Boku Girl

I wanted to right this review before I was able to finish the series. The reason for this is so that I don't have a biased opinion due to having an ending I liked or due to it having an ending I did not like so let me begin. First I would like to state I absolutely LOVE this series. Although there are quite a few issues I see being the cynic I am. So when it comes to the story of Boku Girl there is a pureness to it with a VERY lovable cast that makes this manga exceeds others like it and with athe introduction of the Norse Gods into the story as the reason for Mizuki's change in gender adds a certain flare to the story for me. When it comes to the characters of this series I must say that I love all of them like I stated before it's just a very lovable cast. There is still issues to be found though, when it comes to the development of any characters outside of the main cast which is maintained by a mere 3 characters really leaves a lot to be wanted for me. I would have loved to have seen more development in other characters and with this being said let me conclude this review. I got a lot of enjoyment out of this series and hope it has a great ending (at least to me) and the art is phenomenal, well when I say phenomenal I just mean that it's a truly beautiful style. So overall I thought the story was very good. The characters that are developed being a good quality but leaving quite a bit to be wanted from other characters outside the main cast. An overall Enjoyable story and a truly magnificent art style, or at least one that caters to my taste. So if you like a good gender swap ecchi manga... well this is a great one.

This is written after reading (more or less) all 107 chapters, either through full scanlations, live TL threads, or reading raws with my extremely rudimentary Japanese skills. Recognize that this entire manga is very cisnormative and heteronormative (aka there would be no conflict whatsoever if characters weren't straight and also weren't polarized as strictly masculine and feminine). I'm not a huge fan of the gender binary, personally, but I can put that aside to read some silly manga with nicely drawn boobs. When I first started this manga it was silly, fun, had really nice art, didn't drag things out for too long, and I gave ita 9 rating. Sugito Akira's storytelling style always includes some kind of misunderstanding, distraction, or interruption right before or in the middle of a major event (like a confession, realization of feelings, etc). At first it's funny, but after 107 chapters it gets tiring. Story: [6/10] The main plot is far-fetched to begin with. Loki (in the form of a /very/ young-looking girl) decides to mess with a feminine-looking guy and give him a vagina, hijinks ensue. There are small story arcs that are basically either character introductions or the introduction of some problem that someone has to deal with. It seems like some things are brushed off or handled weirdly for the sake of moving the story along, but the kicker is that there isn't much plot progression at all when you step back and look at it. Let's all be honest with each other though, we aren't reading ecchi for the plot anyway. Art: [8/10] Soft! Boku Girl is so soft and nice looking. Personally, I'm more of a fan of the art towards the beginning. Boobs sag more realistically than most manga boobs, and I appreciate that a lot. Sugito is a pro at drawing expressions. At the beginning, each important character design is very different from the others. If you only saw the silhouettes of most of them, you would be able to tell them apart. If you're looking for cute things that look really soft, nice looking lips, or a ruggedly handsome male lead (luv u takeru), this is a good manga for it. Character: [6/10] This score mostly reflects my feelings on each of the characters by the end of the story. Everyone got a little more bland by the end. At the beginning, everyone had their own distinct personalities that made them unique. At one point or another, they all started feeling more generic. Certain characters had little quirks or secrets that gave them flavor, but basically all of those things ended up being irrelevant. Kind of disappointing, really. Enjoyment: [6/10] The first 55 chapters were an absolute delight, and I would have given them a 9. After that point, all the little storytelling quirks that used to be sort of funny started getting really annoying. Things like the sudden interruption during an event that would have otherwise moved the plot along, comic relief characters overstaying their welcome, pointless "antagonist" and "rival" characters being introduced. If you're patiently waiting for new scanlations to be released, don't think about them too much. They've already hit the best part. Overall: [6/10] I won't spoil the ending, but I will say that I was genuinely disappointed by how vanilla and boring the last like 20 or so chapters were. Hate to sound hipster again or whatever, but early Boku Girl was the best. Chapter 55 was the peak. I'm not into super moe stuff, and BG wasn't /super/ moe, but Mizuki came pretty close. This series would have been better if it was half the amount of chapters that it was, I think. The reason I was all about this manga at first was because it felt a lot like a BL but with boobs. What could be better than that? Over time, it lost the BL feeling, but I still hung on. When it started to get basic was when I started getting sad. I know some people definitely like this manga, and I won't say that I dislike it, but I would have preferred for it to go in a different direction than it did. It's still a fun read, but if you aren't rearing to read it, just wait for the scanlations to finish and blow through it all at once.

