Watashi ni xx Shinasai!: Couple-hen

(Review contains spoilers for the main series and this sequel. TL;DR: Sappy, badly written, but hey! Middle schoolers'll eat anything up... right?)

Found this at a local library. I was with friends at the time, but two of us had read most of the series (at least, up to where it was in 2015 when I stopped caring and stopped buying the mangas... around volume 11!) under its much superior french name, Love Mission. So, when we saw that firstly, the manga was still on-going and that it even had a SEQUEL... we were hooked. We liked the original series when we were young so we figured, how bad could it be?

As it turns out, pretty bad was the answer.

This extra volume follows a similar concept to what the main series abides to; do this to me, do that to me, blah blah, until it sort of falls apart, which I assume is the point Toyama realized that the gimmick was getting sort of annoying (only took dozens of mostly non-consensual 'missions' to reach that point...)

At least, they gave up on the bait incest with Akira and Yukina by this point in the story. The relationships were still sappy, cheesy and seemingly written by someone whose only experience of love was through manga made for middle-schoolers... Which, fair enough, is where its main demography belongs.

I have heard, however from younger reviewers that the non-stop drama the book offers is good to them, so maybe I'm just not the right audience. Hint: I am not. Not anymore. At least, with Ema Toyama you know you're getting two things right: the end couples and the art style.

I've always liked her art style. It fits with the more childish, new to love approach of the book and makes for a good shoujo style in general. And it really does make the characters more likeable; because boy oh boy, are they NOT that likeable otherwise. As for the end couples, they are EXACTLY what you'd think would happen once all the characters were revealed, but that's GOOD. The other options (the 'winners' were Shigure/Yukina and Mami/Akira) either had the asshole win someone over (no one I've ever heard talk about the series liked Hisame, so... no thank you!) or had le ole' incest wincest pairing happening... Sorry, Shigure/Mami fans, your sacrifice let us not have to live in a timeline where Akira and Yukina end up together. Thank you.