There's probably one question that you'll continue to ask yourself in this series. How is this guy so popular with the ladies?
Story
This is a manga about the relationship between our central characters Haruto, a country bumpkin from hiroshima, and Yuzuki, a city girl from tokyo. Basically the story is about how Yuzuki comes into Haruto's life and causes a bunch of problems for him. Say for example, Haruto has a crush on a girl, she will clumsily get in the way of that in a rather silly fashion. However despite the interference, Haruto can't help but not leave her alone.
Overall the first
...
part of the story is relatively decent I must say in terms of shounen romance plots. Nothing is terribly original, but it's paced well and the setting helps keep the story a little fresh. However this only occurs for the first part.
Without spoiling anything the story is branched into 4 seperate arcs. While the first is relatively strong, the remaining 3 are where the series heads down hill. The second arc for example introduces some very illogical drama. Now to be fair, the characters are young and inexperienced so this kind of behavior can be expected. However the problem is, none of the characters ever explain their actions, and none of them ever seem to grow from them. It makes the characters lack layers and makes it difficult to sympathize with them.
The following 2 arcs are mainly filler as the core story is done after the second arc. Mostly filled with fanservice and plot threads that seem like they might build up to something good, but never really go anywhere. This part of the manga is obviously for people who really like to see a couple be together. As fanservice, it is passable at times. But it's dragged out far too long, making the series become rather static and boring. I wouldn't mind it being a straight slice of life if it had been that way since the beginning. The final arc even proceeds to have a very cop out ending which I am very much against in story telling. So all in all, it started out decent and then tinkered off and became rather lifeless.
Characters
The characters are fairly decent at first. Not that they are terribly interesting, but still semi-believable. The main problem is how their growth is handled. It's never apparent to the audience that the main characters are growing up in any fashion, but other characters might have to point it out for you. This is against the "show but don't tell" aspect of storytelling and it makes it seem like the manga is trying too hard to prove that it actually developed it's characters. It will also use time skips liberally to tell you that characters have developed off screen, which would be ok as long as we got to see some of the development.
The biggest problem is of course the handling of the side characters. Not only are most pointless, but there are far too many, and little respect is given to them. Keep in mind that everything in this manga takes place from Haruto's perspective. So we never get to see any of the characters outside of their time interacting with him. This can be done well, if you limit the amount of characters and focus the time well on the main lead. But here it just feels like an excuse not to develop any of them properly. Funny enough, most of them develop far more than our main leads technically. However it's all done offscreen and we never get to see any of it. Also some characters just blatantly get written out of the story, which shows that the author hardly even cares about most of them.
Most of the women are introduced as just harem fodder unfortunately. It seems that no matter what, whenever Haruto goes to something new in his life (new college group, job hunting, part time job, etc) a new girl will be waiting. Unfortunately with the combination of the first person perspective and the fact that they are given very limited chapters, it just begs the question on why they are introduced at all. Especially when Haruto is already in a relationship at these points so introducing further women to be distractions is all but pointless (as you can bet, every single one of them falls in love with Haruto). Now it's a common trait in harem manga to have a lot of girls. But that's most effective "before" the relationship starts, rather than after.
Enjoyment
Like said before. At first it was enjoyable, but then it just got downright boring for me. Though I can understand some people like couple chapters, but I still think it was done in supreme excess. Also not a big fan of cop out endings like said before, so the drama eventually just felt forced and pointless with no real meaning attached to it. Which would be ok if it was entertaining, but I can't really say I feel that way about KNIM.
Honesly there are better romance/ecchi manga's to waste your time on then this if you ask me.
Feb 7, 2014
Kimi no Iru Machi
(Manga)
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There's probably one question that you'll continue to ask yourself in this series. How is this guy so popular with the ladies?
Story This is a manga about the relationship between our central characters Haruto, a country bumpkin from hiroshima, and Yuzuki, a city girl from tokyo. Basically the story is about how Yuzuki comes into Haruto's life and causes a bunch of problems for him. Say for example, Haruto has a crush on a girl, she will clumsily get in the way of that in a rather silly fashion. However despite the interference, Haruto can't help but not leave her alone. Overall the first ... Jan 3, 2014
Arc the Lad
(Anime)
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Arc the Lad, the adventure show that's just a touch darker then others of its type.
Story The story follows a young hunter named Elk and his quest for revenge against the infamous Arc. Although it starts off simply, things gradually grow more complex as soon as our so called antagonist enter the picture. Still the main point of this series is to show the growth of Elk and the heroine Lieza as characters. What can revenge do to a person, what can being overwhelmed by hatred hope to accomplish? Though these may be questions that other shows have presented as well, it's executed well ... Dec 28, 2013
White Album 2
(Anime)
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First things first, if you haven't seen WA don't fret. This sequel only makes a few references to the original (namely the songs that get played) but ultimately is a stand-alone title. Now that's out of the way.
If your asking how is this adaption compared to the VN. It's fine, don't worry about it. Story There really isn't much in the way of story for the first season. On the surface it's simply a story about 3 students trying to prepare for the school festival. However, being a romance/drama, there's of course more to it then that. It's mainly about all the emotional shifts that ... |