July's manga / #Webtoon(264)

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.

The art is cute. Panelling is fine, flow is understandable and pacing is good, not confusing and overloaded with events like other promo one shots. I would be interested in reading more. The story seems to be a cross of I Am A Child of This House x Who Made Me A Princess, both of which I liked. I wish that it focuses more on childhood than quickly growing up the main character though, since that's what happened to those two webtoons, and it got less interesting from there in both instances. We'll see if this ever becomes serialized as a webtoon.

The prologue is too confusing and complicated, nothing was explained properly, so I didn't like it. I don't know if it was the translation, but it seemed very clunky in the introduction, but it might have been from the original source material trying to be vague and mysterious, and failing. The first chapter is better, but does a poor job in introducing the characters and the world, as well as the system of this Global Examination. It reminds me of the Classroom of Truth in Bakuman, but even that promotional chapter was better written than this was. I'm a little disappointed since it seems promising, and the art is good, but the set up is bad. Maybe the novel is better at establishing the world than this webtoon. Hopefully, it gets better. There's too much going on, and it doesn't slow down enough for readers to process and digest what is happening. Update: Each new chapter gets more and more confusing. Seriously, there's zero effort to slow down and make things make sense in this webtoon. I hope that's not the case in the novel.

I think this webtoon is very promising. The female lead has good character and strong resolve to avenge herself in her past life do-over this time around. I can completely sympathize with her, just from the prologue. This is good storytelling at work. The panelling is amazing, it efficiently uses the webtoon format to convey sense of movement in time and space, I'm very impressed. The art is up there, although I feel sometimes it's slightly inconsistent in quality a bit, but not too noticeable. I'm hoping for good things for this to come.

Art is horrifically bad. I was completely tricked by the cover art shown here. None of the actual art in the webtoon looks as good as the art for the cover. It's a total downgrade, with complete lack of details in almost every single panel, and very lazy art and coloring. Plot is non-existent, besides some eye patched dude picked up a half dog human, who he promptly abuses because the hybrid human looks exactly like his former lover who had stabbed him in the eye. I hate all the characters and I don't want them to exist at all. They're all either malicious or stupid. Ugh. Avoid.

It's basically an isekai Cinderella type story, except Cinderella isn't so innocent, and she has more than one Prince Charming as possible suitors, I'm guessing from the cover and the first chapter. I can't really place why, but the female lead is very off-putting to me. It might have to do with how blasé she is about her situation, and she's manipulating people in an unsympathetic manner. Her stepfamily doesn't really treat her that badly, so I am not completely on board with how she wants to ruin their chances of living comfortable lives, just because her own character had been killed off early on. She's not likeable and she's not intelligent, coming off as brash and reckless. Her motivations are weak, all she wants is to be a golden spoon for the rest of her life, with no other real goals in mind. That's really unrealistic. Even rich people have lots of problems, happiness can't be bought, after all. The art is decent for this webtoon, on par with most shoujo isekai webtoons, but I personally don't like the designs of the characters myself.

A pianist gets transported to the past after getting yelled at by his father for not being good enough, only to meet a young violinist who's being scolded by his father for lack of emotion in his playing. Only then does the pianist realize he's in the presence of the legendary genius musician that his father had wanted him to emulate. The art is good, the panelling is great, especially in the prologue. The two male characters aren't that annoying but not too distinctive yet, and I think it's a realistic type of reaction after such a strange encounter. Looking forward to more.

The art for this is really good, it reminds me of Eastern Palace Prisoner, which I just read before reading this one, because of the character designs. The passive lead wears white, while the dominant lead wears black. The art is much better in this than in Eastern Palace Prisoner, and it's slightly easier to tell who is who, but still not that much. Unfortunately, the paneling and pacing of the story is crazy bad, so it's difficult to tell what is going on. Chinese names are thrown left and right, without much explanation, making it super difficult to follow. Sigh, yet another poorly written historical ancient China BL. Still haven't found a good one yet... Maybe it'll get better later. The author needs to slow down so readers can breathe. I don't really care for either of the male lead characters. This is better than Eastern Palace Prisoner in every way though.

I don't really like this webtoon. I had pretty high expectations, and this just fell flat as I was reading. The art is pretty decent, so that's a plus. Problem is, most of the characters look the same, since so far, there are only men introduced. Basically, you have to rely on the clothes to tell who is who. The plot is dumb. There's too many names being thrown around, and as you know, Chinese names are so hard to differentiate because you can't tell what is a place, person, or thing, if there's no background explanation, let alone remember it later, when it's brought up again. All I got was these two male characters were friends, but the white clothes guy forgot about their promise, and the black clothes guy went to war to bring him back to his country. The white clothes guy hates the black clothes guy, because he's a complete jerk. They're both royalty from different countries/kingdoms. The white clothes guy is the most inefficient and stupid ruler I've ever seen, but that's probably just to advance the ridiculous plot faster. He also acts super weak and girly, letting the black clothes guy pull him this way and that like a puppet. It's a bit disgusting to watch happen, because it's all so undignified. Although the art was fine, the paneling is somewhat poor, so it doesn't help the story progress smoothly either.

The female lead has lived through 18 lives, and when she died in her 18th life, she wanted to remember the little boy whose life she saved when she's reborn again, and she does. Now she wants to see him again as she lives her 19th life. I think the interaction between the characters is nice, although i feel she was killed off too quickly in the 18th life. It didn't show so much depth in the relationship so as to make such a huge impact on the boy when he is growing up, in my opinion. Basically, the pacing was too quick there since it's clear the author wanted to kill off the female to rush to the next life for the main story, which I think hurts it. I didn't feel any emotion when she died to protect the boy, since the relationship hadn't been properly developed. It's just not that sad. I also think having 18 lives is overkill, because she doesn't really mention the details of her past lives and why this boy is so special, compared to everyone else she had met in other lives. That's the main problem with exaggerating the amount of living someone has gone through (also with people who are immortal), because in these types of stories, it's just difficult to believe that someone has met their fated one when they've already experienced everything life has to offer. So I'm not a fan of making someone immortal or lived lots of lives and remembered everything, because it raises too many issues that will never be addressed, in my view. It would have been more realistic if she had remembered just two or three of her lives prior, since that's enough to make someone tired of living already. 18 is far too many, and more is not better. The art is decent, but nothing spectacular.