July's manga / #Shounen(43)

So far, I think the opening chapter was a bit weak. It's obvious that in the partnership, the talkative one will be the dominant one, while the computer expert will be the passive partner. I'd rather see it reversed, but even that's rare to find in real life. That's like Jobs and Wozniak all over again. Anyway, I don't feel attached to either character, and I don't know why they need a trillion dollars, because they'd never spend it all in their lifetimes. We also don't have any signs of their backstory or other drives in life, besides wanting to become filthy rich, so I cannot empathize with them. Their dreams thus far sound childish to me. Neither strike me as very intelligent so far, which is disappointing. Maybe they'll prove me wrong later. Honestly, I'm more curious about the daughter of the president of the bank company they failed to get accepted into. She seems quite mysterious and more compelling as a character to me. But since this seems like a typical shounen manga so far, she's probably going to be discarded like trash because there's no need for strong female characters in a shounen manga. The art style is reminiscent of older manga art style, where the goal is ultra-realism, instead of those shiny big eyes and fancy hair effects that we have in modern manga nowadays. It doesn't bother me too much, since this is probably supposed to be a more realistic manga, but I personally don't like the art style myself. Maybe it's because the character designs are also rather ugly or plain. Only the girl character is drawn prettier compared to everyone else. We'll see what happens next, I guess.

The first chapter had some strong elements, but overall the plot is a little ridiculous. The agreement between the gnomes and the humans makes zero sense. Obviously, they should have just have humans and gnomes work together in translating all the texts. And I don't buy that gnomes can read every single one of the human languages. Then what language do the gnomes use? Also what language do the humans here use? The world building is so off. I can't believe that two kids can translate 20,000 books basically by themselves, because the old gnomes didn't accomplish that despite how many of them there are previously. Don't explain it away by saying the kids are geniuses, because it takes a crap load of time to translate stuff. And pshhh, Oda Nobunaga is the most inspiring hero in all of past and future humankind that the author could think of? Seriously? And why was the castle so poorly guarded that two kids could escape so easily? But I will say that I'm curious where this would even lead, although this hasn't been updated in ages. Perhaps I'll never know.

Way too much crap happens in the first chapter, which is divided into two parts. In the first half, he returns home, which seems innocent enough. But oh my god, you'd never guess that he returned from some weird world that has two moons and time flows differently, where he actually spent 15 years and befriended a prince and so much other stuff which is just dumped on readers in the second half. He comes back and he looks like he hasn't gone through all that at all, so I'm not buying his fantastical story. Even his appearance hasn't changed a bit. Shouldn't he look older if he spent 15 years in real time, or is this some magic BS? And he could return to his original world at will? Because it took a mysterious explosion to get him to the world with two moons in the first place. Nothing makes sense so far. The art is average for a webtoon. Maybe this will get better as more chapters are released to explain his experiences, but so far I'm not buying what you're selling.

I didn't understand what was going on in the first chapter of this webtoon. The kid who lost his parents is wandering around with his friends, and then it switches to a guy chasing after a man, but ends up with his head cut off. The translation got really weird at that point, with people talking about territory and all sorts of weird panicky stuff when they found his body. I don't know if it was a bad translation or if it was the original Korean which made no sense that affected the English lines. Hopefully the next chapter will make more sense. The art is not bad, but still pretty average for a shounen webtoon. Update: Second chapter doesn't really make much sense either, still talking about territory and counters, and the male lead has a dream about an old lady, then he meets some bullies. What is this storytelling? It doesn't stop to explain anything, and assumes the reader can follow it. Too fast-paced and fails to set up an understandable plot right from the beginning.

Boring, and rather confusing story so far. Male lead is isekai'd to a magic world where he has a almost-harem of girls adventurers (not quite yet because no one is in love with him) and now they've defeated the boss, he needs to do administrative work. I don't get why they skipped the interesting parts to go right for the mundane jobs that most people would avoid when reading manga. The art is definitely below average, it's so simplistic and uses large swatches of utter blackness to color in clothing and other details.

Seems like a run-of-the-mill isekai, but with a hunter character. I'm not sure why the Hokkaido part is important, since he immediately got isekai'd to another world which is most definitely not Hokkaido. He's a beginner hunter, so it wouldn't make much of a difference anyway. The first couple pages seem to be unrelated to the rest of the chapter, it may be a flashback or flashforward, very odd placement in any case. The art is good, especially for the backgrounds, the shading is really realistically done.

Assassin player in a VRMMORPG is isekai'd to another world by a goddess, except it's not a VR world anymore. He's tasked to assassinate an evil god, for which he'll be rewarded if he succeeds. There's a lot of explaining in the first chapter, but I feel it is too much info-dumping, which may be unnecessary, since he's no longer in the game world he was in. Basically, it was a lot of bragging about how strong he is, and how unique of an assassin he is. The goddess has no head and very big breasts, which I don't like, because that's typical Japanese fanservice...sigh... The art is somewhat decent, but not noteworthy. The male lead doesn't seem too intelligent, which is typical of a shounen character.

There's supposed to be a total of 9 chapters, but there's only one chapter uploaded here. The first chapter is short and sweet, showing the perspective of Tadashi as he builds Baymax for his brother. The art is slightly below average for a manga, but it's still good enough for fulfilling the purpose as an adaptation of the movie.

This webtoon has some weird medical magic going on, but I'll suspend my disbelief for a bit. I don't believe an A.I. can be better than a doctor at diagnosing diseases, unless it's a simple condition. Even in the example given, the A.I. had incorrectly diagnosed pneumonia instead of tuberculosis, which can be a deadly mistake. The professor who explained it waved it away as human input error, but this diagnosis could have just been determined by humans instead of inputting so much material for a computer to process. It takes far too much time and effort to file the various lab results and symptoms, when as a doctor, you can reach a diagnosis more quickly by observing, questioning, and touching the patient. It would be helpful if A.I. was used in conjunction with doctors to further speed up the diagnostic process, but it's impossible to just rely on A.I. alone for this. The doctors here all act extremely questionably and should not have even been able to practice as doctors, because of their complete lack of empathy. Even the main character is not likeable, because he instantly brags about how smart he is when he's introduced, saying how he's the top doctor in his school, when he's only in the first year of residency. They go about doing very strange things, such as putting him on a ventilator and taking him off of it when his lungs hadn't been damaged in the first place, they forcefully wake him up to question him before he's fully recovered by cutting off the pain medication, and they don't run tests on him when he's awake to see if his mental and physical capacities are normal. Also, did the A.I. just make him have permanent hallucinations, because it's a floating chibi figure that only he can see and hear, and that's rather disturbing. At least the art is quite decent. Hopefully it gets better from here.

There are some nice chapters, but also a lot of mediocre ones involving fart and shit jokes, which is very low-brow humor. There is a sense of development, while the characters retain their key characteristics, so it's interesting to see. Art is overly simplistic, but it is fine for this genre.