TENDE FREEZE

What would you do with the power of foresight? Use your powers to help others or selfishly use ‘em for yourself. Well Tende Freeze is a Supernatural, Ecchi, Comedy with a busty beauty that ends up doing all of the above.

Koyuki Koyou is a voluptuous woman with a peculiar ability… the ability to predict the misfortune of those around her. It’s not until a chance encounter with a pitiful High School student Umehachi Kikusui that she decides to use this ability but what may seem like the selfless act of a “Good Samaritan” is in fact a ploy to get something in return. With things working out better than expected, Koyuki decides to stick with him for her personal gain and that’s how this absurd story begins. This being a comedy, you can expect to see our characters involved in a lot of random mishaps, though I believe the main appeal is really to do with the psychic developments. It’s a shame that the hilarious situational humour took precedence over the interesting aspects of the story.

Well during their foreseeable misadventure, numerous characters are introduced, each being as uninteresting as the last. Koyuki & Umehachi could have been a fascinating pair, but they lacked any real dynamic. So just like the rest, you have characters that are either important for plot development or those that are not. Nevertheless whatever category a character is filed under; they are all pretty much a dull bunch, with only their few funny quirks there to pump some vitality into them.

Along with the comedy, the artwork of this manga manages to give it a sort of unique style. The general artwork is very good, with a fair amount of detail put into the larger panels however no matter how good it is the problem remains that it’s just not universally appealing.

Overall Tende Freeze did provide an interesting take on the “supernatural power” sub-genre but I felt that it was ruined by its lack of focus. Sure the random slapstick humour did make this manga more enjoyable than I initially thought but that drew focus away from the more interesting parts of the story. In the end there was little character development, we got the typically rushed last couple of chapters, which subsequently lead to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Well if you ever have 5 hours to kill, then Tende Freeze is worth checking out.

There's a lot that's really good about this manga, but it was seriously lacking in a couple ways. The general premise with powers, enhancements, and such works really well and the use throughout was pretty clever and there was a good amount of variety to things. The humor especially was really solid throughout. The four main female characters are also pretty great, especially Koyuki, and for side characters most of the side characters are decent as well. However, Umehachi is incredibly weak for a main character. He doesn't even feel like one most of the time. In the end, how the entire story seems to pretty much go over his head seems a bit disappointing. Furthermore, this also adds the issue in that while I really did want to the relationship between Koyuki and Umehachi to take off and do well, and hence the ending in and of itself was good, the build up to that felt tremendously weak. There wasn't really any instance where Umehachi excelled or anything at all that could be seen as pushing their relationship from Koyuki sticking to him for his power as it in the beginning to actually being in love with him. Rather, even in the end it isn't completely clearly established that she really does and wants to be with him, she just sort of does, which all around feels kind of weak, even though it is a happy ending. The art was really good. 

tl;dr: An interesting and amusing set of stories with a cast of power users, but a really weak main character that leads to a somewhat disappointing ending.