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I've been going through the World's End Harem series in the most ass-backwards way. It's like if I had found Tenchi Muyo through Tenchi in Tokyo. I found this randomly recommended to me by Apple Books so I figured I'd check it out. It wasn't until after I started that I realized that it was a spinoff of World's End Harem: Fantasia (and not until starting Fantasia later on did I realize that it was in and of itself a spinoff as well). I debated stopping there and checking out the source manga. However, seeing as how this is only 3 volumes long and I ... had already started this one, I figured I'd just keep going.

Overall I enjoyed this quite a bit. It's very funny with very likable characters and situations. Not knowing anything about what this comes from doesn't really affect your enjoyment. There are obviously some visual jokes and situations that are funnier if you know Fantasia, but most of what's in Fantasia Academy stands on its own.

Arc is a great harem protagonist. As in most of these kinds of stories, he can't just wantonly pursue these women falling all over him, but at least in this he has a pretty strict and well defined reason: if he wants to go to the same school with the love of his life, he has to abstain from all sexual release, either with a partner or not, for a whole year. And in contrast with protags from recent harem-alikes I've read recently, it's a breath of fresh air to have a harem protag who's actually horny and to see him flee from temptation, rather than just be not tempted at all.

Still, I will say that this isn't the best of use of your time. There are a lot of compelling stories out there that do more-or-less the same things but are grounded in a stronger narrative. This is mostly just three graphic novels full of shenanigans with very little overarching storyline. If you want to kill some time, these work just fine. If you want to engage with something with more substance, probably keep looking. But if you want something that's light and fun, you can't go too wrong with this.

How do I say this in a nice way... People, if you think you suck too much at drawing the human body to make comics/manga/doujinshi, please read JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Pt. 1.

That's such a dumb thing to say, I could never draw as well as Araki did in the 80s when he made this, but still. Sometimes the art is just so charmingly ridiculous. Never the less, I get why this spawned a long series.

When I decided to read this, I was specifically in the mood for hyper-masculine macho action/adventure. And boy howdy, does JoJo deliver. I generally do prefer it when it's ... about the plot and not the fights. I tend to get bored during long fights in manga, anime, any medium, really. And while the plot is zany and weird, it is compelling and keeps you turning the page. Overall I recommend it, it's a solid tale, though I do get the impression that later stories will improve upon just about every single thing Araki did in this one.

Love Hina and I go way back. This was the first series that I downloaded pirated fansubs for back in 2001. I stumbled onto it as a baby anime fan trying to find "generic anime" art to decorate my desktop wallpaper. By itself out of context, Love Hina fit that description pretty well. Regardless, though, Noticed the little kana Love Hina logos on these images and wondered what show this was.

The thing was, in 2001, Slice-of-Life anime was functionally unheard of in the US. Everything on Toonami was fantasy/scifi, everything on pretty much any other anime source was similarly fantastical. I wanted something grounded ... and realistic, something that took place in modern day Japan. Anyway, Love Hina ended up being this in a big way for me. It was sort of providential that I got the subs when I did because later that year the manga started coming out in the US.

Now the manga. That's a whole new can of worms. Suffice it to say it quickly became my favorite manga of all time. Grant it, I had only read a small handful at that point, but still. The anime was good, the manga was 1000x better.

Love Hina is a pretty by the numbers harem comedy where the twist is that the ladies by and large hate the guy (at least for a while, they come around). Usually in a harem you have a dude surrounded by ladies who fawn over him while he flusters or is mostly aloof. Keitaro, our protagonist, on the other hand, is a lech and a creep, and is constantly punished for his bad behavior. Due to manga plot circumstance, he finds himself manager of an all girls dorm (converted from a very fancy hot spring inn). He's got the ususal childhood friend motivation, supposedly if two people who love each other get into Tokyo University together, they will be together forever. He remembers making this promise with a girl when he was a child and has clung to this until adulthood, even though he can't remember the name or really the face of the girl. Unfortunately Keitaro is kindof a dumbass and has failed multiple times already to get into Tokyo U. So here he is, managing a girls dorm and trying to study, meanwhile maybe the girl he made the promise to years ago is closer than he thinks.

Where the manga excels, in my opinion, is its mix of comedy and heart. Naru is a really gd good character. She should just be a stereotypical tsundre but she has a lot more depth than that and really carries the series. Keitaro goes through an interesting evolution, too, though he is a somewhat weak protagonist, given that so much the comedy relies on his doofy pervyness. The other characters are good, too. They each start out as pretty stock but grow quite a bit as the series goes on. But aside from all that touchy-feely crap, the comedy is often really where it's at. Akumatsu Ken is just such a funny writer/artist. His timing is so often on point, dropping hilarious panels right in in unexpected moments. And while the story does start to feel a bit strained by the end, he does manage to inject enough new characters, situations, and evolutions from time to time that it manages to stay fresh.

