As always, a brief summary. Bakemonogatari is about highschool senior Araragi Koyomi. After encountering a vampire over spring break, Araragi suddenly becomes aware of the world of apparitions and other supernatural phenomenon that seemingly exist alongside human society. Over the course of Bakemonogatari, Araragi meets 5 girls who all are being afflicted by some sort of supernatural ailment that connects to their psyche. With the occasional wisdom from the mysterious expert who helped him with his vampire encounter, Araragi helps out these girls all while dealing with the aftereffects of his own vampiricism.
I think every work has some strengths and I would be remiss if I went without sharing the Bakemonogatari manga’s plus points. Without a doubt, the art of this manga is the highlight. Oh! Great, the illustrator of this series, manages to deliver illustrations that are indescribably gorgeous with an insane level of detail every chapter without fail. It's extremely impressive how consistently great the art is. Also in the art department, every chapter ended with a special illustration from an illustrator, some famous and some not. I thought this was a really cool and fun way to celebrate the reach of this series as a whole. Additionally, just like the anime and light novel, this manga makes meta jokes and references from time to time which I always found thoroughly entertaining. Unfortunately, these were just about the only aspects of this manga that I enjoyed.
For the sake of people who are reading this and intend to read this manga, I first encourage you to not, especially if you’ve not seen either the anime or read the light novels, and second of all, I’ve decided to write a short spoiler free portion that will be followed with a spoiler filled portion with my unfiltered thoughts, so please keep that in mind.
To start, I want to address the fan service elements. Monogatari as a whole is no stranger to fan service and up until this manga I was not really bothered by its inclusion. There are plenty of instances of ecchi elements throughout which I personally don't find all that distracting from the more serious moments. With that being said, this manga adaptation took the ecchi elements and cranked it up to the absolute max. As amazing as the art is, so much of it is blatantly ecchi that it is extremely distracting and I think largely distasteful. There are plenty of moments where touching and deep thematic moments for a character happen and its paired with some of the most insanely lewd imagery ever conceived by man. They really do make basically every excuse they could have to have the female characters be as revealing as possible. Maybe this would be a plus point to some of you guys but I at least, coming off the light novel and anime, was not looking for this and I found it extremely jarring. There is a time and a place and this manga clearly doesn't understand that. Personally though, I thought this was the least of this manga’s issues.
The largest issue is the massive mess that is the story and characters. First off, I want to make it completely clear that I understand that this manga isnt supposed to be a 1 to 1 adaptation. This manga is much more of a reimagining of the source material. While I dont think that adaptations like this have to stick to the plot of the source material, as the manga goes on, this manga takes many well defined characters, story-beats and thematic elements from the original and twists and distorts them in largely illogical and confusing ways. At first, these changes are very minor and as a whole, don't have much of an effect. The being said, later on, the events of the manga are so wildly different from the source material that a number of the later story arcs just feel like a confused jumbled mess trying and failing to tie anything together in even a slightly cohesive way. Many times, it completely misses the point of the events its telling while also ruining the characterization of the characters that participate in these scenes. The most egregious thing I found wrong with this was that towards the end, they begin to take story arcs from different parts of the series and they then blend it all together into what should have been the final arc of Bakemonogatari forming about 40 chapters of complete mindless slop. Characters show up for no reason who shouldn't even be there, even within the context of this manga's reimagined story, and the point of the plots of all the original story arcs this part crams together are almost entirely thrown out the window in favor of random, out of place and unexplained fights. For this entire stretch, it truly felt like a fanfiction thrown together by some horny shonen obsessed 14 year old. It completely misses the point of the original story's pacing and carefully constructed plot. Im not saying that they needed to follow the plot 1 to 1 or anything like that. This manga is at its core a reimagining of the source. With that being said, in so many instance they try so had to riff of pre-established story beats and characters from the light novel and anime just for the sake of including them. It feels largely unnecessary to what this manga is trying to be and I thought it severely damaged the narrative it was trying to push as such.
