Again's positive points are its great art and unique characters.
The characters are so full of life and I love how Kubo Mitsurou draws his female characters.
Most time travel stories focus on changing a violent incident or getting together with a past crush.
In Again it focuses on an anti social guy who travels back in time and decides to use the opportunity to change himself. We get to see him use his experiences as an advantage in the past and also how his actions alter the lives of those he gets involved with.
Makes for an interesting read.

Good stuff, as in... Veryyyy goooooooood stuff. As in cream puff goooooood. As in peanut butter gooooooood.
It's like being negative while staying positive.

There was so much potential in this one, but since the MC is what you can lacking direction loser, it bogged down to filler and randomness. Read up to the latest, he gets really boring and uninteresting so I'm rooting for other characters now. This is one of the worst usage of Time-Travel troupe where the darn MC is overshadowed and did not use future knowledge in any useful way. It's completely unnecessary.

Just give him a vision about what he will be in the future is enough. Like through a fortune or vivid dream will suffice.

Up until the end of the first main arc I thought this was the funniest thing I'd seen in months. But then it got terribly tedious - way too many people I don't care about. I made it to 89, but just don't care anymore.

Still, the first half or so was great! Side-splittingly funny and well worth reading.

... Last updated on September 2nd, 2014, 10:55pm

I was looking forward to reading something about time travel to remove regrets and the like but that's not what this is about.
It's about one of those japanese cheer clubs. kinda hard to make something like that interesting.
They don't really address his regrets, his foreknowledge of events isn't important either (mostly because he has no foreknowledge as he just went through the motions of everyday life). I gave this to chapter 43, I think...boring.

Again!! has been an amazing and rereshing read, right from the beginning. I strongly recommend giving it a try, particularly if you're looking for something creative, a bit wacky and mixed with very strong character creation and a versatile, ever changing plot with time travel questions thrown in.

Particularly in recent chapters, Kubo-sensei has gone with a twisted plot approach that really embodies her style and has a very nice effect, in my opinion. Even in earlier volumes, it was hard to predict where she was going, some, like volume 3 getting a bit boring and others like volume 4 seeming to hit so many different ideas and not close all of them off. This style, however, makes for a fairly realistic storyline, if a sometimes difficult one to follow.

In other words, Again!! isn’t a standard plot progression and even the characters don’t follow a steady development pattern. The characters aren’t even constant: for much of volume 1 and 2, Aki was as important a character as Imamura, in volume 4, Hiro was suddenly introduced and became important, then disappeared, in volume 7 the character relations all get jumbled up and, if you look at the cover of volume 8, you will see that another, brand-new character suddenly becomes an important face.

If you look at Kubo’s other series though, they have a similar feeling – Kubo doesn’t like conclusions, she writes her stories to start new issues, introduce more characters and ideas and sometimes she closes them off, sometimes she just moves on. You could argue it’s terrible story telling technique, or, if you get too invested in a particular aspect of the story, you might think it's filler or milking the plot but it's probably just Kubo-sensei's quirk and enthusiasm to throw her characters off in different directions, which, if you can appreciate it, always keeps her series fresh and pretty realistic (since I find that real life rarely has neat conclusions either)

So the one word of warning would be that you can't go into this series expecting a neat conclusion after a linear plot progression. You're in this for new things and often dropping old arcs without any warning!

Around chapter 30 I thought this was one of the best manga I'd ever read. By chapter 67 (last translated chapter) I decided to drop the series.

This doesn't actually need any time travel in it. It could have just been about a freshman recruited into a cheering club, because that's what's good about this manga. The person below me is right, this manga has everything a shounen should have; huge cast, passion for club activities, friendship, living life without regrets! When this manga was about THAT stuff it was amazing.

Unfortunately around chapter 50~ this manga starts to go off the rails with lots of filler and the characters even not behaving like themselves. First of all, everything important and related to the club and the plot is put on the backburner. Instead, we get lazy filler about a stupid love triangle and some time travel stuff.



... Last updated on September 18th, 2013, 6:20am

Wrong gender but when I first read this manga, I was just blown away by the number of interesting characters and art, and the spirit that everyone had. I felt like, wow, this is what a shounen manga should be, friendship, club, and excitement, it's all there, and for once I'm not sarcastic. It may not be the best of Shounen Magazine, best it is so unique. (and the gags are actually funny) I'd much prefer reading this to reading Fairy ****. Maybe because it's a manga about revisiting one's high school years and overcoming regrets that appeals to me, younger kids in the midst of high school just don't understand. I swear, it's a college student thing. The only thing that bothers me just a little is how much Usami-senpai looks like a boy sometimes, but I really like the characters because they feel like real people as opposed to mere characters in a manga. I can empathize with the main character, and if you can't do that, this series isn't going to be as fun for you because you'll just be waiting for more time leap and cliche stuff. You can just watch The Girl Who Leapt Through Time for that, sheez.

But all was lost when the mangaka chose to milk the story.

I'm grateful to this manga for introducing me to the Japanese style cheering. This thing feels like it came straight from Imperial Japan times. Anyway, just watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqk_YDZWRKU Who won't do a kamikaze attack after being cheered like that?

I won't comment on the plot since it wasn't my cup of tea for the most part. I just want to say one thing: this manga should have ended in volume 7. The new ark that started there is nothing more than a way to make money from a popular story. I feel exactly like the girl in the last meaningful chapter, "I'm disappointed." Does the author want to make another Haruhi style SOS-dan? Meh.

At least the artwork is nice.

Just to clarify, this is not a story about cheerleaders or the protagonist becoming a male cheerleader.

The Cheer club is something more like a coordinated group that works along side the band and cheerleading team, but focuses more on rallying and directing the crowd in their cheers. For example, think of the cheering team comprised of diehard fans that follow the soccer club from game to game the manga series "Giant Killing".

The story is really interesting, and whille "Again" has been catagorized as shounen, it has the maturity and depth to also be classified as seinen in my opinion. The characters and their realism also really make this manga shine. The artwork is also quite good.

I look forward to more releases, and I hope this series continues on well past the 10 volume mark.

... Last updated on July 11th, 2013, 11:12am