tl;dr: A fantasy manga that’s purely comedy without anything more to it, though it is really good comedy. This manga is a gag manga set in a world that used to be the standard heroes fighting demons fantasy but reached a new age of peace and prosperity thanks to the power of smartphones and the internet. The manga is primarily about a serious and earnest young man named Lucas who is doing his best to take care of his younger sister Monika but has a really hard time doing so. In no small part due to a sentient sword she picked up in the forest thatbecame her best friend.
The manga is basically just a series of short stories about the various hijinks they get involved in. There’s not really any sort of overarching plot. The largest plot thread is the background of the sword, which has light hints throughout the series but is only really focused on in the ending. The smaller stories also aren’t all that interesting or deep either. As such, the plot doesn’t really matter.
As such, the focus of the manga is purely comedy, a constant and very dense stream of comedy. There’s a decent variety to the comedy too. There’s a decent amount of playing around with fantasy tropes centered around defying expectation. But there’s also a lot of manzai like comedy with Lucas acting as a straight man and throwing out retorts to all the absurd nonsense that’s going on around him. And there is quite a lot of absurdity. An absurd amount of absurdity.
What’s really interesting about the absurdity though is how the writing almost doesn’t actually treat a lot of absurdity like it’s absurd. Lots of crazy stuff happens that you would think is just a one-off joke with no real explanation that’ll never show up again. But then it’ll become a reoccurring thing for the rest of the manga and there’ll be some sort of logic to it established. There are a lot of running jokes that end up popping up in new and fresh ways and the nonsense builds upon itself to reach more nonsensical levels of nonsense. Despite there not being any overarching plot, there’s still a sort of progression to things and that prevents things from getting stale.
There’s also lot of variety to the bizarre traits of the reoccurring cast so by throwing different combinations of them together it results in a lot of interesting comedy. However, beyond that the cast isn’t very good. There were a few characters that were somewhat likable, but no one that felt worth getting invested in. There’s no real attempt at fleshing out bonds of any type. The premise may make you think that the bond between an orphan brother and the orphan sister he’s taking care of would be important, but it isn’t focused on at all. There’s also light romance with a couple girls liking Lucas, but it doesn’t go anywhere. For better or worse, everything genuine has been sacrificed on the altar of humor.
The art in this manga is genuinely great though. It has a very unique art style for manga that looks distinctively more western. It’s also really high quality, so it would be fantastic in a genuinely serious fantasy series. But here its constantly getting twisted into being wacky and that contrast works incredibly well for lots of great visual humor.
