Oni ga Deru ka Ja ga Deru ka

Promet Jul 9, 2022

4

A rather disappointing manga. It had a good premise, and the comedy was not bad (funny old man, for one), but plot-wise, it wasn't too good. I mean, hard to expect anything else given the premise, but still... one can always hope. To put it simply, this story is A-V-E-R-A-G-E. The plot is average. It's a very cliche type of story with just a little bit of a very simple twist in its premise. The way the plot developed wasn't necessarily easily predictable, but I didn't like it subjectively. The twist in chapter 31 (or 32) was a bit interesting, but it was far from enough to carry the ending. The characters are quite average. No real reason to like the protagonist imo. As for harem, the two girls I liked, including the best girl who actually should have had the best chances and another who had the most likable personality, actually weren't the ones who won in the end (well, it's a bit of a wrong way to put it, since they didn't exactly give up even at the ending... or at least some of them didn't). The one who won was someone I disliked with a dull personality. There were a few others, but since I forgot who they were merely by not reading it for a few months, then it means they were crappy characters (coz they couldn't even stick in my memory like others). Speaking of the characters, particularly the parallels between main character and female lead, this story kind of reminds me of Omamori Himari, except that the protagonist was worse, the female lead was extremely meh, there was no fighting, there was less plot of any worth, and the female lead won with love interests that were much better than her instead of winning against worse (from what I remember) rivals. The romance here is inferior too. I wonder if the author took "inspiration" from that series (it's possible since Omamori Himari is older by a few years, and because the parallels I mentioned are quite apparent when I look back on what I read as I write this review). Art was average. Absolutely nothing special, but it wasn't particularly horrible, either. What else to mention? Setting didn't really matter much except for the part that it was a youkai village with youkai in the guise of humans, and was very simple. To be honest, I'm not sure why the author wrote this story. No real point, imo. A boring, average little story with so little potential that the author couldn't even milk it beyond those 33 chapters (thank God, actually - it'd have been a horrible idea). I almost dropped it a few chapters before the end, and I only read it until the end (after a few months' break, too) because I wanted to have it "read" - in other words, I wanted to tick it off on the list and move on. If there's any reason to read it, it'd be the humor (but be advised that it's nothing special - it merely stands out as the best element of this manga).