July's manga / #Fantasy(145)

Promotional one shot for a novel I'm guessing. Too much is going on in the single chapter, and the art is so-so, it doesn't really interest me to want to read more. Pretty average one shot. Update: Looks like this got serialized. Looking alright so far, the art is more palatable now.

Uhhhhhh. This is really bad. The art is poor -- the coloring and heavy solid lines are extremely unappealing to look at. The body proportions are off. People walk around half-naked or naked like it's normal, for fan service purposes, even when the drawings are atrocious and no one wants to see such abnormally drawn muscular bodies (except the rabid fangirls/boys). Anatomically speaking, more is not always better. There's a limit on how muscular a guy's body should be. Also, it's not realistic that every guy is that muscular. Unless I guess this is bara. Does it even make sense that a mage is that muscular, even more muscular than the knights and the kings? You do know that mages fight with magic and not with physical strength right? Anyway, the male lead is a passive idiot and he just goes along with everything. Not to mention he's acting completely out of character for his supposedly evil king persona, yet no one questions it. People seem to forget that he's a king sometimes, including himself. He doesn't even speak like royalty, he uses informal language. You know he's doing a bad job when his daughter sounds more like royalty than him. Even the young prince of the other kingdom sounds more formal. Also, I don't know which country would just call the King by his first name, people would always address royalty without names, since it's a title. You don't say King Kenneth directly to his face. Ugh. Also Kenneth is a terrible name. Vicar is not a name, it's a position in the church. Sigh. So awful.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of this webtoon. The art is not my taste, although I can see that it might appeal other people. It's overly simple and uses a faded palate of colors, that are pretty limited in scope. Lines are opened like they're leaking onto other objects. It's almost like a watercolor style but it's not drawn with the details of good watercolor style drawings, and lacks the bolder lines to complete the figures and objects. The plot is non-existent. A really strong prince is cursed to feel sexual pleasures every night, but he can be helped by having sex with a divine beast man. Sigh. The characters are not likeable and lack depth. The divine beast man is like a child so it bothers me to see them doing adult things, even if they're aware of what they're doing. He's also really stupid and it gets on my nerves. It's not "cute" or "adorable" to not know things and fail at learning them quickly. That's just being stupid and not adapting easily to the human world. I've read stories where non-human adapt and learn much quicker than this. The prince is supposed to be a badass but he's really not, he's so passive and weak and being a tsundere for no reason. Also I hate how they always don't communicate and that leads to "plot" or lack thereof. It's bad story writing to use forced misunderstandings constantly to advance. Like nothing else can happen? Such as external forces or internal struggles? Hating oneself for something like "Oh, I killed a bunch of people, so I don't deserve happiness" is not a valid point, especially the way it's done here. That's the same plot line that the webtoon "Truthfully, They Only Remembered Her" uses and it sucks there too. It's one thing to actually show the killing and follow the emotional turmoil after in detail, but it's another to just skip the killing and tell the readers about it. What happened to show, don't tell? It also bothers me how the prince looks so feminine with his clothes on and so masculine with his clothes off. I think that's poor drawing skills at play here, since if you know any anatomy, that's not remotely possible. That's just stupid fanservice at work. Yeah, skip this if you like good stories. If you just like sex, it sucks too since it's doubly censored with light sabers and occlusion, which makes no sense to me.

The translation is a little off sometimes, it needs a better proofreader. It's mostly understandable, but I feel the urge to fix the grammar in my head as I read. Sometimes it doesn't make too much sense, but the plot is a little weird right now. I don't know if her family is alive, she mentioned her grandmother is dead, but there's no other signs of her relatives. She's only 18 so is she living by herself? Who runs the incense shop when she's at school? This confuses me. Also bullying is not ok for any situation, especially at school. It's a common trope to bully the person you like, but that's just stupid to do in real life, and I wish people will stop accepting this as normal behavior. The art is alright, pretty acceptable on webtoon standards.

The sex randomly happens and the male lead is completely willing to go along with it, no questions asked. He's a little too chill for me to be realistic. But luckily, there's actual story development with the histories of both main characters, and less focus on the sex. The art is alright for a yaoi manga, and I enjoyed reading the released chapters. It doesn't blow me away though, and the characters are still somewhat lacking. I'm giving it a below average rating, since the ending is crappy.

I really enjoyed the art for this webtoon, it has clear, precisely drawn lines, beautiful shading and coloring, and easy to understand flow of panels. It's not the most beautiful art I've seen in a webtoon, but it's way above average. The plot is slightly different from most current popular webtoons involving reincarnation, instead of going to the past, it goes from past to present. Honestly, that's how most reincarnation stories used to be until isekai become popular. Anyway, it is great there's finally a new chapter, and I'm looking forward to more. The female lead isn't a pushover either, so I expect good things from her!

