Something as simple as “Prison School” shouldn’t be that hard to mess up. It has some pretty decent jokes, some pretty good titillation, and is an overall good time for anyone who would find it’s concept and characters interesting and appealing. But somehow the manga “Prison School” decides to purposefully drive itself off a cliff. But we’ll get into that later in the review, as I need to summarize the plot before I can start talking about my issues with the manga.

Hachimitsu Private Academy is an elite all-girls high school, or was, as it finally opens it’s doors to male students for the first time in it’s history. But only 5 boys end up enrolling to the school, with a total of 1000 students, including them. These 5 boys are the foreign delinquent Shingo, the strange and sickly “Jo”, the overweight “Andrei”, he intelligent “Gakuto”, and Kiyoshi, who is the most normal out of the 5 male students.

But they soon find the female students giving them the could shoulder, and unbeknownst to them, the notorious and powerful “Underground Student Council”, consisting of the misandric president Mari Kurihara, the sadistic vice-president Meiko Shiraki, and the cut but abusive secretary Hana Midorikawan, have issued an edict forbidding any communication between the genders.

Feeling troubled due to their lack of female interaction, the five boys embark on a dangerous mission to peek on several girls while they are bathing, much to Kiyoshi’s objections. Due to a series of mishaps, their operation fails, resulting in the boys having their actions being exposed to the entire school. For their crimes, the boys are sentenced to one month of imprisonment in the school’s prison in a “rehabilitation program” devised by the Underground Student Council. But does the Underground Student Council have something up their sleeves?

To start with the compliments, as they’re going to quickly be overshadowed by infamous second half of this manga, Akria Hiramoto, the author and artist of the manga, has done a fantastic job with the art. With it’s high level of detail working well to contrast with the over-the-top serious reactions that the characters give to things that are both simple and absurd. It gels well together.

And the first arc of the manga, the “Boy’s Imprisonment” Arc, which is the Arc that got adapted into the anime and live action series, and is the Arc that everyone is familiar with, starts the manga off strong. Yes, the anime and live action series have truncated some stuff, and in one case it took roughly 6 chapters and crammed it into one episode of the anime, making it feel a tad rushed, but the anime ends up being a decent adaptation of the source material, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people came to read the manga purely based on how entertaining the anime was.

There was even a spin-off called “Shadow Student Council Vice President Gives Her All” that entirely focuses on Meiko with little to no dialogue in a series of short stories and it is some of the best content for Prison School.

But unfortunately, just after this Arc finishes the rest of the manga starts to slowly decline before just deciding to become an absolute train wreck in the second half. Now, I know that a concept like Prison School doesn’t really have too much room for variety, but there is some room for playing with it’s concept as well as expanding on it. The second arc goes on to develop the characters, which is nice, but towards the middle of the manga is where the author is clearly stretching his ideas thin.

The third arc of the manga, the “Sports Festival” Arc, drags on for a small eternity, especially with the Horseback Challenge. It’s page after page, chapter after chapter, and I’m pretty sure volume after volume, of two teams of four students, three students holding up a forth, trying to knock the fourth student off the other three. The whole thing could be cut down significantly and nothing could be lost. Even one of the side characters manages to get their own chapter. I can’t imagine having to read this on a week to week basis.

And it doesn’t help that all while this is going on, there is a subplot involving the chairman having amnesia and getting caught up with a woman and her husband all while this is happening. You would even need to remove this subplot if the main arc was just cut down to what was necessary.

But when reaching the last arc, there are 4 plots going on all at once, which is way too many plots going on at once. The moment you’ve forgotten one of them, it immediately rears it’s head, reminding you that it exists. And then the manga just ends on a cliffhanger. There is nothing to spoil because there is no ending for this manga. There was even a more expanded and better epilogue for the fans who bought the last volume, but that only amounted to a few pages that don’t give closure to anything. Not even with a one last shot of a promised wet t-shirt contest.

Rumors have circulated about this manga’s ending. If they are to be believed, this author was annoyed that “Prison School” was the one manga that he wrote that became popular when the one serious manga that he wrote, a manga by the name of “Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson”, which seems to be on hiatus, was his passion project. There was no source to this, but the fact that these rumors even exist just go to show just how much people loved this manga and the fact that they had to come up with something just to explain why the ending was so shit and why the promised improved epilogue was so disappointing.

At this point, people refuse to read anything else that the author has written because of just how bad the ending was. I’m not willing to rule out the authors other manga out quite yet, but if your going into this, consider this your warning. Maybe you can get something out of it despite it’s infamous disappointing ending, but it’s hard to recommend something that had such a drop in quality, regardless of the redeeming qualities that it does have.