Kyo Kara Maoh!

I'll have to agree with others that the later half of the manga isn't as good as the first half, but this is still a manga I am still glad to have read. Characters: I think the characters are both the strengths and weakness of this manga. I do rather like the main characters as people I don't mind following around and witnessing their story. Wolfram in particular grew on me quite quickly (but I can see why people won't like him), and the other mains are rather pleasant people to watch, even if they are pretty cliche. I don't mind watching the characters going about withtheir everyday things, even if there isn't much of a main plot (especially at the start). The problem is that it doesn't go much past that. I rather enjoy the characters from the get go, but not in a very attached way either. They don't grow much as story progresses. This is fine at first, but towards the end where lots of things are happening in the story yet I'm not that emotionally involved with the characters (even as I like them), it really hurts the enjoyment of the series. Story: People usually like when there's at least one major plotline. In this manga, I felt that originally, the story wasn't amazing, but was at least enjoyable because the plot wasn't overwhelming. It was a lighthearted read I'd had rated 8 for enjoyment. Then some sort of plot started kicking in. To be honest, I never cared much for the plot in this story, just tolerated it and enjoyed things as they happened. But when the plot becomes the main focus in the story and you don't really care, it kind of gets tiring to read. I just ended up reading pretty quickly even if I can't really absorb all the details properly. And I can't even enjoy my usual character interactions properly because everyone's too involved in the plot. THE PLOT, THE PLOT! they scream, and I'm just here wanting to skip to another part but reading it nonetheless. To add to it, the story has never really been that great with this. There are some fun things here and there, and some happenings that genuinely made me go: "WHAT. LOL.", but it isn't really deep or well executed. Truly the weak point of this series. Overall enjoyment: When a manga goes above the 100 chapter mark, you sort of expect the characters to probably be well developed. - Nope, not really the case here. Then the story must have been great right? - not really... So why did I end up enjoying this a lot? It's something I can't really explain. Often series are decent to good but after I'm done with it I forget it quickly. For KKM though I still rather like it quite a bit. I feel like I want more - even though the manga never really gave me what I want. I'll probably go look at the novel or some fanfiction in hopes of something better. In the end, I'd say this series gave me a similar feeling as fairy tail. Where the plot often gets out of hand but it doesn't really matter because that's not what we are here for. The characters make me facepalm at times at their typicalness but we're not looking for anything deep so it's fine. It tries too hard to build up some story that doesn't really interest me because I stopped caring a while ago - yet in the end when I'm done with the manga I still wish for more character interactions and ships to tide me over. (fanfic time?!). If you're considering picking this up, I hope you do go in without expectations because it doesn't give you that much to go on about. But if you're just looking to pass time and enjoy and laugh a bit, it's not a bad choice exactly. But if you really want something worth your time, I'd suggest picking up something else instead, since this requires pretty high investment in terms of number of chapters, and doesn't give you much in the end.