True to the title, it's a very strange manga. The first half of the manga is pretty interesting, but then it just go down hill from there. The story is sometime good, sometime bad, sometime confusing, and then sometime I just want to delete the whole manga, especially the last volume. If you persevere, the ending wasn't bad, although it wasn't good either. It's just...average. The art is simple, and will probably need sometime getting used to. Overall, unless you don't any any other manga you want to read or if you have to waste, then give this a read. Don't expect too much from it, though.

At times, I found the artwork awkward. The ears were rather big and some characters looked almost sick from how skiny they were. But it was funny and quite surprising. The characters were good and the plot different. The only thing I'd complain would be the ending. There were presented new characters in the last volumes. Good characters. Interesting. But just as they were presented, the main characters almost disappeared. They would show up here and there, but they were totally side tracked.... And I would have liked to see a little bit more of the aftermath of both couples..

Do yourself a favor and do not read this. The "plot" is just a bad excuse, the "character development" is nearly nonexistant and the characters themselves are, with a few exceptions, horrible people.
This whole pile of stuff (you can guess what this stuff is made of) is topped with a nice icing called "very bad art". Especially the way ears are drawn brings my breakfast to boil in my stomach, it seems it wants to come out.
I've read more than 400 manga series until now, and this is definately in the bottom 5 of them.

... Last updated on March 6th, 2011, 8:19pm

Hen is really a rough unfinished early work of Oku Hiroya and suffers because of that. It has both its strong moments and weak ones.

Unlike some reviewers I like the character of Chizuru Yoshida and I think she is one of the stronger parts of the series. Yes, she's a cold calculating witch that uses both her looks and intelligence to manipulate men. Even more when she meets Azumi Yamada, Chizuru becomes confused, jealous and even more manipulative. It isn't until she goes thru several stages that her character begins to change and grow. I liked this because she didn't immediately start off as a likable character. This is like the author's main character in Gantz (Kei Kurono) who doesn't start off as very likable to begin with either, but evolves over time. When we learn what kind of family background Chizuru has and that she basically has nowhere to go it becomes impressive that she is not a victim, but instead the tough cold chick that she is.

All that said the story at a certain point breaks down unfortunately becoming confused and directionless. At first there seems to be some progress in some of the relationships and then it seems that the author changed his mind. Another couple is introduced with some gender-bending thrown in and you wonder if it was really necessary. The ending becomes rushed because the series got axed and it doesn't leave a very good resolution to the relationships between these characters.

So the story is interesting for some of its characters and situations. Its also interesting to see how the artist's style evolves from Hen to Gantz. But the weaknesses in plot, direction, and resolution pull this series down for me. I think I will give it a 7.5 because I didn't hate it and actually enjoyed certain aspects of it.

Hen is probably the worst series i've ever read! The pacing sucks, the characters suck, and the plot is only there for the first half! If you want a horrible manga with nothing unique or good then this is for you soulless suckers!

I really enjoyed this and even Gantz, while we're on the topic. Love trianges like this have been done before, technically it is the same thing seen before, so only read it if you are willing to sit through the formula again or haven't read many before. I don't really let the sex scenes get to me, because I'm an adult and I don't have a jealousy complex, I just take it as realism, not fanservice.

Manga is how you perceive it, not how it is and how people react to one solid "truth", if people like or hate one, its mainly due to how they have viewed the series, lots of people love kuroshitsuji and ouran host club and I couldnt even tolerate the first chapters, whatever its all personal opinion.

I didn't very much enjoy this manga. The art was very, very poor (the artist could have well used an anatomy class or two), so much so that all of the sex and nudity that could have been at the very least interesting, was pretty much ruined because of it. The main character was very hard to identify with or feel sorry for; she was beautiful, popular and even though she was in love, she kept manipulating and screwing all these other people to escape her problems. You could tell that she was literally drowning her sorrows in sex. Badly drawn sex. The other characters were all either bashful, wimpy and unproductive, or perverted. The plot was constantly running around in circles, and was very slow even in that. The characters themselves even seemed to be stalling the progress of the story. The plot itself had no rhyme or reason to it.
And I don't really see how this manga is gender-bender either. Where does the gender-bending begin? I read through all the chapters to find anything, and I found nothing. I kept expecting the girly boy to dress in drag and seduce the main character, but he never did. While I was reading I thought that maybe the yuri content would make up for the lack of gender-bending content, but the problem was that the relationship between the main character and her friend doesn't progress at all. They don't even kiss!

I love HEN, I love Oku hiroya, and I was reading this manga (totally). It's great!

They are the creepiest ears ever drawn.

I can't keep reading this manga because they creep me out so much. It looks like the mangaka has some sort of issue with ears. And head shapes. And breasts... though he's hardly alone in that last one, so scratch it. And the weirdest part is that it easn't as bad in the earlier chapters. Maybe the artist was becoming more and more fixated on ears as the story "progressed"?

Anyways, the art quality ranges from OK to WTF (like every time an ear or a misshapen head appears in a close up), and the plot doesn't seem to know where it's going, though that might be a side effect of this being a sequel to some other story or something. It starts with a short tale of a high school girl teasing her teacher, and then after a few chapters it more or less says "wait, nevermind that" and takes in a completely different direction (i.e., the artist changed his mind about the story and/or hadn't planned beyond this point when he started).

I gave it a fair chance having read over 30 chapters so far, but I guess I'll save myself the trouble from now on.

My favorite out of all Oku's series.