Many thanks to Yen Press for providing a review copy
About the Mangaka
Abeno Chako is a member of the doujin group Kappa Kurieito. And has worked in both the manga and visual novel field. Some of her more notable works are Mai-Otome Zwei, Sola and White Album.
About the Manga
I had no idea this was licensed, or even what it was about, however the cover just screams cuteness and I was eager to get my teeth into it.
The little image you see here of the cover just doesn’t show off how awesomely cute it is. I fell in love with the cover as soon as I saw it. And, given how well the cover art was I had high hopes for the volume (yeah I know, judging a book by it’s cover hehe).
Opening it up we get the chibi page, where all the characters are presented in their chibi formats. And sadly, while again they are exceptionally well drawn, I really don’t like them. The eyes of the majority of the characters really annoy me, horizontal slits that take up the entire face *shudders*
Next we’re treated to a double page spread of the two love interests, in their swim suits of all things, fan service really does feel out of place in this sort of manga IMO, and while again they’re well drawn, It doesn’t suit the setting well.
Finally we get to the main story, and once again the colour art is stunning, and we get introduced to the two main girls of the story.
Sadly, this is where the amazing art ends and the crappy, choppy and blocky art comes into play. It’s almost as if Chako gave all her effort into the colour pages and was spent when it came to the black and white pages.
Crappy art on it’s own wouldn’t be enough to make me trash a series, however this one has everything that I feel makes a crappy series: bad art, confusing characters, confusing plot, no real story.
The art feels especially bad after the colour pages, and are reinforced several times when she actually manages to draw something rather beautiful. Sadly these times only draw notice to how bad the rest of the art is.
The characters really are bad, I don’t think I’ve seen a series with characters this bad in a long time. The male lead is flat, dull, uninteresting, and if I was any of the girls in the dorm I’d kill him just to liven the place up a bit. I can’t think of a main lead I’ve hated this much.
However he’s not alone!! Toguin is, if you can believe it, worse!!. She’s a real rich kid, fed off a platinum spoon sort of thing. Yet for some reason she goes off to be caretaker of run down school dormitory. No explanation was to why and what her motivations are. Though she feels more robotic than any of the cast. Even the times she’s supposed to be expressing emotions feels silted and forced.
Okay, i’ll be upfront and honest, I gave up on this volume after the fifth attempt to read it. I only ever managed to get half way through before I had a mind blank. As such to me, this story was confusing as hell.
The flow is distorted and doesn’t really make sense, and the frequent recap side panels are just damned annoying. Sure it might be good in a magazine where a month or so may have passed between chapters, but in tankobon’s remove them please!!
The other thing I noticed was that Chako frequently seems to gloss over events that have happened recently. The whole meat of the story is dull as well. Sure it’s been done before, guy loves girl and follows her to a new school to try and win her heart. But Chako really can’t seem to bring the story out properly. This is probably the worst executed manga I’ve ever read.
Yen did a great job with a crappy title, and the translation is the usual high standard with all honorific’s left intact. Also, given the larger size than normal, I initially thought this was a 4-koma, but it isn’t.
Sadly, this one goes in my Junk Pile, one of a rare few Yen Press titles to fail to impress me so badly I want to incinerate it. Rather than read this watch pain dry, it’ll be more exciting 
Will there be a volume 2 of this series? Who knows, but given the length of time it took Chako to do the first volume (almost 18months) I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting.
Where to Buy
