Esoragoto Note

Esoragoto Note is a short, simple shoujo manga with a very, very tiny amount of romance. It tends to jump around a lot during the 5 chapters and ends with only one or two of about a handful of plot points being settled. Story - 4/10 The manga has a fairly typical hospital setup. A girl named Ririko has spent most of her life in a hospital and wishes for nothing more than to be able to do the things she never could. She is friends with a boy named Ichiru and is taken care of by the new male nurse Toki and her doctor Hakase. Themanga almost follows a slice of life style (if your life was spent in a hospital) and is about Ririko's different interactions with the guys around her and her dreams. Ririko has written down in a notebook many different things that she wants to do from carving 100 pumpkins to sunbathing to skydiving. When she finds out one day after being in the hospital for ten years that they have finally found a donor for her, Ririko is not really sure how to react. She might actually get a chance to do all of the things she has dreamed about for years (despite most of them being very childish). While this setup had potential, the story did a poor job of developing each plot point and ended up skipping to the next plot point too soon. Also, being only 5 chapters, the story does not really get a chance to develop very far. Art - 6/10 The characters are generally well drawn, but there was too many times when the characters were drawn as chibi (very short and small). It prevented the manga from ever developing much drama and really was not funny enough to help it comedically. One plot point of the manga is about how the female protagonist never or hardly ever smiles. While I understand it's part of the story, it still results in her hardly ever showing any emotion. She barely even shows negative ones as well and most of the time the guys aren't much better. Most of the emotion shown is irritation or happiness which is usually shown by making the characters chibi which I felt drew away from the emotion as I mentioned before (sorry I just really don't like overuse of chibi characters in anime and manga). Character - 4/10 The characters are simple and don't get much development due to the short story and multiple, jumbled plot points. Ririko's goals are nice and somewhat unique, but they don't go much into depth about any of them. The rest of the guys are fairly generic with all of them looking out for Ririko (in Ichiru's case Ririko is also looking out for him). They all have very, very small traces of romance of with Ririko but nothing ever happens with it. Not that it really needed the romance and it probably wouldn't have been any better with it anyway, but a little more development between the characters would have helped. Enjoyment - 4/10 It's a decent story about a girl trying to overcome her health problems and fulfill her dreams, but it just has a lot of problems along the way with its execution. The small, non-romantic harem consists of generic guys, Ririko is pretty boring, adn there is too much chibi in my opinion. I wouldn't recommend this manga and would instead recommend checking out "Rec: Kimi ga Naita Hi" which is a much better short shoujo manga about a person with a crippling health condition.