Yoshi no Zuikara: The Frog in the Well Does Not Know the Ocean

tl;dr: A slice of life that’s a bit interesting at times not ever particularly funny or deep and thus just okay. This manga is a slice of life about a mangaka that lives on a small rural island. The core of the manga is the protagonist, Naruhiko, gaining more confidence in himself. He seems to see himself as a failure of a mangaka and failure of a human that’s just barely hanging on by a thread. This manifests in him trying to be successful through copying market trends and not at all trying to put any of his own life experiences into the manga, as hebelieves the life he’s lived is pretty worthless and always will be. However, he eventually gets pushed into doing a slice of life manga based on his surroundings by his editor and it actually becomes pretty successful. And with that he tries to take a more optimistic view on life and experience more of what the world is offering him. While this is a slice of life manga, it’s the type that focuses just as much if not more so on trying to show character development as it does on comedy and just showing characters living their lives. However, it isn’t very successful at doing so. It doesn’t do a good job of establishing Naruhiko’s character before it starts throwing events at him that result in character growth, and the character growth itself is pretty rushed. As such, it doesn’t feel all that cohesive or all that satisfying to read about. Furthermore, Naruhiko’s the only character that really stands out at all in the manga. There are of course other reoccurring characters, but they aren’t all that memorable and their connection to Naruhiko isn’t established all that well. The only character that feels like they actually had a strong impact on Naruhiko’s character growth is his editor, but she has very little presence as she’s in a far away city and they mostly communicate solely through phone, which resulted in the growth that does occur due to her feeling pretty abrupt and random. There are characters for whom it feels that something more was definitely going to be done with as there are hints at complications to backstories and such, but the manga ends before any of that occurs. Thus the cast overall is lacking in depth and hard to get all that invested in. On top of that, the slice of life aspect and comedy aren’t that great either. The slice of life is a scattershot of a bunch of different topics without any cohesiveness to them. It can be interesting at times, but it hops around too much to really get into anything enough for it to feel like it’s really adding to the manga. The comedy is also lackluster due to it being pretty character focused but most of the characters not being all that funny. The only character that really stood out in that regard was the tsundere fan, and while I suppose that she’s the character with the third strongest presence in the manga, it still doesn’t feel like all that much and certainly not enough to hold up the manga. The art is pretty good in terms of quality and decent in terms of style in general. As such it’s good at conveying the story that it’s telling. However, it never really has panels that look especially good and as such considering the grounded setting, the art can get kind of dull.