, but choosing an artist who’s known for making songs for My Hero Academia is something that in my opinion paints the direction behind the anime in a bad light, as it just proves to me they’re going with the safest approach possible with this adaptation. And they are. There’s genuinely more creative vision and innovative approach in the action scenes of the Wano anime of One Piece than there is in Chainsaw Man. There’s a couple cool shots here and there, one I really liked was Denji doing the Levi Beyblade thing when fighting the zombie devil. A lot of the time though, it’s just CGI models smacking each other with their hands.

So in conclusion, this anime is definitely carried by its source material, it adds nothing new and does absolutely nothing that justifies it being worth watching after reading the manga, which honestly, just makes it a failed adaptation overall, and in some cases, like the ear-torture voice acting of some characters, it makes it a worse experience. Why is it like this? Money. A safer approach to an adaptation makes it more popular and easier to consume for most people. Chainsaw Man honestly didn’t need this, if we look at the manga sales at its peak, it could’ve easily been an amplified and crazy adaptation, something like OPM season 1, and been just as popular, but it ended up being a washed down version of Jujutsu Kaisen, in terms of adaptation quality.

What about the people who haven’t read the manga? Well, if this is your first time experiencing Chainsaw Man, the anime does a decent job at recreating the first time experience from the manga. Personally, I would still not find it as good of an experience, as the voice acting and bland color scheme and lifelessness of this adaptation would’ve been bad regardless of if I read the manga or not. I would’ve given this anime an 8/10 if I hadn’t read the manga. Because, honestly the source material is really good. The characters, the world, the fights, the political allegories and subtle but deep character arc of Denji is something I look for in any good piece of media. And honestly I mostly touched on my negative opinions of this anime during this review, which revolved around its quality as an adaptation, and not as a full piece of media.

Tldr: The anime adds nothing new to make it worth watching, it’s a lifeless and soulless adaptation that could’ve been an artistic marvel but was made to be an easy to consume piece of media, some of the voice acting is horrendous, and the music is good. As an adaptation, it’s quite bad. If you haven’t read the manga, it’s quite good, yet I still wouldn’t hold it as highly as its source material with this level of adaptation.

My fourth experience of the acclaimed Golden Age arc, and honestly it's the best one besides the manga. The CGI is good, and mostly used for action scenes, although it does look out of place in some scenes. The direction is good. The music is amazing. The 1997 adaptation doesn't deserve the hype, and this one doesn't deserve the hate. It's wildly different from the 2016 anime, and actually delivers a watchable experience.

The fact that it's now weekly episodes rather than three movies makes it more fleshed out and feels less rushed. Each episode delivers a decent watch that has actually made me more ... invested in the characters than ever before.

The only problem with this adaptation is the source material. Berserk is not THAT good to begin with, and this adaptation doesn't really elevate the experience of the manga beyond adding good music. So it's essentially as good as the manga. The faster pacing is a bonus, as each episode thus far hasn't felt like a drag to sit through. Oh, and they added some tracks from the 1997 anime, which is a fantastic bonus.

It is worth watching. This and the movie trilogy are the best adaptation Berserk will have probably for some time.

"Bleach has finally made its way into the midstream"*

Out of all popular shounens, Bleach is perhaps the one that checks off all the stereotypes anti-shounen anime fans like to throw at shounen fans. It's a mindless battle-shounen, has badly written females (Yes, it's controversial to say Bleach has badly written females as it's often hailed as one of the series with the best female cast. That notion comes from the sheer number of females in the story, and their level of power in the action portion of the story, not from the fact that their writing is any good. Good designs and fights don't make ... good females.) mindless main character, terrible comedy, repetitive action, and whatever else one can think of about any basic shounen. Bleach is THE basic shounen. Just because it has a bit of blood here and there doesn't make it any less childish and brainless. It started off as a promising story with a unique power system and worldbuilding, and it delved into the realm of repetitiveness and unoriginality that people should really open their eyes towards.

