I actually quite like this story, at least when it has its good moments, the art is also quite great for a manga. The biggest issue with this manga is that the author seems to not really know what he wants to do. It's messy. I also don't agree with many of his quirks and views that he seems to be way too willing to share almost every chapter.
The story itself plays out similar to a slice of life episodic comedy, yet the author likes to introduce unnecessary drama for no particular reason except that he probably felt like it at that time. We have characters that the author introduces who are initially seen as villains by acting creepy or just like impulsive douchebags. The first time I got pissed off and wanted the character to die only to be quickly told that the author was just yanking the readers' chains and she wasn't a bad girl at all. The next one had me skeptic but I doubted there'd be anything weird even if she was shown in a cliché "bad" way, as if she was going to be a bad guy. But as I had suspected, she was also just a good guy. The next person got even more bad scenes, but I instantly knew that this guy was just someone with an inferiority complex and he'd be a real good guy after the author introduced him properly and made him meet the mc... And to no surprise whatsoever, he turned out to be a giant carebear. The author turned out to be the boy who cries wolf, now it just feels forced and fake whenever a "villain" is introduced because we all know it'll be a good guy in the end, there are no bad guys in this damn manga. And if it wasn't, well, I guess the author will be eaten by the wolf for screwing around.
I'm all for drama, but this is just badly executed and boring. The half-serious half-lighthearted mood isn't well done and feels very off. It distracts us from what could've been a perfectly great pure-comedy slice-of-life manga. This brings me to the next issue: the author has no real plans and doesn't think enough. He doesn't properly finalize his own settings or even set the basic stuff in place, which becomes very obvious with his notes when he plainly states that he hasn't thought about something elementary like who the knight units answer to and many other things like that. This wouldn't have been an issue if this was a real episodic gag-manga, but it's not, it seems the author does want some measure of story and plot in here but can't execute or plan it properly. It just comes across as something hastily thrown together without much thought. One has to decide what to do when writing a story and plan accordingly, but this author failed in this.
The relationship between the mc and Noah the loli makes me kind of worried as well. It's not about her being a loli, it's about the fact that the author portrays them in a somewhat romantic light, at least in that noah wants to become his wife. However, the author wants to keep it as a father-daughter type of relationship and doesn't even want to say if what she feels is just adoration or actual love. This doesn't work well because he has introduced romantic elements into the story already. Since he did so, he needs to follow through or it'll just be very disappointing. If it was supposed to be a father-daughter story, there should've been no such things and she shouldn't be talking about wanting to marry him all the time. I'm not against that type of story at all, but it's TOO LATE. While writing a story, one has to decide on things like this fairly early, at least to some extent. If the plan is for a pure father-daughter type of relationship, it needs to be implied from the start and she needs to view him like something of a father figure, but she doesn't. The thing about her wanting to marry and become the wife of the mc would've been fine if she actually saw herself as his daughter(like how some daughters say they want to marry their father when they grow up, childlike, cute version that won't actually happen and that will change as she grows), but she's stalwartly opposed to that notion. Now it'll just be disappointing in regards to that, which was very unnecessary and could've been avoided easily if he had PLANNED THE STORY AND BASIC SETTINGS.
I find this story to be pretty nice, it has a light-hearted mood, plenty of comedy with mainly pleasant characters and the art is great. But there are so damn many flaws with the story itself. Perhaps this is due to the author's age and lack of experience. Perhaps not. Perhaps he's just like this as a person. It could've been something more, but it ends up being above average but not something that awesome and certainly not a masterpiece. It's no doubt worth reading and it's a pretty great manga, but it'll never be one of my favorites because it's lacking in too many aspects. If only the author had kept things easy and went for a story without a plot, he wouldn't have needed these basic settings that he now lacks because he wants plot and some drama. I feel like he made a huge mistake regarding this, but that doesn't change that it's a pleasant read, so give it a shot. You might like it more than me and feel like the flaws aren't really that huge. I am painfully self-aware of that I've become much more of a critic over the years and things I enjoyed several years back are now, more often than not, nothing special and I find them far less enjoyable than I used to while picking at flaws all the time. I also wish I could go back in time to when I could enjoy everything without thinking, but I think it's all those damn novels that has made me like this, especially after I started reading chinese, korean and japanese novels and comparing good and bad parts, the things I don't like has become so apparent after that, so take my review with a grain of salt. Chances are that you will truly enjoy this more than me, me giving it a 6/10 shows that it's a pretty decent manga.
Still, it DOES become a bit more creepy the longer you read. The mc is a creep with a mask that he never takes off so it's very hard to feel attached to him since we don't even know what his face looks like(his house fetish, hair fetish, mask fetish and everything like that just makes him even more unrelatable and repulsive), the side-characters are all creepy in their own way, especially the tool-maker and the mc's childhood best friend(kind of possessive gay-like straight guy who just likes astra WAY too much and in the wrong way yet doesn't seem to go after him romantically, truly a weird freak that becomes aggressive as soon as anyone gets close to the mc...) who are both kind of disgusting instead of funny. If I had read more chapters of this, I think I would probably drop the score to 5/10... At the end of the day, I'm just opposed to too many things that this author likes. Rather, you could say I really dislike so many of his quirks and thoughts and he just can't stop sharing them almost every damn chapter so it gradually makes me think more and more about why I dislike this crap and everything that's wrong with it.
(-17)
