I was a boy when I first watched Ranma ½. Today, I am a man, if not mentally, then legally and physically. While childhood nostalgia shouldn’t interfere with rating a work, I’m giving a fair warning if you don’t think I’m being objective enough.

Ranma ½ is important to me. I recall watching the show during middle school. We didn’t have internet then, so I’d ride my bike across my half-square mile township, furiously pedalling to get to the local library where I’d go to Youtube to MP4 and download Ranma ½ episodes onto my flash drive to watch on my netbook in the evenings. Ranma ½ never failed to make me laugh. For what it’s worth, childhood or no, I don’t think I’d continue to watch a show so passionately if it wasn’t any good.

The final episode was bittersweet; I finally had finished my favorite anime. Hungry for more, it wasn’t long until I decided to pick up the manga, which continued after the anime’s cancellation.

And now that I’ve turned the page of the last chapter of the last volume, I’m left with that same feeling as I had years ago when I finished the show: bittersweet. Allow me to share with you the sweetness I experienced while reading Ranma ½.

Ranma ½ served as a gateway series for many an anime fan in the nineties, not unlike Sailor Moon and, a bit later, Dragon Ball Z. Given the timeframe of the height of Ranma ½’s popularity, it gave birth to one of the biggest anime fan communities on the web. To this day, it isn’t hard at all to find Ranma ½ fanfiction. It’s easy to underestimate just how big Ranma ½ was, because it’s virtually unknown today. If the name Rumiko Takahashi means anything to the layman anime watcher, it’s probably as the creator of Inuyasha with many people watching anime today never even hearing of Ranma ½. So an explanation of the insane plot is in order.

Ranma Saotome is forced by his father, Genma Saotome to accompany him to Furinkan, a neighborhood in Nerima, Tokyo, Japan, where his martial arts buddy, Soun Tendo lives with his three daughters. Ranma Saotome is set to be betrothed to the middle Tendo daughter, Akane, a tomboy. Not long after meeting, it’s clear that Akane and Ranma don’t take to one another too well. Making Ranma’s life even more of a pain is his secret. After falling in the spring of drowned girl while on a training expedition in China with his father, Ranma was cursed. When splashed with cold water, he becomes a she, and hot water turns him back into a male.

Ranma ½ is a romantic comedy, harem, ecchi, martial arts, sitcom manga. Crazier than even the plot and crazier than how many different categories Ranma ½ falls under is the fact that it works. Ranma ½ starts out as a romantic comedy, focusing on the dynamics between Ranma and Akane. Before long, as more and more characters are added to the cast, Ranma ½ transforms in a way that cements it as one of the best comedy manga. Ranma features a truly colorful cast of characters, from the honorable, brooding, lovesick Ryoga Hibiki (one of my favorite characters of all time), to the violent yet affectionate Shampoo, to the lecherous martial arts master, Happosai, to the money-obsessed and morally dubious Nabiki Tendo, to the kind yet dangerously set-in-her-ways matriarch of the Saotome household, Nadoka Saotome. Ranma 1/2 is light on character development (your mileage may vary as to this being a bad thing/how bad this is, which I’ll get into in a bit), but in spite (or perhaps somewhat because) of this, the characters in the manga are very, very well-defined. The characters are so distinct and animated that it would be a shame not to see how these characters interact with one another. Fortunately, Takahashi seems to know this and after the principal characters are introduced, Ranma ½ shifts its focus from Akane and Ranma to the cast at large as we see how they play off of one another. Hilarity ensues and I love it because the possibilities are endless and the characters are so wild that they get into truly insane scenarios. Takahasi’s creativity knows no bounds and even one-shot characters often leave impressions because they're so out-there in terms of concept, design, or both (one such character that comes to mind for me is the Panda Doodle, a poorly-drawn picture of a panda that comes to life and won’t go back into her scroll until she’s kissed by a handsome man). It’s also interesting to see what new Jusenkyo curses will pop up. The situations in the manga are driven by the characters’ outlandish personalities such as Ranma’s insane ego that doesn’t allow him to lose anything.

Adding to the comedy are the facial expressions, which turn my chuckles into full-on laughs. I’m partial to Takahashi’s running visual gag of drawing the faces of flabbergasted characters (often Ranma) as Henohenomoheji (へのへのもへじ).

Besides being a sitcom, Ranma ½ is an action manga, featuring loads of martial arts. The wackiness of the plot bleeds into this. Ranma ½ features a whole slew of mundane activities that are given a competitive, martial spin, such as martial arts cooking. That said, as shown by her later works such as Inuyasha, Takahashi is no slouch when it comes to bonafide action, and my action itch was scratched when Takahasi got serious and showed fights with stakes. The manga can definitely be serious at times, in both terms of action and plot. This is a nice break from the episodic nature of the series at times, but it leaves a bit to be desired in terms of characterization.