Honestly, this webtoon was only good until maybe the second or third chapter. It went super downhill from there, and now I think it's dug itself into a hole so deep it can't even get out of it. The author wrote themselves into a ditch, apparently. Then decided to go ultra magic! on this story, and now it barely makes any coherent sense. The art is alright, but if you look closely, the artist is lazy at drawing everyone except the female lead. Only the female lead is carefully drawn, with constantly changing hairstyles and clothing. Everyone else is just bleh and sometimes, the art quality can decrease a lot in a single chapter, if it doesn't feature the female lead. The artist is also not that great at establishing shots or backgrounds, and draws far too many headshots and characters from the waist up. What really irks me is the constant freaking gushing of how handsome the male love interest is in nearly every single chapter. It's like the author doesn't know what else to make the female lead say when she's thinking to herself. Shut up! I am a reader and I have eyes, so let me be the judge, thank you. By the way, with my very eyes, I don't see him as that handsome that you feel the need to remind me every single time you see him. It also makes the female lead sound stupid and shallow. Basically, this does nothing to advance anything and it's a waste of panels. The male lead also thinks to himself about how beautiful the female lead is quite often, but not to the irritating extent the female lead does. Honestly, a lot of the chapters are just spent with the two characters praising the hell out of each other in their heads. What happened to "Show, don't tell?" I really detest it when the authors think their readers are so stupid that everything unimportant needs to be spelled out for us, instead of focusing on plot and writing actual believable conflicts. You know what, this webtoon is basically Twilight. You heard me! Except instead of vampires, everyone's a god. She's a god, he's a god, the maid is a god, and there's another random god wandering around somewhere. Uhm but maybe at least Twilight had some conflict with the werewolves, I have no clue where this pile of steaming trash is trying to go. There's some weird plot line about how he's a supposedly evil god, and then absorbed the other gods, and the last god ran away, but then he reincarnated and ... Yeah no clue. Why is that even important, since obviously he's not a threat to the last god if he doesn't remember he killed the other gods? Or maybe the conflict is that all the other gods are going to kill him, but then they made a point somewhere back there that he's super OP, so it's not like that's a real concern. Yeah, just avoid this. It sucks.

Male lead died and reincarnated to redo his life. He becomes super OP because he already knows all the best materials and ways to get them, etc. The translation killed the story. With each chapter, the story makes less and less sense because the translation gets even worse with each chapter. It's like someone tried running the lines through Google Translate multiple times and then changing back to English. The art is not bad, but it's very hard to tell what the heck is going on.

Actually, I didn't like this webtoon in the beginning, because the male lead was so unlikeable, as typical of OP heroes. Even worse, he gathers a small harem of beautiful girls in the first five chapters (it only gets bigger from there). But it does improve slightly with recent chapters, although not by much~ Well, at least he's become slightly more likeable, because he cares about upgrading everyone mostly equally. Also, he hasn't shown any signs of favoritism or romance towards the girls, which is a plus for me, since it's so, so easy to devolve into mushy lovey dovey crap that doesn't make the story any better, and leads to pointless arguments or something. It's still somewhat interesting to see how the story will unfold from here, but I'm guessing he will not really encounter much way of obstacles besides his own teammates dragging him down. He gets lots of beautiful girls in his harem but they're all basically useless in the end since he always ends up having to save them.... Sigh. The art is decent, not the best, but it's serviceable for this genre of webtoon. His ring is OP and it can store infinite amount of items. I'm not sure why he's so good at fighting since his skill is actually forging. His girl companions are all idiots who are incapable of defending themselves, even against fodder enemies. He also picks up two trash guys as team members, and they're also extremely weak. I think this webtoon has potential, but it's definitely hard to see through the pile of plot armor crap the author has surrounded the male lead with. I'm hoping that he will have to actually face some strong difficulties instead of wiping the floor effortlessly every time, but I won't hold my breath about this actually happening. The translation gets worse with the newer chapters, and there's lots of grammar and spelling mistakes. Don't read if you don't want a headache.

Hmmmmm, I'm a little mad about this webtoon because I feel like I was tricked in the first chapter. It focuses so much of the panels in the chapter on the red haired mage, only to have him killed at the end of it. And as the readers, we got to listen to his thoughts and see mostly his side of the battle, as if he were going to be one of the protagonists, but nope, gotcha! The sidekick is likely going to be the blue haired dude who killed him instead, and we know nothing about him, except that he's super strong (and he barely speaks in this chapter). It feels like we got traded an interesting character for a less interesting one...My feelings are mixed about this. It's like the author purposely tried to mislead the readers with the very first chapter, which is usually the chapter you want to make a good first impression on, so that people want to continue reading. Seriously, it spends so much time analyzing the mage, and he even has a backstory and some random girl who wants to save him, but it was all for a cheap shot at the readers to twist up their expectations. I don't feel that is a good move for a first chapter. As a writer, you should also want to make the readers trust you with what you're presenting them with, and instead, you've basically lied to them in the very beginning about who will be important, to make a shocking turn of events for the sake of novelty. It's not a good move to me, but maybe some other people like being hoodwinked like this because it's cool and different. I just feel it's dishonest and a waste of panels if you're just trying to shock for shock's sake like that. It would have been more acceptable later on, once the readers are more familiar with the characters, but as the first chapter, it shakes up the foundation of the story way too much. It makes me doubt what the author is presenting as a whole, if we can't even trust what is happening as we think is happening because the presentation is actually a big lie. Anyway, the art is also not my preference either. It's too bold with solid color palettes and looks extremely European in style, which I guess is what the author is going for, but I'm not a fan of this style myself. Hopefully, the author doesn't pull any more cheap tricks like this again soon. Otherwise, the overall idea and set up for a quest-type adventure is promising, but I think the explanation was a little clunky, and they could have spent more time establishing the more important characters like the princess and her family better, instead of wasting it on this unwelcome twist. Okay, after reading the second chapter, my rating has gone down even further, because the female lead is not likeable and abusive. She doesn't come off as a strong female protagonist who I would like to read about, because she is cold and uses people like pawns. Maybe it will be expanded on, but I'm not quite warming up to her at the moment. It doesn't help that no one likes her at all. The boring male protagonist we got switched up with is the basic male character you find in everyday adventure reading material, a kind-hearted boy who was forced to fight for survival, wants to have a better life, and is fighting in the memory of a loved one, etc. I really preferred the other guy in the first chapter before he was killed off, he seemed like he wouldn't be so complacent and obedient towards the princess, which would be a far more interesting dynamic. In fact, the introduction of that character was so much more compelling than the character we actually end up getting. I'm still salty about it.