“If you’re going to be reckless, then I guess I’ll just have to follow your lead.”

• Midori Misaki, Chapter 19

When taken at face value, Candy Flurry could be best described as average. The art style is clean and easy to read, the story has potential, and the characters are fairly well developed. These elements make it a good read, but it feels more like a pastiche of other Shōnen titles rather than being its own entity. However, it definitely showed that it had the potential to become something more if it had been given more time.

The core concept of Candy Flurry is an interesting one; taking an everyday item and expanding it into a fighting mechanic that provides a lot of room to experiment. This made the fight scenes enjoyable since there was a healthy amount of variety offered by the different power each character had. Due to the shortness of the series, there wasn’t enough time for the artist to truly experiment with the fighting style, this means that there aren’t many stand-out panels but it shows that there was definitely a level of competency behind the art. It felt as though a majority of the art was falling into line with a more generic art style. However, there were some moments of strong panelling and composition which shows the artist’s potential.

The plot was also fairly interesting, hinting at a darker side that could have led it to tread on some interesting ground if handled well. There were a small handful of subversive moments that demonstrated the potential that the author had if they were given more time to expand on them. Unfortunately, the superficial elements of Candy Flurry overlapped with a couple of other Shōnen titles which would make the series a difficult sell. It also relied on being quite repetitive; especially with the idea of society “hating sweets”. While it makes sense that this would have been one of the larger focuses of the plot, watching as society began to slowly mirror the main character’s way of thinking, it was over-used and showed little faith in its reader remembering what the manga was about. This lack of confidence is something that can be felt and could put people off the series. The ending is, of course, a little rushed and is unable to fully explore some of the more intriguing elements of Candy Flurry’s narrative. However, the key elements are concluded and it is easy to see how the story would have progressed if given more time.

The characters were the strongest part of the series, with the main character being likeable and her internal dilemma feeling realistic for the story being told. It set up a couple of interesting dichotomies that could have been expanded upon later in the story. For the secondary characters, there were only a few who received any development; mostly due to the limited amount of time that could be spent on them. There was definitely potential for them to be improved upon and their designs, for the most part, were interesting. The antagonists were definitely the weakest part of Candy Flurry as they didn’t seem to have a clear motive and lacked any depth until the last chapters where they were suddenly given a lot of exposition. Perhaps, if given more time, their purpose would have been revealed slowly over time rather than it being dumped on the reader all at once.

Overall, Candy Flurry was a series with potential that quickly became buried by a roster of more accomplished series that have similar stories to tell. There were moments of potential that were never fully realised and of some of the character dynamics deserved a little bit more attention paid to them. However, it was still a good series with likeable characters and an interesting premise.

I hope that the artist and author move onto newer and greater things as they both have talent and it would be a shame for it to go to waste.