Gun x Clover

tl;dr: A manga that’s full of enjoyable characters, action, comedy, and art but that ultimately buckles under the weight of how it can’t really stick to anything. The highlight of the manga is definitely the protagonist, Morito. He does his best to generally look like a meek little boy and is supposedly the lowest rank possible when it comes to mercenaries. However, he’s in actuality a master rank mercenary, of which there are only thirteen in the world, and though his exact age is never disclosed he’s old enough to have trained a number of other successful mercenaries. The setting makes incredibly good use of thisdual identity, in that he’s pretending to be a student at Mikado High School, an academy for mercenaries as well as those that need mercenary protection. To the students, he’s just a weak kid that’s seen as either lame or cute. But to the staff, many of whom are his former pupils, he’s a monster worthy of both fear and respect. The gap between him acting weak and kind of pathetic one moment to then incredibly powerful and somewhat sadistic the next is hilarious. And this comes into play quite often, because while he’s overpowered and often quite wise, he’s also really petty at times. Having to act weak with the students often pisses him off, resulting in him letting his anger out on his former pupils. Him, just being overpowered and shocking people that expected him to be weak, both allies and enemies, is also written in a pretty satisfying manner. While he is incredibly powerful as a master rank, there are twelve others at the same level, so it’s not like he’s completely overpowered. A heavy amount of the action in this manga involves fights between him and other masters while underlings on both sides also fight each other, and the moment-to-moment action here is pretty exciting. The cast overall is packed with colorful personalities that are a lot of fun and the manga is also pretty good about having lots of fun interactions between them. The most interesting as one would expect is the heroine, Kotonoha, who has seven distinct personalities, each with their own design and abilities. The manga handles introducing all of them pretty well, and them having conferences in their head discussing how to handle various situations is generally pretty amusing due to how different they all are. Morito having to figure out how to deal with all of them due to his main job being to guard Kotonoha is also pretty well written, and the initial relationship establishment between him and six of them is handled well. The art is pretty great with a good style and pretty solid quality. The character designs have a good amount of variety and are generally used pretty well for a lot of good art. The action too has a lot of variety that the art showcases well. The problem that lies at all the issues in this manga is the lack of any overarching cohesiveness. There are a lot of plot threads that seem interesting when they are introduced, but they never go anywhere. For the most part it just keeps pushing them along at a minimal level while constantly adding new ones, and in the end it just kind of throws half of them away while rushing to quickly resolve the rest. The world building has a lot of interesting concepts, both in terms of the mercenary system and supernatural elements. However, they don’t really fit with each other, often contradicting what came before. This makes the action especially hard to get invested in as it’s just all completely random with powers and abilities that don’t mesh at all. The world building for each arc works well for the arc, but falls apart at a larger scale, and that builds up to making the world overall not feeling cohesive. Similarly, while there are a lot of great characters, the manga is really bad at using them after introducing them and giving them some basic development. A lot are reoccurring but it doesn’t feel like anyone, not Morito, not any of Kotonoha’s seven personalities, not a single character in the entire manga has a proper character arc with development beyond the arc they’re introduced. Similarly, showing how a lot of the cast fell in love with Morito is written pretty well, but then absolutely nothing romantic happens after that with any of them. The manga also does try to give a serious take on various themes, primarily centered around why humans go to war. However, a lot of that it is just random monologues or infodumps which are then never brought up again. It ultimately feels like all of it is more for the aesthetic of appearing like it’s dealing with serious themes, rather than actually dealing with them. As such, the manga is really enjoyable chapter to chapter, but ultimately leaves no lasting impression whatsoever.