Tegami Bachi

Some light spoilers in this review upto vol. 12. Nothing super major, because the main story actually takes a small break before getting back into it.

The series is about Delivering Letters... Mostly. They're 3 main concepts to the series. The artificial Sun, Being the best bee & delivering letter and killing Gaichuu's which is the main enemy of the series.... I think. It's not entirely clear. The idea here is that the chads, the Main characters are people who deliver letters known as the Letter Bee's. However letters here are more than just simple words on a piece of paper but rather contain their heart or piece of their soul. Letter Bee's have a weapon called a shindan which uses the user's own heart/soul to shoot. They use there dingo's (sidekicks) find the weak points of Gaichu's and the Bee's shoot them dead with there Shindan. That's basically the story for the first 15 volumes until the author realized that the actual main story about the main character's mother was also a thing and very abruptly came back to it.

The main character is a very uncharismatic character for like 18 volumes of the series. A constant crybaby that really destroys the emotional weight this story could've had. When a scene does require him to cry it just falls flat due to how much you cannot take the main character seriously anymore. Its disappointing but what can you do. You can choose to not read the manga. That's a bright idea.

The action and the story was actually very underwhelming. Though I was initially interested in the story, the way it was unraveled was one of most boring and poorly paced ways ever. The story is 2 fold. 1 is finding the truth about the MMC"s mother and what happened to her. Why she was taken to the capital. However we talk a long break from this main story to fuck around. For about 10 volumes there is this big fucking gaichu that attacks peoples hearts. Huge problem but this guy is fucking annoying. Its literally a giant monster with no absolute personality. He's not vicious either. The taking heart basically borrows the people's soul so when the MC can inevitably defeat it they can return back. This completely destroys any sort of tension the you may get when the characters themselves are in no real danger.

The things I enjoyed about the series was the characters and world building which also fucks right off. However the actual solid moments of character interactions are just constantly bogged down with information about shit I don't care about. Imagine you are playing a video game and you pick a codex that's underneath a bed that tells you the minute details about shit you can't even connect to. That is the main dialogue of tegami bachi between characters. It sucks too because they are some great characters they are just severly underutilized. Jiggy Pepper and the Bearded Dingo were probably the best characters in the series.

The MMC"s Dingo Niche was a problem as well. I quite liked her as well. She was funny and had some decent action scenes. There is a running joke where she doesn't wear underwear which would be fine when its done once.... Not the amount the author decided to shove in to the point that it became very uncomfortable.

I was under the impression this was a good series but not a single person has told me this was a good manga so far as I was Live reacting on discord. Everyone told me that it was boring and I can see why. There are many characters that get sidelines, many plotlines that get dropped out of knowhere. It is incredibly disappointing.

If there is 1 refuge I can say about the quality of the series, its the quality of the ending. The ending is ballsy. Yes everything leading up to the ending was an asspull and the way the actual ending occurred was also an asspull. But the consequence that occurred did make me think, ok yeah, this is a decent ending to the series. Its not a well written series but the ending did take some balls. Either that or the author realized that he should just throw some action on the screen.

Overall. I'm disappointed. Gonna go back to playing Hades. At least that was entertaining. Due to the ending I did consider giving the series a 5/10 because I'm not made of stone damn it. However... Considering I've typed all of this out, they were moments where I did enjoy the series it was just far too few in between and if push comes to a shove I would not recommend this series.