If any of you reading this take a glance at my posts from time to time, or even follow me on here, you'll know that I've recently came back to my yuri arc, stronger than ever before. The manga I want to review today was actually the first manga I layed my grippy, yuri-needing hands on after coming back to the genre. Let's dive in...
Lonely Girl ni Sakaraenai, or more commonly known in English speaking countries as Can't Defy the Lonely Girl, is, as you might have guessed already, a yuri manga. This manga follows the steps of Ayaka Sakurai, a model student with exam anxiety and a soft spot for baby chick characters of all sorts, and Sora Honda, a loner girl with a soft spot for, well... Ayaka. The two of them meet after Ayaka is tasked by one of her teacher to convince Sora to come back to school, since she had been skipping classes for a while now. After getting to her house, Sora accepts surprisingly fast, but that's only because she wants to make a deal: Sora wants to be able to make one request to Ayaka each and every day.
The art-style is very much like that of a shoujo manga: cute and somewhat cold at times, and is especially good in how the characters are drawn. It also makes great use of chibis to ease up the story with smile-inducing panels.
Both the characters of Ayaka and Sora are well established, with Ayaka being serious and clumsy and Sora being needy and straight-forward. The most well-thought-out characters of this manga, though, are the side-characters, which are interesting, yet somewhat flawed, making them feel real.
There are 32 chapters, each one of them around 20 to 30 pages long, making for a fairly long read despite the short amount of chapters. The author, Kashikaze, also put out lots of extra chapters, mostly omakes, which bring the total chapter count to 52.
I want to start by saying that the chibi panels in this manga are divine. It might just be me having a soft spot for chibis, but they are some of my favourite panels ever, no doubt about it, and are definitely one of the main reasons I'm making this review.
When it comes to the characters, and as I've mentioned before, I fell in love with most of the side-characters. I mean, don't get me wrong here, both the main-characters are great, but there's just something about the other that makes them special.
The story-arcs, if you'll let me user the term, never felt drawn-out or too short, but were actually really well spaced out, both in themselves and between one another, making for a seamless transition between each one.
If I had to give this manga a fair rating, I would give it no less than 8 out of 10, as I feel like that's well deserved.
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