It's not often that I'm so immediately drawn into a manga by it's description alone, yet there's something about this that seemed so enticing. Maybe Monster Musume wasn't enough for me. Maybe I had to go in even deeper. And what i found at the end of that dark journey was Nukenai Seiken-chan.

Now the plot of this manga really is quite something. The basic premise is that a swordsmith is traveling around the land trying to create an imperial, which is pretty much just a really fancy legendary sword. So of course, like any good swordsmith, to make something great you need to know what a real one looks like. You gotta get real intimate with it, know how it feels and understand the curvature of the blade, hilt and sheath. So our main character starts off his journey coming across Excelia, which is pretty much like Excalibur: a sword stuck in a pedestal. Only, the sword can turn into a scantily clad loli. And the pedestal is her panties. Honestly, I can't think of a better way to start off a manga than to have your main character trying to force off the panties of a loli so that he can study her better. But it gets better from there. Every chef and lumberjack knows that you gotta keep your tools sharp and clean so that they can be the most effective. The same is true to swords, so our aspiring swordsmith takes it upon himself to keep all his imperials sparkly clean. Only, the author loves to show the cleaning as if the swords were in human form. And so our swordsmith becomes a legendary masseuse with a skillful touch, able to clean up every part of his imperials. As he continues on in his journey he acquires more swords, gets into wacky predicaments and gets closer and closer to making his own imperial.

There's honestly very little 'real' plot to this story, so it just devolves into an ecchi slice of life fanservice fest, which may or may not be a bad thing. The one thing I really enjoy about this manga is that it knows that it's trash and it embraces it. The worst types of stories are those that try to take themselves too seriously while just being bad, which makes it hard to just casually enjoy it. The characters in Nukenai Seiken-chan are super tropey, there's no development, no plot, no stakes, no themes to talk about. It's just a dumb, fun time to enjoy such a dumb premise played out to it's fullest extent. I'm glad to see that decades of manga history have come around to creating this wonderful gem, and I'm looking forward to see what more is to come.