July's manga / #Fantasy(145)

Not isekai, at least for now. Just a villainess who ends up entangled with three men, who all want something different from her. They all seem like grade A bad guys. She doesn't stand out as someone who is capable of dealing with them, from what was revealed to us. It seems more like she'll rely on the demon dude to advance in her world. Doesn't seem promising so far. I don't like the art style. It's passable, but not my taste, and no one is good-looking to me, personally. The facial features are drawn in a very non-aesthetically pleasing way. Too angular and the eyes are weirdly offset. There's a huge lack of variety in the types of shots in the panels, they're almost all head-shots, with no establishing shots for background or placement of setting. Artist also has limited facial expressions. The characters all like to have their mouths half open. You can even see an example of this in the cover image.

I like this female lead, she tries hard to improve herself and is very smart. She's even aware of her shortcomings and lack of power to influence events as she is now, which is so refreshing to see. The only off-putting thing is she keeps wanting to be a villainess, which is somewhat childish of an aspiration. Although characters in otome games are divided into heroine and villainess, once you're living out your life as a character, you've become the hero of your own story. So there's no need to stick to a certain path. But maybe it's for comedic effect. The art is good and the pacing is great so far. I really like this manga, I hope it continues to be of this quality in storytelling.

A man is randomly summoned to a different world by "accident" by a goddess, and the new world he's in operates like an RPG game. He's chosen to be a craft type class, so he begins his quest by collecting and hoarding everything he sees, and his item box has unlimited capacity. A somewhat basic isekai with an OP hero who starts off with the best of the best in terms of skills and equipment, etc. He's not really a unique character, and I don't like him as a protagonist. Everything goes super smoothly for him, it's rather boring to read. World-building is rather weak so far, so the story isn't engaging in any way.

This weakling male lead was abandoned by everyone, his family, his teammates, his guild, etc. He ends up being used as a scapegoat so his former team members can escape a giant monster, and he's carried back to the monster's lair so he can be eaten by the larvae. It's very gross to watch. As he's turned into worm food, he hears a voice talking to him, which tells him to eat the larvae, and when he does, he's attained a different form which is clearly stronger than he was before. I don't really feel much for this character, and I can't sympathize with him, probably due to the rapid pacing of the story. It hasn't gone into what he's going to do with his newfound powers yet, so I guess we'll see where this goes. The art was detailed, but for some reason, I dislike the character designs. The gross detail of being eaten alive by worms was brilliant.

A boy with the useless job class of Appraisal is abandoned by his party members, and he nearly died, but is saved by a tree spirit and her guardian. He lost his eye, so they replaced it with an even more powerful version of his appraisal eyes, and he's learning to fight using his new ability. It seems ok so far, but nothing special. The tree spirit is completely in love with the male lead already, which is lame. The art is a bit too rough for my taste, but it's serviceable for shounen manga.

Ahhhh this isekai manga about cooking is hilarious, I really enjoyed all the chapters that are out so far. She was summoned to another world, but it turns out she isn't the saint, and instead was mocked for her chubbiness. She quickly learns to use her cooking skills to win over everyone in this new world, because the food they eat sucks. The personalities of the three royal brothers are distinct and complement each other. Art is good for shoujo manga, although not the most detailed.

This webtoon is so confusing, with Korean terms being thrown left and right without stop. It's already really difficult to follow the story, with the non-linear flow of events, since it goes from past to present to past without warning, and the lore is complicated and not explained clearly. It's a huge mess of a story, and very difficult to grasp what is happening. The art is so-so. I can tell it's stylized, but it's not my cup of tea. Maybe it will get better with more chapters.

A girl from Japan is isekai'd to a fantasy world where the men of the royal family can marry multiple women, and to avoid becoming Crown Princess, she decides to lose her virginity at a masquerade ball, only to discover that the man who took her virginity was the Crown Prince himself. Ugh, what a contrived plot line. The characters are all bland and one-note. The girl is an idiot, and many characters have commented on how stupid her plan was. I disliked the fall in love at first sight trope with the prince because it's unoriginal and wasn't even executed in a compelling way to freshen it up. Art is alright by manga standards, but not impressive in any way.

