Back in 2011, there was a surprising renaissance of shoujo Yuri. All three of the top Shoujo magazines, Nakayoshi, Ciao and Ribon were running titles with Yuri plots and characters. After those series ended, what was left was a very silly title called Sabagebu! (さばげぶっ!)I first wrote about Sabagebu!  when I was reading Nakayoshi again for Nobara no Mori no Otome-tachi.

“Sabagebu!” is short for “Survival Game Club”. The story follows normal girl Momoka as she’s recruited into the Survival Game Club by insane club leader Miou. Momoka’s adventures in surviving Miou’s crackpot plots is the bulk of the manga.

Yuri is provided in the form of extreme crushiness (everything in this manga is “extreme”) by Urara, an underclassman with a raging crush on Momoka. Momoka turns out to have some marksmanship skills and, as Volume 3 opens, the Sabagebu heads to the game center to practice shooting on first-person shooters. Momoka gets caught up in a battle for supremacy with a hyper otaku type. She wins, but not before she clubs him over the head with a real (replica) gun. Chuffed with her victory, she allows the guy to take a two-shot puricula with her, which she later regrets. Urara regrets that she wasn’t able to take a two-shot with Momoka.

I said that everything in this manga is extreme. Here’s what I meant. Meiji chocolate company puts out two snacks that are identical in all ways but their shape. Kinoko no Yama are mushroom-shaped, where Takenoko no Sato are shaped like bamboo shoots. When some members of the Sabagebu express a preference for the one over the other, war is declared with a school-wide “indoor survival game” to prove the superiority of the one over the other. (If I had to take a side, I’d be on the Takenoko team. Better cookie to chocolate balance.) Or the day Momoka vists a new dog cafe with club mascot Kamo…who is a duck. It’s all dumb and over the top, but it still makes me laugh.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 7
Yuri – 3
Service – 1 (mostly for gun fetishists)

Overall – 7

Not high on Yuri, but off the scale on goofy.