Itsuwaribito

tl;dr: A manga about lies and trickery that’s terrible with lies and trickery but is pretty good dumb fun anyway. An Itsuwaribito is a master of trickery, capable of using stealth, lies, and force in order to enact their plans. This manga focuses on one named Utsuho who decided to use his skills to help people. At least at first. As the manga progresses, it becomes about a treasure hunt for nine treasures known as the Kokonotsu that various individuals including Utsuho and his friends are searching for. Regardless of whether the focus is on helping people or searching for the Kokonotsu, the manga remains prettyepisodic throughout with the only things really carrying over from arc to arc being the main cast. That’s probably the core of the weaknesses of this manga, though also one of its strengths. The biggest problem in this manga is that it’s very haphazard and inconsistent with everything. It really felt like there was no overarching plan with regards to anything, whether it be character arcs or plot. The main cast grows to a group of ten characters eventually. But of those, only the first four felt like they were properly written. With everyone else, it felt like they were never planned to be so important when they were first introduced, but the mangaka decided to do so anyway, and then had to write around their original portrayal in order to make them characters that would fit. At times this was decent, in that this shift was done through a proper character arc. Other times there was just really forced writing trying to make their previous actions somehow be different from what they appeared to be. It also felt like the group holistically had really bad chemistry and just in general felt kind of off and not like a proper group. The plot sometimes taps into this lack of unity at times, but even when it’s supposed to show them as united it doesn’t land all that well. Furthermore, the writing also didn’t really handle characters backgrounds and motivations all that well, just kind of throwing them in there randomly at times and in ways that doesn’t help flesh them out at all. And a lot of the cast was also just in general useless or lacking in presence for long stretches. The same applies to side characters that it tries to give depth, as the writing surrounding them often ends up running around itself trying to fit as much into their character as it can but it just feels really forced. All in all, it made it pretty hard to get invested in or like any of the characters outside of Utsuho and his Tanuki friend Pochi. I suppose the ending wasn’t bad, but it was a pretty generic ending and due to lack of investment in the cast not all that satisfying either, and thus not that great either. The plot was also really random. The overarching plot is simple enough, with the cast going around helping people and looking for treasures. There was some foreshadowing of what it’s all building up to at times, though it doesn’t really matter as it essentially gets overwritten. But overall, every arc has very little connection to any other arc. However, there’s a lot of variation in terms of what that actually goes on from arc to arc. This results in every arc feeling messy in new ways. One would expect a manga where the protagonist is a master of lies and trickery fights others to have a psychologic aspect to it. In certain arcs, it certainly tried to do so. However, for the most part it glosses over things entirely. It involves a lot of characters being able to predict tricks with no explanation for why they were able to see what was going to happen, or characters being able to trick others with it not really making sense why the trick worked. It’s all incredibly simplistic and not something that you’re really supposed to think about much. The plot beyond that felt similarly mishandled. Each arc very much felt like the type of story where the plot wasn’t really planned out much in advance so twists and turns were thrown around on the fly even if they led to plot holes and inconsistencies. I suppose that that’s pretty standard for a shounen action manga, but the problem here is that the fights here are still portrayed like they should be battles of wit and skill, so them playing out like battles of strength feels really weird. It also results in action that isn’t all that interesting because it’s trying too hard to stay grounded, though that too is pretty random from arc to arc. At first the manga felt pretty grounded, other than the talking Tanuki, with the general stance being that anything supernatural was just a trick. However, it dropped that completely with all sorts of crazy things thrown in over time, ranging from self-moving combat dolls to abilities vastly superior to what humans are capable of. The problem though is that none of these really stuck, with them pretty much always being constrained to a single arc. The writing also tries to somehow explain a lot of these as rooted in science, which was fine for some things, but with others completely ridiculous. With all that said, that does make the manga kind of fun in a sense. Since the mangaka wasn’t all that concerned about keeping things consistent, having an overarching narrative, or making sense in general, he went crazy with the story. It moves fast and goes in all sorts of directions, making it unpredictable and despite all the messiness, pretty interesting. It helps that there’s a large focus on humor with it being throws out in spades and most of it being pretty good. It’s not the type of manga you really get pulled into, but more so the type you just turn off your brain and flip through, and in terms of that it’s pretty solid. I do wish it had better art though. The quality is decent, but the character designs and style in general felt kind of dull.