I generally have a knee-jerk reaction to harem manga. Ranma ½ features one of the largest, being the trope codifier for love dodecahedron and unwanted harem. Given this, you may wonder how I can stomach it. The secret lies in the latter trope: the harem is unwanted and it's played for comedy. The harem generally exists to make Ranma’s life miserable and while sure, you can insert yourself due to liking a few members of the harem, the point of it isn’t just to be mindless eye candy. If harems aren’t your thing, it being a part of Ranma isn’t a reason to skip over this series.

It’s weird critiquing something you love. Because you must now think about why you love such a thing, perhaps realizing that you can’t quite articulate why. Or worse, in taking a hard look at its faults, you realize it isn’t as good as you realized. And despite that, you may still love it.

I still love Ranma ½, though I realize that even if it’s the perfect show for me, it’s not perfect for everyone and perhaps it wouldn’t even be the perfect show for me if I was introduced to it when I was older and not via the anime DVD section of my local library when I was twelve. Perhaps, you being the astute reader, have realized another problem: I’m enamored with the anime, not the manga. Don’t get me wrong. I still love the manga and there are problems that the manga and anime both share for sure, but the manga has unique problems as well.

I won’t focus on the lack of music and that dated, 80s art and the EDs that blast me back to a time the I never experienced, yet have an odd sense of nostalgia towards all the same. This isn’t a fault of the manga.

The manga’s greatest strength, its characters, plays a part in its greatest weakness, the lack of recurring characters. Let me explain. As stated before, Ranma ½ features loads upon loads of characters, and when they interact, it's great, but they don’t do it enough for my liking, leading me to feel like they’re underused. More often than not, Ranma and Akane meet a one-off character. Adding salt to the wound is the fact that there are characters with their own epic arcs such as Pantyhose Taro and Herb, but they’re only seen twice, at best. I can count the number of times one of my favorite characters, Principal Kuno, appeared in the manga using one hand. Fans of manga say that the anime cuts out various characters. I’m inclined to care less when the characters don’t really appear that much. Granted, the characters are still great, I just wish they interacted more, like in the anime.

Then there’s the lack of growth. In fostering a light tone, status quo often needs to be maintained. Without some sense of status quo, the episodic nature wouldn’t work, but still, it’s downright oppressive at times in that nothing ever changes. I get that it’s not a romantic comedy anymore, but it makes me not care about Ranma or Akane at all. It just gets tiring with no romantic progress, especially since the mangaka wants us to like them as a couple, but throughout the manga, they hardly ever make nice. The manga doesn’t even let them have a happily-ever-after, they just argue a bit more. I know that this is supposed to give the sense of the adventures continuing indefinitely, but it just makes me feel like the ending is cheap. It was cute seeing all the characters one last time, though. I didn’t bother putting a spoiler tag because nothing really matters in Ranma ½, the sooner you realize this, the sooner you’ll be happier. I remember years ago screencapping Ranma and Akane kissing and excitedly showing a sibling, only to unpause the video and discover that Akane had applied duct tape to Ranma’s lips.

The comedy can also be a bit hit or miss. At times it can be a bit juvenile and crass possibly due to the temporal and geological borders (there is an unconscious body swap joke at least twice). And as kind of hinted before, the tone can be a bit dismal, with no one seemingly getting along with each other. If you take this too seriously, it can make the manga uncomfortable to read after a while. For what it’s worth, the anime does a better job of making me happy, though both the manga and anime can make me laugh.

When it’s all said and done, I still love Ranma ½, whether in anime or manga form. My love isn’t completely irrational, while it’s not perfect, Ranma ½ is still a humorously zany manga that needs to be seen to be believed. I’m glad I discovered it. It is my hope that in reading this, others can come to love the anime and manga the same way I have. Love it so much that if they ever want to go to Japan, then like me, they’d want to visit Nerima.

At the end of the final original Viz publication of the manga, Rumiko Takahashi wrote to her readers, expressing that she would be happy if the characters from Ranma ½ would stay in their hearts and remain their friends for life.

I know that she’ll never read this, but I’m pleased to say, at least for one man, her wish has been granted. Whether I die tomorrow or in eighty years, the cast of Ranma ½ will remain in my heart for the rest of my life and seeing them will always bring a smile to my face, even in the fiercest of storms and the darkest of nights.

8.5/10
B

(But a 9 for the manga and a 10 for the anime in my heart)