Okujou-hime

This manga had a pretty pleasant start; maybe unoriginal, but not too bad. However, as the chapters progressed, it became clear to me that's all this manga was going to be. Let me tell you why.

The story, as said, started out fine, but unoriginal. That isn't a problem on its own, but paired with terrible pacing and weak development, the story quickly changed to a generic shoujo story: some normal guy meets a beautiful girl way better than him. For some unexplained reason, she is interested in our Generic Guy #2222. However, after some time it seems she actually wasn't interested, but due to pure believing, our main guy wins her over anyway.

The pacing was rather bad. Like before, the beginning starts out rather quickly; they start dating at the end of chapter 1. Then it slows down, and nothing happens until about the last 3 chapter, when everything gets magically resolved.

The way the story was presented was actually rather nice, so was the ending, which I find very important to any story.

A story like this can be forgiven, if it has interesting characters. If the story doesn't keep you interested, the characters should. Best case both do that. In this manga the story nor the characters seemed interesting.

The two main characters are just horrible. There's the main guy who does nothing but hope and believe his princess will come to him. The princess is the default perfect type with a "dark" secret that keeps her from being normal.

Secondary/less important characters include the childhood friend, who of course has had a crush on our main guy for some time, but he is too dense to notice. Out of all the characters, she is probably still my favourite, since she's believable. She manages to confess to the main guy, doesn't go all crazy when he loves someone else, and is just a reasonable, but still generic, character. Last there is the guy friend, who also happens to love the childhood friend, but for some reason doesn't have the balls to say or do anything useful.

If there must be a good part, it's the art, which is pretty good.

One more thing, this review might seem negative, but that's because I've focused on the negative parts. The TL;DR for this manga would be: generic story, generic characters, bad pacing, nice art.

I felt like the manga had a fairly solid foundation, the main characters are unique but the side characters are pretty cliche'. The protagonist was original in the fact that he wasn't some attractive guy which was interesting to me. However, he does retain the fact that he is incredibly thick-headed (more so than average) which bothered me.

The story itself takes off fairly early however, It doesn't progress very fast and stays in the same place until towards the end. It felt like some chapters destroyed the progress made and the next chapter does the same, with this process repeating.

To me, the above would've been okay if the manga was much longer however by the time the story moved on it had concluded. I haven't done much research on this particular manga but it basically felt like it was supposed to go on longer but they decided to conclude it prematurely.

Okujou-hime had the potential but every character's personality just didn't seem to have the chemistry.