While I'm not one to hate on shounen (I enjoy all four demographics), there's no arguing the fact that the tropes typical to the demographic greatly limit originality and opportunities for character development. Shirodaira Kyou, however, has managed to utilise the typical themes of willpower, hard work and friendship to create a fairly intricate plot which, while extremely infeasible from a real... 6n4hm

...is how successfully it incorporates romance into the plot. I'm usually opposed to love stories in plot-focused fiction because 99% of the time is feels artificial and forced merely for the sake of "character growth" (aka characters acting like idiots just to create pointless angst and unnecessarily lengthen the series). But in Conductor, love and lust is the motive -- not an obligatory aside to...

As long as you're not like naikan, below, who considers something like a minor lapse in scanlator judgement (not anything that affects the storytelling, either!) enough to drop an entire series, and don't expect 100% historical accuracy (some of the facts are correct, some have been edited for dramatic effect and/or plot originality, and some are plain inaccurate, which is fine since this isn't a...

A few of the category tags are entirely irrelevant to the story, and are based solely on impressions given out in the first chapter (mistakenly indicated as a oneshot) : there is no rape, arson or suicide in Akumu no Elevator.

The story is short (148 pages), but delivers well for something of that length. There's little that can be said without giving the plot away, other than that things are not...

Two volumes is in no way sufficient to explore this kind of serious premise in-depth, so it's not the thought-provoking psycho-thriller it could have been, but for their length, all the stories (there are four sets of characters and situations, each with very different circumstances and outcomes) are clever and psychologically twisted enough to entertain.

The only thing I found slightly off was...

I really didn't think this would be any good when I first picked it up- and was taken aback when it pulled me in from the first chapter. The characters are funny and engaging, but still manage to be deep and relatable (not a common feature of most shoujo manga, I can tell you!).

The friendship between Yuuki and Memori is very touching and sincere- and how

they eventually went their separate ways...

The mysteries are moderately clever, but what I really liked about this manga is how, despite the protagonist being a civilian the police frequently come to for help, the police detective Eiji isn't a worthless incompetent like in so many other series with a similar theme. He is, in fact, quite a clever character who contributes just as much to the resolution of the cases as Bundou does.

Another...

Of course, the ratings on MU are hardly ever to my satisfaction, but what's with the absurdly low scores for this one? Is it because it's somewhat lacking compared to Higurashi and Umineko, or...?

In my opinion, the plot is interesting (despite being slightly too fast-paced), and the last couple of chapters were fairly intriguing from a psychological standpoint. As a quick exploration of how...

...Torikago Syndrome's the kind of manga that practically no one will like, because it doesn't have enough BL to satisfy the fujoshi, but just enough subtext to scare away everyone else. Personally, I wouldn't call it 'shounen-ai' at all, but the tag's best left there because typical shoujo fans probably shouldn't read this anyway. It's only target audience is the handful of people who are neither...