Dozens of arcs ago, Ichigo was going bankai and using getsuga tenshou to destroy his enemies... and now, he's going bankai and using getsuga tenshou to destroy his enemies. It gets old. This season is living off of nostalgia. This is a problem Bleach has had throughout its entire run. Bleach is a battle-shounen, yet it takes itself WAY too seriously with the corny ass dialogue, villains and drama, which is why I say it's also trying to be something it's not. If Kubo wrote Bleach as the battle manga it is, it might've been better. But anyway, even though it's a battle shounen, the fights are just meh. It's just beams and sword slashes copy and pasted across different characters and colorful bankais. And it's no different this season. A good example of a battle manga that knows it's a battle manga and acts like it, and excels at it, is a certain new gen that is directly inspired by Bleach with about 200 chapters out currently. Bleach simply lacks creativity. The character designs for the bankais are pretty decent, but they barely ever appear so you're mostly treated to some ugly arrancars or another "badass" middle aged male with a small forehead and bored looking eyes.

The dialogue this season is somehow even worse than what it used to be. That lame villain of the week in ep3 was doing the classic shounen "explaining his powers and saying how strong he is" gig, and doing it in a rather serious manner, something that would make even diehard classic shounen fans cringe. There was that one exchange between him and Ichigo where Ichigo went "it's just like Uryu's powers!" and the guy said "Uryu? Are you talking about Ishida Uryu?" and Ichigo replied "Yes, you know him?", like why name drop him like that if you assume the guy you're speaking to doesn't even know who he is. It's just a lazy way to advance the dialogue progression and check off some marks without actually having anything make sense. Call it nitpicking, but this is bad dialogue.

I'll admit, this season has great direction. Although it's definitely wasted on this subpar source material. At the end of the day, Bleach is just a story for anyone looking for mindless repetitive action. You'll get no interesting dialogue or characters worth investing in. Although I like Urahara, he is a good character. This season offers no more than interesting scenery and animation. There's nothing at stake in the story, zero tension. Just another bad guy coming to take the soul society or whatever, as if the viewer is meant to care.

The music is also not good. Shiro Sagisu is an amazing composer, but he missed with the soundtracks for this and the earlier installment. I know people praise Bleach's music, but that's just because "cold" edits and AMVs on TikTok tell them to. No one actually likes this music.

tldr: it's a battle shounen but pretends to be something else, and has boring fights with no creativity. Bad dialogue. Bad music. Good direction.

Why is it that when something becomes popular for being unsettling to read or watch, it's usually the most "basic" and stale material ever?

A note before dissecting this terrible piece of work to its core, it might be the case that I am desensitized to works like this already, so I will not discount the feelings of others less experienced in the realm of "fucked up" manga, but seriously, this manga did not make anyone cry for a week as some may lead you to believe. I am of course not flexing my "hard stomach" here, this is just to give context and to not ... invalidate other people's experiences too much.

The paneling and composition

Already in the first couple pages of this manga, the reader is presented with some of the most confusing to read pages of any professionally published manga. I will not name any names, but it is certainly even worse than a particular "dark fantasy" manga which reigns supreme in the MAL rankings. The author clearly does not have the reader in mind when writing and drawing this manga, and as we will get to later in this review, avoids this with more aspects of his work. A good mangaka guides the reader's eyes where they want them to go, in every single page. This involves exploiting the page's composition, paneling, and the placement of text bubbles. You want to give the reader a smooth reading experience that never removes them from the immersion of the work you want them to read. "Metamorphosis" certainly fails at this. The only rule the paneling here follows is moving the reader's eyes from the top-right to bottom-left of the page, everything in between is up to the reader's intuition and guesswork. In several cases, one is greeted with character cutouts that transcend panel borders and disrupt the flow of the panel in every way, as the full-body cutouts aren't properly implemented. A good example I can think of is on page 31 of the full work, the reader has to guess which order the speech bubbles are supposed to be read in, as they do not match the standard reading order found in most other manga. A good example of a full-body character cutout is from "One Piece" when Yamato takes off their mask. Having a good flow to your page is one of the bare minimum essentials of making a good comic, and is a rule all comic-book authors and mangaka abide by, except for the author of "Metamorphosis", apparently.

A side note

Why is it worth dissecting and criticizing a hentai like this? I would agree, it is indeed stupid and an obvious low hanging fruit to overanalyze hentai in the same way one would analyze respectable works, however, the manga tries to be more than a simple hentai, so I will treat it as such, even though it fails miserably in what it tries to be. In addition, the majority audience reception of this manga is one that gives the impression that this manga IS in fact something to be taken seriously.

