When I read the first chapter of Kawai Roh’s  Bousou Girlsteki Mousou Renaiteki Suteki Project (ボウソウガールズテキモウソウレンアイテキステキプロジェクト(B・G・M・R・S・P)) in Comic Yuri Hime, I actually was pretty excited for the series. It was an all-girl harem battle! The uber-cool boyish girl versus the feminine girl. It sounded like it was going to be a lot of fun.

And indeed, the premise starts off well enough. Unfortunately, the story handicaps itself right from the start. Beniko, the apparent ojou-sama type, likes one of the underclassmen, but she seems to have become attached to Aoi, the otokoyaku type. Instead of charming Shino away from Aoi, Beniko has hysterical fits and Aoi appears the type of person to trip someone in the cafeteria.

Instead of putting cool, athletic Aoi and beautiful honor student Beniko on equal footing, the two start, continue and end by making snarky asides, trying to cheat and accusing each other of cheating. By the end of the second chapter you sort of desperately flail around looking for someone to like. Shino, the first-year they fight over, is nice, but one-dimensional, a human-shaped stuffed animal. Their mutual friend Kimi seems to have her head on straight, so you sort of glom on to her as a bright point.

The second half of the book completely loses coherence. The student council president is, apparently, the character I expected Beniko to be, but she’s underhanded and manipulative. She coerces Beniko and Aoi to run for the council then makes Beniko be part of her harem through the misuse of a beauty contest.

By then end of the volume, I wanted to go back in time and whisper in the creator’s and editor’s ears to throw all of this out and write a good story.

Ratings:

Art – 5
Story – 4
Characters – 3
Yuri – 7
Service – 1

Overall – 4 and I’m being nice about it.

Seriously disappointing. Of course I had been reading the chapters as they were run in Comic Yuri Hime and have been progressively more disappointed, but I kept hoping that when I read them in a volume, it would all gel, as it so often does. The months in between me reading chapters means I lose threads so, often the stories hold together better when I read them in volume form.  This story was the opposite, it worked worse all together, when I couldn’t forget how nasty Aoi had been or how hysterical Beniko was last chapter.

The best part of this story is the title.