Love between human and a sentient mechanical being can be pictured profoundly and meaningfully. It is what i expected at first, but this manga is NOTHING LIKE THAT.
I will begin with the only saving grace,the art.The drawing is pretty clean,the characters figure is quite proportional, and the best part is facial expression, especially of the male characters in showing how incompetent/ petrified they are.
About the story, someone wrote that Chobits is lacking something,well , i know exactly what it is lacking,it's the depth of the plot and the basic consistence between characters. First of all, i almost can't believe the future world could be that underdeveloped,there 's almost no innovation although the computer science has reached the stage of android AI, i mean that's just too shallow for an automatic world it should be, as if Clamp think just add some female humanoid figures and everything looks like we are in the future.
I already knew that this manga has a stereotype typical protagonist with typical low intelligent quotient like tons of other ecchi manga but sometimes his lack of normal knowledge still surprises me.
And the supposed 12-year-old-genius can not even realize the picture of a GPS map while he can "program" his Persocom to use the IP tracking device. And after that i saw a picture of him with the IQ of 214 o;0 i almost died laughing, THAT. IS. SO. RETARDED
And there was this scene when a smart-looking guy called Dragon Fly looked like he was pondering with his arm folded and his eyes closed saying how an amazing piece of technology "chi" is and then explained the special accessibility to other computers of Chi to Hideki (who, the authors tried to described as "clueless"), then the "genius" (as mentioned above) made a sad face explained about the importance of security and access of the owner ? the more obvious things the authors try to make Hideki not to understand,the more stupid the quarrel of the"dragon fly"guy and Hideki, and all three of them become.
For short, all the characters in this manga that look smart are actually average or below average in intelligence and those who do not are thus worse. That is probably because of the superficial storyline, you can think that i demand too much from a short manga, but believe me, this manga can be alot deeper even without those mushy scenes and "pseud-intellectual" dialogues. However, the best character is Chi, mainly because the picture books she read. Other than that, nothing significant, even the desire for love of android is just too plainly written.
Overall, a mediocre manga, and i can't see how it is categorized as Seinen. Practically, aside from the ecchi part, the story is suitable for readers under 13.