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As a D&D player I have a hard time reading this.
Imagine you get back home and everything is just slightly off. Maybe you left your clothes there, and maybe your ceiling always was a bit low, and maybe... but as those slight differences start piling up you feel repulsed by this place that clearly isn't your home.
Isekai Munchkin takes a lot from D&D. As in, 5e character sheets are on display. It's not sword world or something else, it even uses feet to meassure things which you only see in D&D outside of the US. But half the spells are original, and most things ... are either extremely nerfed or turned OP to a level that wouldn't pass the first playtest. Obviously, what the main character does is OP and what everyone else does is nerfed to dead.

And that doesn't matter. It's awkard because you can tell the author didn't get why the game was a certain way, but that's minor. Isekai based on videogames rarely reflect games properly. The issue is that they don't get why D&D's system appeal to players. The titular munchkin isn't a munchkin under any definition of the word, the rules of the world are vague and while they use the language of chance games they follow what's best for the plot with no value in negative outcomes, the setting exists to serve the plot and lacks any kind of weight.

As a generic fantasy isekai it's fine. A 6/10 held up by the art. But if you play D&D it's just gonna feel like the cliche kid who can't manage to read the manual but it's sure they can do a better job without any experience. It's like being 13 and trying to play the game by ear with a railroady DM who has clear favoritism.

If you want an isekai by an author who took the best elements from their TTRPG experience and is still working the genre go read Faraway Paladin. If you want a D&D campaign turned into a story go watch Lodoss War. The only value here is if you really need your isekai fix and nothing else updated that day.

All, more or less, new horror scenarios tied to part time jobs. That alone should make this manga pretty popular. There is some common ground, but in general there's a ton of creativity and variety in the types of life threatening supernatural threats our protagonists meet; while we slowly get to know more about them and why they are taking this well paying but dangerous jobs.

The art is a bit stiff, you get used to it but if you pass over the pages looking for the creepy monsters you'll feel a bit underwhelmend by the general style. Nothing broken, just uninspired. But the money shots ... are there, and even if they don't hit the concept behind them is more than solid enough to carry the horror aspect. Most of this could still work as campfire tales.

By far the strongest point is the creativity, and in something as saturated as japanese horror that means a lot. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants more of that genre and isn't expecting peak artistic quality.

This is the very best Goosebumps you'll ever read. I don't mean it for the weaknesses those books had (pointless cliffhangers, meandering, template characters, lack of goals) this has none of them. But it's clearly taking very childish fears and twisting them into the horrors kids see in them. It might take a minute to distance yourself from how absurd some ideas are, and some might die in the translations (the very concept of school myths is very japanese), not so much if you're used to japanese horror but even if not you'll get in the mood really fast.

The art is outstanding, as expected of ... Kanako Inuki, like a more cartoony Junji Ito. It dances in the line between being too cute in its depiction of fear and straight up gore. I'm surprised this hasn't been mined for reaction faces and unlicensed shirts.

The one thing I have to warn about, and it's a bit of a spoiler so be warned and stuff, is that there is no absolute ending to this manga. It sort of closes its concept for the plot but it's 3 volumes of a non existant 10 volume series more or less, it's really noticeable and it might leave a bad taste.

I'll just answer a few things that made me doubt if I really wanted to finish this as I was reading it:
-No pedo stuff, no map propaganda or anything like that.
-It has some wholesome tearjerkers and some sad ones too.
-The ending doesn't matter at all besides being the point where the story stops. Halfway through that looks like the logical way to end this story in a mature way and it delivers. I could had kept reading a couple more tanks but it's correct.

If that helps you read it that's cool, it's a decent short grown up harem manga.

Besides that there's this bizarre thing ... where we eventually see a female teacher dealing with a male student interested in her and somehow the kid has to take the same responsibility on the issue as the adult man in the main story. Really weird and it ruined a great chance to expand the ideas through a new perspective for no reasson.

warning: the first chapter is a very bad look on what the manga really is. It makes it look like a pretty generic comedy fantasy when the main objective is expanding a bureaucratic fantasy world that follows obscure medieval rules.

The characters are in general lovely, with a very liberal art style that focuses more on impact than consistency. Everyone has a particular look that sells what their deal is but can be extremely simplified, so you can pay attention to the intricate cities and settings. Most jokes are about regular folk having their jobs structured around magic, levels, heroic deeds (performed by appointed heroes) and ... the like.

