Guest Reviewer has been found and approved, but thanks to everyone for jumping right in!~

Hi Okazu Readers! I am in desperate need of a Guest Reviewer and I hope one of you can help me.

As you know, I do my best to bare my biases here on Okazu when I have them and explain why I don’t and do like manga when it’s relevant. Every once in a blue moon, I come across a manga or anime that just really makes me unhappy and I can’t find a civil word to say about it.  Last year for instance, the Sakura Trick anime just made me deeply uncomfortable and I didn’t want to have to watch it.

I understand that many of you love Citrus, by Saburouta. So much so, in fact, that it is currently selling as the #1 Romance Manga! Congrats to Seven Seas and Saburouta-sensei on that.

But, you see, I have been reading it since the beginning and..I really don’t like it.

For the several people who are super jazzed about reading a review by me on this series – notice I have never once reviewed it in Japanese. That ought to be a clear indication of my feelings. To be honest, I haven’t even bought the Japanese volumes. I like it that little.

I don’t like either Mei or Yuzu, I don’t find their attraction appealing. It reads like just another incest story to me and I honestly to do do not care if they live happily ever after or get hit by a truck and die. Reading Citrus has, since the day it debuted, made me deeply unhappy. I don’t like reviewing things that make me unhappy. And, I know from experience, many readers get personally offended when I have the nerve to not enjoy something they like.

So…I’m turning to you, my readers. If you have 1) Purchased a copy of Citrus, Volume 1 and 2) enjoyed it, I invite you to be a Guest Reviewer on Okazu. Please read the Okazu Guest Review Guidelines first and follow the instructions there. (You don’t have to convince me that the series is worth reviewing, only that you should be the one to do it!)

And, please, I beg of you, do not comment here attempting to convince that Citrus is awesome. I’m glad for you that you enjoy it, please respect that fact that I have actually been reading it in Comic Yuri Hime and I just don’t like it. Thanks very much. ^_^

Thanks again to all you amazing folks who volunteered! We’ll have a review up shortly.

Well, in this month of firsts, we have another first! Today’s review has been sponsored by a brand new Okazu hero, Christopher S! Christopher, please email me at yuricon at gmail dot com so I can send you your Hero badge! Seriously, what a month this has been – what  a month this is going to be.

Thanks to Christopher, I have had the chance to read the first volume of the Kampfer manga. The Kampfer anime came out in 2009 and was a hot mess. ^_^ Nothing was explained, and frankly, it wasn’t like it was worth really knowing. The manga, which appears to be an afterthought, doesn’t really give us much more to work with.

High school nice guy and resident nonentity, Natsuru, who is in unrequited love with his neighbor and  childhood friend, Sakura, suddenly turns into a girl and is commanded to fight. Why, for whom, and what the goal is, is almost entirely left out of the narrative in Volume 1.

In the anime, we had the limited pleasure of the entrails animals being voiced by popular voice actresses. In the manga, we don’t learn much more, except that the “Moderators” are the ones who have sent our unpleasant little mascots and required the fighting. Why, we still don’t know. Neither do the girls. Some of them don’t much care.

Volume 1 focuses primarily on Natsuru’s concern that he has suddenly become female and can’t control his switching back and forth. And the fact that he’s being attacked for no apparent reason. With his life on the line, of course the thing he’s most concerned with is that he doesn’t know when he will suddenly become female. As a result, the opening chapter is chock full of really random service, lots of panty shots and Natsuru fondling himself to make sure that those breasts are attached to him. I guess visual confirmation wasn’t sufficient? ^_^;

As a girl, Natsuru saves Sakura, who promptly falls in love with her savior. She asks for a date but of course the date is interrupted by a Kampfer attack. Yuri is wholly in Sakura’s insto-crush with girl Natsuru…. This becomes a multi-partite plot complication, by damseling Sakura and also giving Natsuru another reason to be nervous about switching to girl-form.

I’m actually interested in reading more, because I’d like to see if the manga actually gets the opportunity and/or impulse to tell us anything about to the situation. I’d like to know what the plot is or whether there actually is one, or is this just the thinly connected conglomeration of ideas it appears to be.

This emanga from DMP is as okay as the manga itself. It functions, one can read it, but nothing impresses, really.