This is really one of a kind. Even if at the same time it is an amalgam of almost everything thats wrong in manga and anime today, it still managed to give me a fun time, so I will give it that. There's no significant character development whatsoever through all the course of the story (even the guy to girl development seemed a bit off and in times, artificial (very, very artificial)), but this time it didn't really matter much. I will talk about the wrong things I mentioned before, and focus my review on that. First and foremost, this is an ecchi manga, so Ibelieve fanservice doesn't apply here - however, it has just the same problem as bad fanservice goes: IT MAKES NO GODDAMN SENSE! Most of the time it was obscenity for the sake of it, and it just popped out of nowhere and went for about many pages just because, even sacrificing any kind of character traces it had built until now. Yeah, its clearly an ecchi manga, but I think even ecchi mangas should, I dunno, respect whatever kind of inteligence readers of the genre still have. And this brings out the next problem: the nonsensical, sometimes utterly stupid humour and character actions. Yeah, a guy riding a trident into the sunset and exploding into a massive mushroom might sound credible in a Uncle Grandpa episode, but all this kind of crude humour through all the manga felt really tiring and boresome. The ecchi stuff enters greatly at this category as well. The bizarre sense of pace: it may be just me, but almost all shoujo manga feels the same thing with a different story. This is not so bad, because the diversity fills this void, however it always goes like this: *close at the handsome fella* ~shocking, foreseen catchphrase with sometimes a little bit of nihilism~ *sparkles flies, now both are blushed and the camera focus on both guy and girl, this second with a troubled face* ~actually unimportant character that just comes out of nowhere to create a false sense of choice for the protagonist and a drilling feeling of rage for all readers who were actually cheering for this second because the main's interest was actually boring, annoying, offensively retarded or even a serial rapist~ And yeah, Boku Girl follows this path, however, the problem with following a formula is that, if you screw up, it's more of a crime if you did create your own way of telling a story. The pace here felt off, but I can't really explain why (not a pro in this), however, reading Masamune-kun no Revenge, I can tell that at least Boku Girl didn't screw up THAT badly. So yeah. As for the general rates MAL provides, the story, apart from being a transgender story, doesn't really have anything to offer so meh. I really, really liked the art though (apart from those bizarre eyelashes the girls all have - and for some reason even Mizuki before turning into a girl), even though the first chapters had one of the most bizarre senses of anatomy I've ever seen. The characters, too, hadn't much to offer, although I liked them, all of them are really bidimensionals and not that worth mentioning. But, welp, I really liked it overall.

Boku Girl is fine. If you’ve seen any of my reviews before, you know that I am decidedly outside of the intended audience for a work like this; I am not crazy about male-gazey ecchi (especially involving non-adults) and a lot of the common shounen/seinen character archetypes present here tend to frustrate me. Nothing about this manga seems like the kind of thing I’d be compelled to read, much less finish. Still, Boku Girl is simultaneously better than it should be and not as good as it had the potential to be. It’s just, you know, fine. (To avoid spoilers, I will be referring to the protagonist Mizukiwith gender neutral pronouns throughout) “Magical Sex Shift” exists both as a common anime/manga plot device – usually in the form of body swapping – and also as a rather niche stand-alone genre in its own right. Boku Girl commits fully to its premise on this front; this manga is about the sex shift and the antics that come from it, through and through. Mizuki and the turmoil they experience due to their sudden goddess-induced sex change is “the point” of the entire manga. And it actually tells a decent story, though not without its fair share of drawbacks. See, for everything Boku Girl does well, it also feels the inexplicable need to force a hamfisted, unfunny scene usually involving something tantamount to sexual assault against Mizuki as some kind of twisted balancing act. These scenes weren’t funny the first time they happened, they weren’t funny the 10th time they happened, and they certainly weren't funny when they were still happening toward the end of the 100+ chapter run. It’s as if the mangaka was terrified that the readers would be able to enjoy the story too much if they didn’t shoot the pacing and the characterization in the foot every few chapters or so. This nonsense was old the first time it happened and it only got worse. Yet, somehow, the story and characters still manage to keep enough positive forward momentum to not be completely crippled by the mangaka desperately trying and failing to be funny. In spite of its faults, Boku Girl is surprisingly committed to exploring its themes of identity, sexuality, gender, and the need to insist upon your own truth. It was both refreshing and frankly surprising to see how tactfully an ecchi tackled a lot of these themes and all while mostly respecting its cast. Mostly. It isn’t amazing, but it did a better job than I think anyone could have expected it to. Where it fumbles the bag again is how it rarely goes all the way on these themes and the way that the final arc sort of undermines everything established so far. Boku Girl seems mostly oblivious to the notion that sex does not inherently equal gender or gender expression, all while trying to tackle the confusion arising from that very real topic. It’s baffling how a work can take feelings and emotions expressed by real people, make it fantastical, and then almost never connect the dots between them. It’s such a missed opportunity to really unpack the heart of the feelings that would even prompt someone to write this kind of story in the first place. This is exacerbated dozens of times over with the terribly handled final arc of the manga. I won’t get into spoilers, but the way it ties Mizuki’s sexuality rigidly to their sex, ignoring ways it’s more complicated than that and also refusing to even entertain the possibility of Mizuki being bisexual is kind of mind boggling. I think they mostly managed to bring it back together at the very end with a passable explanation of things, but it should have handled the road to that point far better than it did. The whole thing is just kind of fine. Boku Girl does a surprising number of things well and royally screws up a near equal amount. To be honest, this is one of those works that makes me wish MAL had a .5 element to their scores, as 5.5 just feels right. As it stands though, Boku Girl mostly just kind of nets even. Which, to be honest, is an impressive feat for something so far outside of my usual spheres of interest and with so much baggage weighing it down; it just makes me wish even more that Boku Girl was better than it is. It had so much potential in spite of the things working against it, but it just couldn’t quite bring it home.