This will majority be a spoiler free review, though obvious spoilers will be marked as such.
I just spent the past four hours binge reading Gyakusatsu Happy End. Let's talk about it.
#STORY
##8/10
The general premise of
Gyakusatsu Happy End is "high-school boy gets stuck in a time loop where he has to murder people so that his sister can survive to her surgery". Simple enough, right? However, where this manga shines is where it takes the story. The story itself can be incredibly predictable at times, and there were multiple times where I had correctly guessed where they were going with it. However, that didn't deter me from seeing it through to the end. That, unfortunately, is where the majority of my ire for this comes from.
Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide
This manga ends on a several chapter lead up of Makoto realizing the way that he can break the curse: he has to have Shiori (ie, a relative of his) kill him. However, he cannot bring himself to make Shiori a murderer. He then gets into a fight with his other sister Kana, which results with him getting pushed off a very high ledge and falling to his death. Kana then has to hope that that is the way that the time loop has ended, but she is not sure it wasn't passed along to her instead since Shiori's curse specifically mentioned killing a loved one. Kana barely knew Makoto and had spent the past week trying to find him due to him killing their mother. So did his death qualify? We'll never know because the manga ended exactly at 23:59:59. So, who knows if they're still stuck in the time loop?(Spoiler free TLDR: Cliff-hanger ending left me raging but some might like.)
#VISUALS
##8/10
This is certainly one of the strongest aspects of the manga.
Hirokazu Mukoura is an incredibly strong artist, and you can 100% tell they had an absolute
blast drawing the panels for this manga.
#CHARACTERS
##7/10
The characters were fairly enjoyable. Here are some of my specific thoughts towards some of them:
-
Makoto Kusakabe very frequently teeters the edge of villain and anti-hero, but he still clings to that hope of morality (sometimes at the worst of times). This is both his strength and his weakness, as it shows it's face at some of the worst possible times for him.
- Detective Tsukumo was a fairly comic character, as we are introduced to him via him consuming sugary foods in bizarre ways (like drinking liquid red bean jelly or dipping chocolate into mustard). However, he ended up as one of my favorite characters purely due to his unpredictability and obsessive actions that left me gripping my seat.
- Detective Midzuno starts off as the comic relief to the already comic Tsukumo, but really evolved into a character that I highly enjoyed by the end of the manga.
- Katagiri, in opposition, went from a character I was very sympathetic towards to one I absolutely despised. That's what she gets for being a yandere, I suppose.
#OVERALL
Gyakusatsu Happy End is a very predictable cluster fuck of gore, rape, and weird fantasies. However, while that normally would put me off from any sort of story, every rapist that we see on the page gets what they deserve, and I respect that in a manga.
While I wouldn't recommend if you have a squeamish stomach or are sensitive towards stories with fairly common mention of rape and sexual assault, I would very much recommend if you like stories about time manipulation, murder, and dealing with the consequences of such time manipulation.
Gyakusatsu Happy End has many highs and lows, but I do think this manga is really slept on. However, I hope you get to read it in a different way than me, as I read it as a Japanese -> Russian -> English translation, so it was.... a bit awkward at times, if you would believe. :P