Ratings:

Art – 7 Competent
Story – 4 Not so much
Characters – 4 At the moment, they are the same 2-dimensional creations of the anime. If the manga gives them a chance to develop, it would be nice.
Service – 8
Yuri – 3

Overall – 5

I can’t say the manga is bad, although it sure ain’t good. I went into it knowing it was going to be fairly craptastic and I wasn’t disappointed. ^_^

Thanks Christopher, welcome to the Okazu family!

Back in June 2013, I reported about the existence of an odd little webcomic by Akili, called Stretch. Some time after that the Shogakukan Big Spirits Comic imprint must have picked the comic up. (The website now even says, “Big Comics Spirits Presents”.) In March 2014, I noted that it had been published as a collected volume.

And so as I wandered around the various bookstores in Tokyo, seeing Volume 1 of Stretch  (ストレッチ) (also available on JP Kindle) on the shelves was a bit like running into an old acquaintance. “Oh, hey, how you doing? So good to see you again…” ^_^ I picked up Volume 1 to reacquaint myself with Ran and her sempai at school, now roommate, Keiko.

The two women have a casual, almost cheerfully antagonistic relationship. Ran appears to work at a club as a hostess, Keiko in a respectable office a a career woman, but both of them drink too much and bicker in a friendly way. Ran is a fan of stretching, and she has taught Keiko some good basic ones. They stretch in every chapter, and teach us how to do this healthful exercise, as well. Nothing here is beyond the ability of any sedentary chair-sitter.

Each chapter is wrapped around a snippet of their exceptionally average lives. Work, home, friends, food, drink, stretch. There’s hint of relationships outside their own here and their. Ran had, at the very least, a boyfriend, and we are given the merest glimpse of a failed relationship in Keiko’s life as well. Work friends and school friends provide very normal society, which makes this just about the realest manga I have ever read.

There’s a fair amount of service. We get regular underwear shots and crotch shots, but they are presented without eroticism. The women wear underwear that lacks decoration – exercise bras look like exercise bras. They wear sweatpants or pajamas. We’re looking at a crotch covered in a pair of quilted, loose pants and I have to hope that Akili is doing this on purpose to mock the obsession.

There is a Yuri-ish vibe between Ran and Keiko, but it’s mostly because while they like each other, their relationship isn’t formal…or even nice all the time. They grope each other as just another stupid prank among many.

The end of this volume details how the two met in school and how their relationship developed, but not how they became roommates. Volume 2 is now available as well, and I know we’ll get more information about them in this volume. (Please refrain from spoiling if you’ve been reading the webcomics or the scans of same. Thanks.) I’m a big fan of stretching myself (like Ran, as a result of injuries), so I’ll be tuning in again.

Ratings:

Art – 8 Simple, solid, unadorned
Story – 6 The story is presumably the stretching, but the real story is told in the scenes around it
Characters – 8 Human, petty, a bit snarky, I quite like them
Yuri – 1, mostly in our heads in this volume
Service – 4 Perfunctory, maybe even satirical

Overall – 7

It’s a little weird, reading a manga about stretching, but it’s a pretty good manga. And we can all use a little stretch.

Every New Year’s Day in Japan, stores sell “Lucky Bags” which are blind grab bags with you-do-not-know-what in them. ^_^ You have to trust that the store is putting $200 shoes in a $100 bag. I love this idea, so once again, if you really like getting cool stuff and you really want to reward yourself, I have Lucky Boxes!

For those of you unclear on the idea of a Lucky Box or Grab bag – these are blind bags. You don’t know what you’re getting. There are no refunds, so if you’re not comfortable buying a box of you-have-no-idea-what, don’t worry, I’ll do less blind contests in 2015 again. I can’t tell you what is in each box anyway, because I just crammed stuff in as tightly as possible. ^_^ (We’ve had a few folks unclear on this in the past, so really please don’t buy one if you don’t like getting utterly random things.)

Just like as we’ve done in previous years, these are medium USPS flat rate boxes crammed full of things like magazines, postcards, doujinshi and manga, DVD/Blu-rays, games, figurines, clearfiles and stuff I picked up in Japan in October special for you! This time I will have three boxes, all with *varying degrees* of appropriateness and Yuriness (and there’s some BL in there too. If you don’t want it, please feel free to gift the to friends who might.)

Grab boxes are limited to the contiguous 48 states of the USA, because of the shipping, and people who are 21+ only, on principle.

Grab Box A – $35  Claimed!

Grab Box B  – $50  Claimed!

Grab Box C – $50 Claimed! Damn these things go fast.

Thanks to the folks who bought the Lucky Boxes -here’s to a happy holiday season!