There are quite a few D&D references (for example explaining that nothing would be so hard if there were bags of holding) but the main inspiration is MMORPGS and an in depth study of medieval economies that gets expanded in an extra page at the end. I personally love that expansion detailing the research, I learned quite a bit about how hunting was banned in most of Europe even to protect your crops because the lords wanted to hunt in their woods, how wailing was done before refrigeration, and tidbits like that.

I guess that you have to already like work comedies to enjoy this twist on the genre, but I'd recommend this to any fantasy fan. I'm for sure stealing some concepts for a D&D campaign.

There is a certain type of japanese comedy where they are intentionally stupid and just play along with it, I think it's one of those things that you either like or you don't. Judge if you want to read this based on that first. Bottom line: Funny man accidentally badass in an uncool way but so earnestly that it becomes cool.

Isekai is currently the most popular genre in fantasy, to the point that we don't have just direct parodies doing the opposite of what's expected but a full range of absurd takes on the concept. You have the land of the failure that is Konosuba, ... you have cute girls doing cute things disguised as isekai with Watashi, Nouryoku wa Heikinchi de tte Itta yo ne!. And in this case you have the standard OP protagonist taking the chance to be the biggest chunnibyou* ever.

Unlike the crimson mages from konosuba that are comedic exaggerations of over the top dark heroes, we're supposed to be part of the joke instead of mocking them. The MC is living his life the way he wants and doing the most of it. When he spouts non sense badass lines he himself doesn't understand, when he worries if he's going insane for doubting a human can take a nuke one on one, or when he's training secret techniques to get his ass handed to him in the most background character way, the reader is supposed to laugh, clap and respect his way of life. He is a badass, not for the things he can do, but for his dedication to the most idiotic things possible. Everyone around him progresses in life while the invincible MC is playing pretend.

My main complain so far, with 15 chapters read, is that the initial joke where his chunni openly fake story happens to perfectly match with the huge conspiracy to take over the kingdom and destroy the world for no reasson. All the time we're seeing both sides of the story: his impression of what he's doing and how others see it; and the outsider perspective matches the world when his doesn't. That's the joke, he's brute forcing his fantasy into a working world. But the initial building block of the whole plot just happens, because. I assume that at some point it's revealed that either the world is being changed around him, he's responsible for everything bad happening, or some god implanted those ideas. But having that hanging is like a thread that needs to be pulled and I fear it will take away the fun when it does.



*Chunnibyou, or chunni, eight grade syndrome, is a term that refers to people who has self important power fantasies in 8th grade, made them public and maybe kept them in HS. For boys it's usually being a secret badass hiding a huge power (probably tied to an arm or eye) and for girls it's seeing the future or cursing people with magic. If they took it in stride it'd be just a thing they like, but being a chunni is tied to the embarassment from realizing how lame you were while trying to be cool. It's a pretty universal thing.

tl;dr: HnS is about how everyone is sort of fucked up from childhood and being there for your bro isn't really gonna fix a decade of mental torture but that's all you have to give. That and sports. It's sad in a good way, a bit melodramatic, pretty cute at others. The Bluerays are gonna look awesome, the tv version has small botches in a style that lends itself to sakuga and tons of emotion.
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Fans of sport anime are a weird beast.I'm not saying they're stupid but it usually takes a few years for them to realize how things are. Remember how Kuroko no Basket ... was considered identical to Haikyuu even though one just makes up superpowers on the spot while the other one has long slow arcs building tiny victories based on flawed characters. You can also look at Prince of Tenis' dominance over the genre for almost a decade, the love for Tsubasa's remake even though everything it does has been abandoned as the genre progressed, or the common idea that the genre is a shonen when most of its tropes come from shojo. As you can see, I'm extremely pedantic about this topic and I'll remain that way for the rest of the review.

Hoshiai no Sora uses the sport as a comparison point with the drama. I feel that even mentioning that there's drama is a big spoiler, the first time we jumped from happy boys being sort of cringey in a good way to violent parental abuse it felt like the most beautiful kick to the face I took since Sangatsu no Lion. But every review mentions it so there's no point in hiding it. Those reviews have this weird idea that sport anime has to be this math problem that can be done a single way, usually with an underdog, a training camp, senpai's sacrifice, one big loss, side characters explaining basic rules for the millionth time (what is this "goal" event you speak of? are you telling me points are tracked? how uncool is to punch the other player in the nuts? what is this "passing the ball" sorcery you speak of? and so on). I'm sorry to say that Hoshiai no Sora follows another sport anime style and that's a good thing you should learn to enjoy for your own good in life. If you think this isn't a proper sport anime then I guess Ashita no Joe, Ace wo Nerae o Big Windup aren't either. And now you're the elitist, but a really weird one.