I'm going to be honest, I did not expect to like this one as much as I do. This sh*t is effing weird. And I'm going to level with y'all: the first book is kind of trash. It's your generic format of "introduce fantasy creature: creampie". Okay, maybe that's not a generic format that's ever existed before, but it is true in a harem story often the first several chapters will be front loaded with introductions. It's just, this story goes about these intros in the most insane ways imaginable.

Basic recap of the synopsis, protag has been identified as the father of a future ... "Chosen One". Women selected from the various realms and fantasy kingdoms are sent to mate with him in order to give birth to this Chosen One. Problem is, our guy a) has a condition where contact with the opposite sex causes him to faint and b) he already has his Childhood Friend he's in love with and wants to be with her. However, each of these mothers-to-be gets around this problem by simply causing him to faint and then... f*ing him anyway.

I could imagine people finding this series offensive, which is why I've elected Mixed Feelings as my recommendation. If you feel like what's happening to the male protagonist is r*pe, and that bothers you, probably don't read it. Because yeah, what's happening to him is r*pe. But I feel like this story manages to achieve the difficult to master comedic trope called "Crosses the Line Twice" where you take a taboo concept or inappropriate joke and double, triple, quadruple down to absurdity to the point that it just becomes funny. Maybe I'm a bad person, but the escalating absurdity of the execution of the premise had me laughing my ass off in the later books. It just gets... so insane. I can't really get into it because it's spoilery, but let's just say it gets creative.

Aside from the glaring issue with the fundamental premise of the story, the women are pretty much all very underdeveloped. They begin to work better later on as a collective of archetypes bouncing off each other, not a single one of them really being able to carry anything on their own (probably why the first several chapters are so ass). The Angel character is probably the most developed, but even she's doesn't have much to her beyond wanting to get knocked up like all the rest. Still... I like this dumb series. I'll look forward to more as they come out.

This was a formative one for me. I found this while exploring hentai sites back in the late 90s on good ol' dial-up internet. Each page would take over a minute to load and there were no QOL features like "next" buttons.

Yes, I fully agree, this shit do be weird. While I find most of this pretty entertaining, Mixed Feelings is the appropriate Recommendation here.

Still, though, I to this day fall back on Pfil and Pamila as bisexual character archetypes I enjoy seeing in media. Take or leave the Bug Sex, the schnanigans these ladies get up to are largely what keep you ... turning the page. Plus, don't let people say that porn categorically makes you worse at sex. Some of these comics provided pretty detailed instructions on fingering and foreplay that I was able to put to use years later to good effect.

Can a bad ending ruin an otherwise good manga? Yes. For me, in the case of this one, it can.

It's just baffling the way this one wrapped up. Honestly, I don't even know how to write this review. MAL suggests not including spoilers in the reviews, but so much of why this story landed with a massive thud for me is because it has one of the most rapid turn arounds from good to bad I've seen in a story.

Just the fact that our protagonist loves her family, is devoted to them, and her family loves her and cares for her, just for ... it all to be erased from her memory and for her to be left a total orphan? It's just an extreme solution to a problem that seemed like it could have had more than one fix (or at least had the writer been a bet more deft, she could have come up with a less extreme solution).

So yeah, I guess I get to be the one person on earth who doesn't like Karin / Chibi Vampire. I don't think the journey fixes this, it's just not good.

This is probably one of the better isekai stories I've read. There's a lot to love here, whether it's the positive protagonist to the idea that sex magic makes the world a better place. It takes this pretty weird premise of "what if a sex worker had to service every fantasy race/job/class before she could go back to her home world?" and spins it out into something compelling and unpredictable. I would say it has something of a rocky start, not quite finding its tone in the first book, but moves along and keeps things interesting. It's hard to go too much into detail about ... the characters or events that I like because they're all great when experienced fresh, but suffice it to say many of the characters are many layers deeper than you might think, it's surprisingly sociopolitical, and is just... so much fun. I'll spoil one: at one point a gigantic male dragon wakes up and starts what should amount to an end-times level threat to the world. Normally this would be calmed by a female dragon for him to mate with, but the only dragons alive are small whelps, the larger ones having died out long ago. Thus our heroine must use her call-girl skills (with the help of the long dead dragon matriarch's powerful essence) to calm the beast. It's a great sequence of events.

It's not perfect, it's odd that in her book of people she has to service she never once needs to service a woman. That stood out to me, especially once you find out what the list she's working through actually is all about. Missed opportunity, could have had even more fun pairing her with more feminine fantasy archetypes. Still, that minor complaint aside, this is a strong entry in the genre of lewd-comedy manga. 8/10, check it out.

