Outrage Girl Shiomi is the sort of title that has a lot going for it but has almost as many strikes against it. It's undeniably well-made but at the same time rather hard to recommend.

The manga's central premise is that yakuza boss (they just call him a "mob boss" but let's be honest with ourselves, we all know what that means) Gen Shiomi, whose clique is embroiled in a mob war, gets extensive plastic surgery to disguise himself. Through the machinations of a perverted doctor he ends up looking like a high school girl (specifically, a famous idol). Fair enough, strange premises are nothing new to the medium and there are all kinds of angles you could pull out of this sort of thing.

So what frustrates about OGS is that it so frequently is decent, sometimes is good, and occasionally is great, yet also manages to fumble the ball when it comes to anything that's not specifically school-based comedy hijinks or mobster action scenes (of which there are surprisingly many and almost all of which are manga highlights). In particular, there is just enough weird out of place fanservice and just enough shitty cracks at the expense of crossdressers and transpeople that even if you're a part of neither group, it will inevitably wear on your nerves unless you're thoroughly desensitized to such things. When crossdressing schoolboy Rei is introduced and offers to take Shiomi to meet his "friends", it doesn't take a clairvoyant to guess (correctly) that they're depicted as gonky middle aged men in maid-themed drag. It's just rote and is honestly more sigh-worthy than actively offensive at least in the opinion of this particular transwoman, but it's frustrating nonetheless. There aren't a ton of these scenes, but there are enough that it detracts greatly from the overall experience.

Really that's the main problem with OGS. That if it were just slightly different--a few scenes changed or omitted, one or two characters rewritten--it would be great, and much easier to go to bat for. In its best moments it's reminiscent in tone of One Punch Man in the way it seamlessly blends ridiculous physical comedy with actual serious action, but it simply falls back on laziness too often to be truly recommendable to most people and sadly, it doesn't really seem like it has an interest in pulling itself out of this holding pattern. Despite being on-point in the technical sense (I must restate again that the action scenes are a highlight and are very well done, especially anything that involves Shiomi and a katana) it has too much holding it back to be truly great.