In a spokon sport is an end in itself. Ippo is happy because he has boxing, boxing is good because it makes him happy, sometimes sad but that's part of being happy. In an otome sport anime sports are a medium for pretty boys to be pretty, the way sweat falls is more important that how did he move 30 feet in half a second. In a sport drama sports are a tiny spider thread that buda sent to save you from hell, it will break at the slightest mistake and best case scenario Joe is gonna get a warm meal this week but probably just alcoholic rants.

Some reviews say that sports are secondary to the plot. That's like saying firefighters are secondary to arson, I'd say they're pretty important but I get your point. You won't get anything epic out of this anime, no one is gonna get metaphorical ghosts holding them up or a single instant of victory changing their lives forever. You're gonna get sad kids being justified in their sadness, trying to do something about it, maybe getting a tiny bit ahead in life, trying to help each other and clearly failing to solve the underlying issue because they're kids and not even adults can actually do that much.

Complaining that this isn't doing a genre the way that you decided on your own it has to be isn't a critique, it's a really bizarre form of schizophrenia.

Let's be real here. This is a super trashy manga that pretty much fails at everything it does.

The premise is clearly meant to be a harem manga, but since they presented the unique girl at the begining it can only pretend to be for a few pages now and then. All new girls will be forgotten and the magic effect goes away when they are needed for something else. As a romantic comedy it has no romantic development, 120 chapters in it's still having flashbacks to the first arc becuase nothing really changed. I think the better arcs take from yankee manga, the battle by ... stages and gritting your teeth for your friends, but putting it next to Crows is a joke. Then you have the diverse female cast, the only ecchi moment happens during the loan shark arc around chapter 80 and you can tell it's not more common because anatomy isn't a strong point. All the girls look like cheap dolls with tiny arms and legs for a torso where the "sexy parts" are crammed together with no kind of sexual impact, much less body variety to take advantage of having multiple characters. I guess some people might like that the characters aren't particularly thin but they don't look good enough to tell if they're supposed to be that way (they're not according to dialogue). I think the most bizarre character design is the loli bancho with the worst limbs, and the biker girl gets the prize for looking generic enough to pass as a manga character. The comedy is the basic giving each character a gimmick and they repeat it every now and then, adding new characters to do the same but with a different gimmick. All of them really weak and with no depth (compared to something like Komi-san, not the peak of intelectual story telling either).

But I read 129 chapters, it's trashy enough to lend itself to binging and I guess it did a kung fu arc better than Blamo. If you want to waste your time it's decent enough

The "office lady is an otaku" genre has more works than you'd imagine. In a sense this is probably the best mixture of the otaku topic and the actual plot. At first characters look and behave similar to their 0079 counterparts, but as the plot progresses it becomes an office satire about Gundam.

The chapter by chapter comedy is solid, the gundam is in no way subtle but the jokes go beyond references and in general it would be good even without the Gundam angle.

Sadly the final chapter is a huge insult that has to take away points from this. Not only that but ... it got cut right when Zeta's AEUG was forming and we had so many characters to develop. There wasn't even time for a Hitler comparison!

I completely recommend this manga but be prepared for the worst final chapter you could ever get, way worse than anything you could imagine.

I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone who has seen HxH. I guess it eventually becomes funny how dumb it becomes, so if you have friends who like HxH maybe you can laugh at it.

No character behaves like they would, even when faced with situations that happened in the series; nen is used as generic ki; and the movie touches themes fully treated in the series in the most generic shonen way. Most of it could had been a Saint Seiya movie, just to keep the femme boy with chains. Most of it is plain nonsense.
-The Spider appears to deal with Spider copies at two ... points, they could had been new enemies defeated by the cast and nothing at all would change.
-Kilua full on leaves Gon to die. Gon was trapped by a nail in his coat, he struggles until tearing his coat instead of taking it off or taking the nail off. The coat is fine in the next camera angle.
-The biggest strategy they try is having Gon and Killua rush the villain while blocking, Leorio doing the same without blocking and Kurapika jumping over them to use chain jail.
-The bad guy uses nen while in chain jail
-Chain jail disappears between camera angles so the Spider does their second cameo
-The Spider kills visual representations of their powers.
-Chrollo's clone uses one power from his book, the wacky fish from york shin, they go away when they stop looking at them. After that he only tries to stab. Poorly.


A horrible take on everything HxH had to offer, sure, but I think it goes beyond that. The movie is just lain bad.