This was just so mid, I’m sorry. The art is beautiful but the story is very mediocre. The protag is more boring than usual for an isekai. And, without sounding like I’m ace-phobic or something, but for real, god save me from these sexless men. I’m not saying he needs to be a horndog, but at least give me some insight into the guy as to why he is so disinterested. Then ending with a call to adventure that will never happen because this is a one-off. If you’re going to do a one-off, give a more concrete ending.

I did like that the isekai-man actually ... shows some signs that he misses earth and doesn’t want to live in the fantasy world. Usually they seem like they could care less about their old life which feels a little unrealistic. Sure, it's easy to say "dude's surrounded by babes, what's the problem?" but we don't know what life he had. Maybe he was happy on earth. And the fantasy world as we see it doesn't seem to have all that much of interest aside from cute girls. Still, this is all undersold by the fact that we have next to no window into this guy’s interiority. He’s such a blank slate reader insert. Even his character design is practically a rough draft compared with the beautifully detailed women of the fantasy world. And yet he fails to live up to any sort of self-insert fantasy a reader might have.

I should comment on the women. I like the female protagonists in this. They're fairly well rounded despite the one-note they're all given. The issue with the book isn't the women, they're fine. I know what kind of book this is, I know they're going to be written in such a way to play into romantic/sexual fantasies of the presumed male reader, and each one is indeed that. But they are charming, especially Nia and Rosette, both of whom feel like they could carry a story on their own if they were given one.

Still though, underwhelming ass book, kind of wish I hadn’t read it. Kind of adds further proof that underwhelming is almost worse than bad bc you get frustrated over what could make it better.

This is one of those books / series where I want to give it the highest possible rating because it is so well realized and feels so good to read. The relationship that builds between the two protagonists is very believable. It's not just a cute romance, it's a painfully realistic one, too. There are misunderstandings, false starts, plenty of difficulties that are associated with the reality of trying to find a same-sex partner in a world where it is still largely stigmatized. Our two protagonists aren't all that compatible, this becomes apparent relatively early on and stays true throughout what's been translated so far. ... However, when you finally meet the one and only other person in your social circle who's also gay, you kind of feel compelled to give it a go regardless.

I think that's the vibe this series captures perfectly for me. It can be kind of a hard read at times because it often feels like the two women are constantly treading water, struggling with each new development in their relationship. However, unlike a lot of the romantic manga I'm used to that put the reader through an endless will-they-won't-they cycle, the relationship actually does go places and you do see development.

The major criticism I have for it honestly is more format related. I feel like the author isn't as skilled as others I've read at the comic or manga medium. Time skips sometimes aren't given anymore fanfare than a single panel or page change, it is often difficult to pick up on what's happening or who's talking in a given situation. Each page is crammed with art and text it can sometimes be overwhelming. The author could do well to make better use of void space and breather panels to help break things up. Still though, it's not so bad that it ruins the story, it's fine, it's just sometimes the format gets in the way of the story for me. Still though, highly recommended, I can't wait for more to come out in English.

I'll be honest, I came into this with fairly low expectations. If there is any series that basically is the definition of a one-shot, it's FLCL. The combination of talent, circumstance, writing, acting, all of it, were so perfect and really only could have come about at that one time. So when I heard there was going to be a sequel series, I was highly dubious. Honestly, I was somewhat disinterested. Sure, there were plenty of unresolved threads, like who really is Atomsk, what's the real deal with Haruko and what about Medical Mechanica? But like many great works ... of fiction, often the specific details of a story are less important than the themes that story is trying to get across. FLCL was about growing up primarily. It was also about a number of other things if you dig deep, but growing up was what it had on its sleeve. However, if you wanted to see a sequel that decides to take the plot specifics more seriously and answer some questions, that's a fine way to go. Too bad Progressive couldn't even do that.

Progressive is basically FLCL again but with a lower budget and with less to say. I couldn't even get excited about one of my favorite characters in all of fiction period, Haruhara Haruko. She's in this and she almost feels like more of a parody of Haruko than Haruko herself, all her weirder attributes cranked up to 11 with less of her depth. Near the end I was hoping maybe she'd get some development as a character, but no, not really. She basically leaves the show on the exact same note she did in FLCL.

One of the wild things about FLCL was that it was a mini-series anime with basically a high-grade film anime animation quality. The animation in FLCL is out of this world. Progressive just looks like what you might see in any old 13 or 25er, and it stands out in stark contrast to its predecessor.

Honestly I just don't really know what else to say. It doesn't really bother me that this was bad because it doesn't do any real harm to the first series. It doesn't recon anything or ruin any characters. It was just kind of a waste of my time. I know if you're a big FLCL fan you'll probably want to see this even if people say it's bad, and sure, that was me, too. It's not going to hurt you to watch it and it does have some good moments and funny scenes. Who knows, you might even be one of the people who really like it. I'd say watch it, draw your own conclusions.