Spoiler, click to view
From this point on, I'm going to assume that people reading this have read the light novel or watched the anime and I will give a broad overview of the entire manga breaking down to specifics exactly what the issue is. To start, the first 4 parts of Bakemonogatari, Hitagi Crab, Mayoi Snail, Suruga Monkey and Nadeko Snake for the most part are just fine. For the most part, it keeps in line with the original in terms of plot. My only issues come with, like I stated earlier, the constant barrage of ecchi your hit with almost every chapter. I'm not going to go into that too much though as I think this is just partially my preferences. Also Araragi acts like a complete edge lord sometimes for no reason. Especially during his fight with the rainy devil, he gives off a “I'm a badass vampire who could kill you whenever I want” sort of vibe which I found odd as this goes almost completely against his characterization up to this point. Also, in numerous cases in the same arc, Araragi will intentionally seek out fights which are strange. But overall, it was just fine. The Issues begin right after Nadeko Snake. They decide to do Kizumonogatari before doing Tsubasa Cat. While I feel like this isn't necessarily an issue, I just found it extremely weird that they chose to do it here. In Kizu though, more issues become apparent. This is the point where they begin to really make up their own plot points that add very little to the story. Every vampire hunter gets their own exhaustingly long backstory that I have no idea why we need. While this does not exactly mess up the story in the future, I feel like I don't need to know 2 chapters of info into Guillotinecutter’s religious beliefs or an extended portion about Dramaturgy’s company and about him wanting to hire Araragi. Again, this doesn't exactly mess up the story going forward, but it just felt like largely a waste of time to me. Later on in Kizu, after the final fight as Kiss-shot is half dead and Araragi is unsure of what to do, they for some reason decide to have her monologue the flashback portion of Onimonogatari from Second Season. The story of her first thrall and getting attacked by the darkness (which hadn't shown up yet) and the first thrall's suicide. I have no idea why they put this here. It makes very little sense here and it disrupts and subtracts from the deep moment between Araragi and Kiss-shot at the end of Kizu. Towards the start of Tsubasa Cat, they decide to skip Araragi and Senjougahara’s date and here is where they do the Nekomonogatari events during Golden Week. Again, while I get why they chose to do it here, similarly to Kizu, they went away from the events of the original to an extent and missed out on some of the point of the arc. At this point, while I was slightly annoyed, It really wasn't droppable bad. Once that flashback ends, the plot goes almost completely off the rails. For some incomprehensible reason, they decided to take Nekomonogatari White from the second season and combine it with the end of Tsubasa Cat. Additionally, because Shinobu Mail in Owarimonogatari happens at the same time as Nekomonogatari White, they also do this at the same time. Said simply, they now have 3 entirely separate plot lines all happening all at once and it becomes a complete mess. Because now ⅔ of these events take place further into the story's timeline than the rest, the story is now almost entirely rewritten. Shinobu’s first thrall shows up and kinda just lurks around in the background only able to be seen by Oshino and Hachikuji. Araragi, searching for the missing Shinobu, goes to the top of the mountain and meets Kaiki. Because they entirely skip Nisemonogatari, they make him some know-it-all conman who is just chilling at the shrine for some reason. In this version, he did not sell the curses to the middle schoolers but it was instead Seishirou, the first thrall who spread cures to the middle schoolers to connect and open a door to apparitions at the shrine while Kaiki just sells info on apparitions to middle schoolers. (????LMAO????). Also Kaiki somehow knows who he is and who Hanakawa is even though he hadn't met either of them. From here, Araragi sprouts bat wings for some reason (???) and flies to the top and bottom of the mountain. Then, when he finds Shinobu with Black Hanakawa, the tiger shows up and Hanakawa goes to fight it knowing exactly what it is straight away (skipping almost all the backstory and completely missing the point of Nekomonogatari White) and Araragi fights Seishirou like he does in Owarimonogatari. Of course, they skip the entire character building portion of Nekomonogatari White so Gain has not been introduced yet so instead, Episode and Dramaturgy shows up with a small army of military spec-ops vampire soldiers with assault rifles and humvees. They want to kill Seishirou (for some reason?) but Araragi wants to do it himself and they have the race to the sword thing. This is basically more or less where the manga ends that has been translated to English so far (as of 1/28/24). At this point, these last 30 to 40 chapters have been a complete blur and I genuinely have no idea what is happening. They somehow managed to almost completely ruin Hanakawa, Seishirou, Kaiki, Shinobu and Araragi's characters in one fell swoop and it's honestly kinda impressive how they managed to completely miss the point and ruin the impact of all these storylines as much as they did. Thankfully, I ran out of English content and it gave me the last push I needed to drop it.TL;DR - In conclusion, the Bakemonogatari manga, while it starts as just an ok way to experience the Monogatari series, completely devolves into an incomprehensible mashup of story arcs that completely ruins the all characters involved. It really does by the end feel like some sort of shonen obsessed fan fiction created by someone with no understanding of the series laced with blatant ecchi fanservice. With all this being said, I know I am in the minority with the high average score that this series has and the praise it regularly receives. This of course is all purely my opinion and how I viewed the story but I can't ignore how disappointed and upset I was by the time I finished it. If I said anything here that seems like I missed the point or didn't understand, It's probably on me but this is just the way I unapologetically feel. Please just read the light novel or watch the anime.
Update 9-15-24: When I first wrote this review, I had dropped this manga at about chapter 175 as that is all that had been translated at the time. I checked today and saw that not only was it finished, but I was only 18 chapters from finishing. As such, I picked it back up and finished it. The ending is extremely stupid and far more shallow than the base series. There are numerous side characters who have their character arcs practically half finished. They introduce numerous random major plot points from portions further on in the series that didn't get included so far, throwing a few major implications out there in literally the final 4 or 5 chapters that are forgotten almost as quickly as they appear. It leads for this ending to feel very confused and overly complicated for no good reason. I understand that the Bakemonogatari manga is supposed to be something of a reimagining of sorts when it comes to adapting the source materials, but for this adaptation to have completely missed the point of its own story as much as this adaptation does, it really just leaves me extremely disappointed. Again, I implore you, if you haven't experienced any of The Monogatari Series yet, please opt to read the light novels or just watch the anime. Both are consistently fantastic and if you think you will like this series, I can assure you they will offer a far better medium to experience this amazing story than this manga.
Score: 40 ---> 30