Manga Review: Shitsurakuen

Title: Shitsurakuen
Author: Naomura Tooru
Release: Monthly
Status: Ongoing
Genre: Seinen, Yuri
Art: A
Originality: S
Story: A
Characters: A
Humor: B
Action: B

Impression: This is about a girl named Sora who transfers into this famed private academy only to find that the school, unknown the outside world, carries out this game that sets back the feminist movement a couple centuries back. It involves girls being treated as 2nd class citizens within the boundaries of the school and these girls are used to provide weapons to the chauvinist scumbags for augmented reality battle game. If you don’t know what that means, it’s an interactive form of virtual reality that blends in with the real world so that the students in this series can battle it out like they’re in an RPG. Things change however when our main character shows up in the school somehow possessing the equipment needed to play on the same field as the boys. She who has always dreamed of being a knight decides to take part in the game to win girls from the oppressive male students and free them from the tyranny that is the game. Aside from the gender equality themes, there’s also a good deal of mystery thrown in there courtesy of secret maneuvers that certain characters make behind the scenes of Sora’s battle and it turns this otherwise straightforward story into something much more intriguing. With all that’s been said allow me to me sum this up in a neat, little and compact formula:

Yuri + Great Art + Interesting Characters + Yuri + Depth + Mystery + YURI = Hell Yeah!!

P.S. The author really knows how to tease Yuri lovers.