Manga Review: S.A.

Title: S.A.
Author: Minami Maki
Release: Monthly
Status: Finished
Genre: Shoujo, Romance, Comedy
Art: C
Originality: C
Story: D
Characters: F
Humor: B
Action: B

Impression: This is about a hard-working middle-class girl in a class of super-elite students at prestigious school who’s always getting second place to her rival, a childhood friend who has talent to spare and enjoys watching the girl repeatedly try to beat him in anything she can think of. And I do mean ANYTHING to the point where it becomes highly predictable when she’s about to challenge him. This has got to be the most annoying thing I’ve ever read and I sat through 5 volumes worth of the stuff. The basic plot concept is always being reintroduced in the first pages of every chapter up till halfway through the second volume which was really, really unnecessary. Also the characters aren’t very interesting and are incredibly shallow. You could describe their entire personality like you were defining some word in a vocabulary test. Main characters come off as “useless oblivious ditz” and “unreal boring show-off”. If the author actually built up the characters properly then it might actually have been good but all that’s being done is to turn up the fangirl squeal factor by adding more gimmicks and having some mysterious relationship brought up over and over again. Oh and the reason I gave the art a C was because it was really confusing trying to read the damn thing. It might be due to the messy paneling or the drawings themselves but it really made me dizzy while I read it.