Tokidoki

Tokidoki is the latest One Shot by Naoshi Komi,despite the small length it has been better in many aspects than his previous work but this isn't the first time that someone came with a Melodramatic plot which portrays strong emotion and tragic in the expense of logic and character development, tbh, it relies heavily on getting the reader emotional to create a fake sense of attachment to the uninteresting and bland characters, the closest thing I can relate it with is Hollywood flick "The Fault in Our Stars" In short,it follows a girl with fatal heart disease and got few countable years to live, untilhe meets a boy who changes her life over a short time but life isn't meant to be easy and the tragic plot twist happen. It's just 49 pages with fine art,go check it out.

JUST READ THIS ONESHOT!!!!! ITS FRIGGIN BEAUTIFUL!!!!! (except if you plan to wait for more than a oneshot to enjoy this more, but this oneshot itself is magnificent) Komi Naoshi is most famous for his work Nisekoi which I enjoyed myself since it was very light and just sparked the young romantic-comedy side in me, but Nisekoi was lacking deep emotions and the capacity to make the reader see relationships in a more sophisticated way since it is a harem which mostly focused on making the reader giggle and the characters funny. This work of his on the other hand still is very enjoyable thoughnot a harem but its plot just hits deeper in the feels. THE ONLY THING LACKING IS LENGTH TO FURTHER DEVELOP THE CHARACTERS AND TO LET THE READER BE ABLE TO ABSORB MORE EMOTIONS. Im really hoping for more!!!

As I noted in a past review, author Naoshi Komi wrote my single favorite one-shot, "Island", when he was just 20 years old in 2006. However, his one-shot "E no Genten", written in 2018 when he was 31, was largely bland and uninspired. While Tokidoki is better than the latter, it's very far from the quality of his early work. Tokidoki has a simple premise. High schooler Iijima discovers that his new classmate Takagi has only a few years to live and seeks to make her remaining time as joyous and exciting as possible. They go to the beach, attend a carnival together, eatice crime, go on bike rides, and ultimately, practice music in a school band. Here, we already run into a big problem. Takagi is able to determine how many beats her heart has left before she dies. Essentially, a death clock. However, such a device doesn't exist in the real world, even for the terminally ill. Not that the latter would even apply to Takagi, as she has at least 6 years of life left when the story begins. Thus, the manga invents a magical MacGuffin that doesn't exist, but is a necessary plot device, central to the big twist at the end of the work. This is painfully lazy, particularly in a one-shot. Sure, it makes the reality of a character's impending death more stark and emotional, but at the price of drawing many readers out of the work, as they realize how manipulative and artificial it is. The rest of the plot is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the interactions between Takagi and Iijima are cute and innocent. Thus, they are realistic and relatable as one's first high school love. However, they're so generic that they don't distinguish either one as a unique character. At the end of the story, I still didn't know who Takagai and Iijima truly were. They could have been any high school boy and girl. That gives the story a universality, sure, but also weakens one's interest in their eventual fates. Takagi and Iijima are no one. The twist at the end is also a mixed bag. It's mostly surprising, having been lightly telegraphed by the facial expressions of one member of the school band, and does present the story in a new light. Furthermore, it grants the one-shot a meaning, even if it's a simplistic, mundane one, namely to live and enjoy life to the fullest. However, the downside is that it's almost as contrived as the death clock earlier. Not only is it exceptionally unlikely, but it makes certain earlier scenes borderline impossible, or at least implausible. Overall, this is a frustrating one-shot. It has competent and even good elements, but is dragged down by an awful MacGuffin and a number of decisions that had downsides as much as their benefit to the story.