Really refreshing twist on the "harem" genre and a PUNCH back in time.
This all started when I saw a shitty recap vid at 3 in the morning (the irony here is palpable) of a chinese movie adaptation and thought that it wasn't fair to the original story if I only watched that. The vid was short and didn't really get into it, so I watched the movie (which was decently good actualy). It felt empty and not that much elaborated, and the caracters were a bit bland. After watching it (with some pretty bad subs I might add) I left it at that.
A few days later, just having finished another novel and searching for other stuff to read, I wandered through my many reading apps (wuxiaworld, webtoons, boxnovel, etc...) in search for something entertaining to read and then I remember the recap guy say something about it being adapted from a korean novel, and me, being a korean novel and manwha crackhead, I searched it up.
I started reading the webtoon and I started to see some familiar tropes that harem-like mangas and manhwas do (and also some of the fighting mangas/manhwas). Only after I started thoroughly reading was that I found myself fascinated by the small things in the plot.
Sometimes it strays a bit of the beaten path, but I found this weirdness really refreshing. One day, whilst starting to read at 11:00pm did I realize that it became 3:00 am. I have watched many animes and "doramas" and I have read many manga, novels, light novels, visual novels, etc... It had been a while since the story got me so entangled.
Of course while reading other media such as "Overgeared" or "World's Apocalypse Online" has done something of the sort, but Girls of the Wild's is one of the first in a long time to make me lose that much my sense of time.
At the time of writing this review it is 2:22 am and half an hour ago I finished it's last chapter and I can't say anything more than it was a fucking pleasure to read something so revivifying after a loooot of cookie-cutter media being shoved down my recomended at my usual reading apps.
To be more concise, this aparently harem/fighting/slice of life manwha is (at least to me) so much more than that. The caracters are interesting, the sub-plots make you wanna read more of them, the action is well drawn, there isn't an excesive amount of fan-service (which I frankly despise), the main character is your typical clueless young guy, but with such a twist and such caracter development that makes it not feel like that at all, the sub-protagonists are each unique and diferent with well defined personalities, and so much more that can only be comprehended after reading it.
Its duration is 260 chapters, with a relative lenght to each of them. The quality of the art is really apropiate for this "weird" mix of themes and in the places it lacks because of the dynamity of the situation, it makes up for incredible artwork and care given to each drawn thing and a really good story.
To sum it all up, if you want that feeling of reading "Love Hina" or "Zero no Tsukaima" again, this is the closest I've been in 10-ish years.
