**Opinion up to chapter 138 (and coming from the anime):
**
The story development can become so stagnating at times that I had to force myself to really read the blabla and not just flip through the images. Esp. after volume 15 up to volume 22.
Additional the quality of the scanlations is from rarely good to awful (ugly scans, tiny pages, extra-large pages, bad grammar [and I'm not picky about grammar], bad cleaning, worst way to save a page I've ever seen [some 2 bit crap which rendered a lot of text unreadable], untranslated text,...).
The character development is slow... generic as someone else already mentioned but not totally tiresome. It has its ups but also downs (some don't develop at all, some are totally not-from-this-world, some develop in one moment and in the next it's as if nothing ever happened).
22 volumes and nothing big happened yet - no success in any direction of the two stories everyone wants to read about (Sho and Ren) and her career is also still just at the beginning. That's painful, esp. since in the middle Ren's character becomes very interesting (after it was so dull before), just to go back to the dullness again sigh (what happened with his affection and inner turmoil towards her? was almost heart wrenching in the beginning of the Dark Moon arc and then later on almost completely dropped ;_; )
So why my rating and why did I bother till the current end?
The answer is **Kyoko and her evil spirits. **
Apart from the totally dense side of her when it comes towards love (even directly pointing out... into her face doesn't work -.-) that I think is tiresome and annoying, I do love her freaky side.
When she snaps and her evil thoughts already form spirits that come out of her body and even manage to paralyze people or scare the lights out of them - I would always rofl (only she can see them). They even mob up to groups (the spirits) to take turns and tasks and deliberate on a way to attack. They're the best (esp. in the anime).
[img]http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/2885/thsharofl.gif[/img]
Her monologues with the puppets she creates and perfects and the mean and evil faces she can do, that look quite cool, are more things I liked.
So of course when those things were missing +a lame Ren and a missing Sho I got totally bored.
And since there's long no cool male lead Kyoko was all that entertained me. Later Sho becomes entertaining too - hehe (but that was to expect from the beginning) and a guy named Reino is my ray of hope too (esp. after the lame vol 22).
Coming from the anime, reading the manga to continue (since the anime stops around vol 10/11 [but I read it from the beginning]), I must say that the anime is better. It dropped some content. Imo it could drop more content to make a faster pace but comparing to the manga it was already an improvement.
And creepy Kyoko animated is pure entertainment. ^^
(-37)