The art for this webtoon is awful, it's so lazily drawn with complete lack of details and over usage of chibis and thick lines with solid coloring. Yechhh. I don't know if the author is doing this on purpose to make the characters seem cuter, because they seem to do a good enough job drawing the serious character, which is the father, better than the rest. But then again, looking at the prologue, it seems most characters are drawn rather poorly, so I don't have high expectations for this in terms of art. Now, in terms of the story so far, it deviates from isekai genre by having the girl lead character read a book in her father's library, and she finds out she will die in 5 years. So she decides she'll live life to the fullest and enjoy whatever time she will have left. This is an uninteresting premise, since she lacks strong motivation, and I don't care that she will die, from how this was executed. Honestly, maybe in this case, isekai would work better, because the point of isekai is that your past life also influences how you live your current life. But here, it's an empty slate, because all she knows is that she's a kid who will die, and her father doesn't love her. There's no strong emotional attachment nor desire to live, because she doesn't even know what living is all about. She's only 5, for heaven's sakes. Honestly, she shouldn't even know what dying means, because she's far too young and sheltered as a duke's daughter to even know of death. And that's where this webtoon's story quickly unravels. She's too knowledgeable to be only 5, but acts too childish to be mature enough to know the concept of death. Heck, she even refers to herself constantly in third person, and acts all cute and stupid most of the time, with the most mundane thoughts running through her head 95% of the time. I don't even know how a 5 year old can read so well, and understand the concept of foster children... And don't bother explaining she's so smart because she has non-human lineage, because it never showed so far that being part demon or whatever increases your intelligence, since she's clearly not smart, and her father isn't known for being smart either. Nope nope nope. This is just bad across the board.

Wow, this webtoon is a classic example of wasting space. Literally, there is more white space between the panels than the amount of panels per chapter. If you add up the total area of white space, it would be probably 2-3x more than the area of the panels combined. It makes it really annoying to look at, with so much emptiness separating each panel. The panels are tiny as hell, and even the art is somewhat mediocre, it just smushes everything in cramped, small windows that don't fully bring the story to life. I'm not even sure why this webtoon was drawn in webtoon format, because it doesn't take advantage of the flowing nature of webtoons, where the movement is from top to bottom. This could have easily been drawn as a comic style with direction of reading going from left to right. The coloring and lines are super bold and dark, like Western style coloring, which I'm not a fan of at all. The girl in the cover image gets killed off in the third chapter, how misleading to put her on a cover like a feature character. The lore of this world is terribly explained, even though it spends a good chunk of the first chapter trying to explain it. Why is this magic tower is important and cool, and how come the royal family can't go in, but librarians like the plain male character can work there and read the books? Why is the library there like a regular library, with normal fiction on the shelves, instead of precious magical texts and ancient tomes? Magic Tower is the most lazy name I've seen so far. Also, I think the author shot themselves on the foot because they can't even get their characters straight. When the princess is introducing herself, she says she's the fourth daughter, but when the guards say she died, they called her the second princess. When I read that, I rubbed my eyes and scrolled all the way back up to make sure that they were talking about the same character. How can the fourth daughter be the second princess? She should be the fourth princess, if my math is correct. Well, it seems like this story might go for a Groundhog Day type plot, where if the main character fails his mission, he needs to redo the day over and over. If so, I'd be interested in reading how this goes. But so far, it's a meh webtoon. Update: The size of the panels get better with newer chapters, thankfully. It's no longer a Groundhog Day plot, which is a bit disappointing, since I'd love to see it in a webtoon or a manga, other than Re:Zero. I'm adding a star since this seems to be improving as it goes along, but I'll still have to wait and see if the plot will become more original from here. Update #2: Well, thank you for proving me wrong, author. It doesn't happen a lot, but I'm finding this more and more enjoyable with each new chapter. Kudos to you, here's another star from me. Give me more Groundhog Day shenanigans, and I'm a happy reader. Update #3: Finished. Seems like this was cancelled, as the ending was extremely rushed and didn't address any of the major plot lines.