The characters, character arcs, writing, and pacing

This manga is not a good example of what most uninformed individuals would refer to as "character development". Why might that be? The girl clearly changes drastically throughout the story in reaction to her experiences. Yes, there is the PRESENCE of a character arc in this manga, but in the same way as some certain story about man-eating giants attacking humanity hiding behind walls, it is not a good character arc. This is for two simple reasons: the character progression is too fast paced, and that there is zero prior character development (character development meaning the actual WRITING of the character, not the process of change they go through) before she begins to change and bad things begin to happen to her. Why should any reader care about what happens to poor Saki-chan? Any 3 year old could write a story with a character who has a lot of bad things happen to them. Here, I can write one now: 'there is an 80 year old grandma who is nice to her grandkids and she gets murdered on the street because people are bad. The end'. No one cares about that grandma for any reason beyond basic human empathy, as the only empathy she generates is through her existence as, one, a human, and two, as an elderly person. Nothing in that story I just created gives reason for anyone to care about her. This is the same for "Metamorphosis". There is no prerequisite for the reader to care about Saki-chan, or anything that happens to her, besides the fact that she is a fellow human, and a seemingly innocent girl who just wants to fit in (something lazy authors use to write easily relatable characters if they don't actually feel like writing a fully fleshed character profile).

Now for the pacing. Characters here just make decisions on a whim just to fit the narrative. "Oh, we just heard a rumor that Saki-chan is having sex with the boys in class? Let's all hate her without further notice! The author needs her to be alienated from her social circle and to apparently suffer more!", "Oh, I'm pregnant again! I will not abort the baby this time because I do not want to go through 'that' again." Now in this case, because we never actually saw "that", the reader is left to assume that she doesn't want to abort her baby this time because it would... hurt? Who knows. This decision is a turning point in her character arc and it is sudden without any form of buildup to it. Characters just change and react in accordance with what is required for the story. This is lazy writing, and the result is a main character who gives zero reason for anyone to invest any sort of emotional investment in them. Unless, of course, the reader is one of the many people who take characters at face value and relate and invest time into them on the basis of their mere existence as people, rather than doing it for any solid reasons like relatable character traits, decisions, or impactful actions in the story.

Saki-chan is also another example of terrible female writing by a male author. The author writes women as they exist in his head, there to satisfy his fantasies. Girls like this don't exist. And even in a work of fiction such as this, it is offensive to the reader to even portray a character so stupid with actions and decisions solely based on his male fantasy, and expect the reader to actually feel something for them. Now of course, it is a given that women in hentai manga are not realistic, and this goes without saying. But I happened to be unlucky enough to come across fans of this manga praising it for being "realistic", so excuse me.

Also, just a last note for the writing, this manga was insanely predictable. Now this may be an obvious case for hentai manga or erotic works in general, but this really stands out as it isn't even predictable in an absurd sense, it tries to actually portray itself as a solid story with shocking twists and turns.

It fails as a story, so how does it stack up as a hentai?

To cut it short, it fails as a hentai too. I will not try to boast, but this is one of the most visually mild hentai I've ever read. Most of this aspect of the manga comes down to each individual's taste, but people shouldn't waste their time on this manga if they want a good hentai to satisfy their business. It is stale and lacks creativity. Even in the subgenre of "ugly bastard" or "old man", something I dislike to begin with, there isn't anything noteworthy or new in this manga. I would rate the hentai aspect of this manga a 4/10, as there were a few good panels.

So then why isn't it a complete 1/10?

It certainly almost is. But the way the author draws male testicles is nice, and some of the tragic things that happened to poor Saki-chan near the end were definitely kind of infuriating, so I guess the author got me there. But this impact lasted until the second after I read the last page, so as far as an impactful read, it was quite weak.

Conclusion

"Metamorphosis" is truly one of the most overrated manga and hentai I've ever come across. The fact that it has over 40000 members on MAL proves just how easily impressionable tiktok teens are, with the slightly unsettling experiences Saki-chan goes through being an easily advertisable set of events that strike the interests of normies on the internet whose tastes are shaped by the instagram, tiktok, or youtube algorithms. The manga fails as both a story and as a hentai, and is a waste of time for anyone beyond the mental age of 12 looking for something impactful to read or something to satisfy their hentai business.