Tsurezure Children
Tsuredure Children

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Tsurezure Children follows the ordinary lives of several high school couples (or perhaps-soon-to-be) and their daily grapples with love.

You'd be forgiven for thinking the characters are archetypal: you've got the couple that are goofy and unable to properly convey their feelings to one another; a delinquent girl and the studious student council president; a stoic sportsman and a needy, overtly affectionate girl... the list goes on. The cookie-cutter characters would perhaps be a detractor if there weren't so many to keep things interesting - which they do.

Despite following many couples, all of them attend the same school, which naturally leads to plenty of nice ... inter-couple interactions to flesh out their relationships.

Humor and cuteness are definitely a strong suit, with the artwork being consistently effective in amplifying these strengths.

The manga is primarily episodic in nature, and the setting/plot is generally very simple. If you're looking for heavy drama, you're unlikely to find it here.

Despite having little to no overarching plot, Tsurezure Children manages to deliver an extremely enjoyable rom-com experience with a wide cast of (mostly) lovable characters and charming comedy. If you were impressed by the anime, then I would heartily recommend reading this; it is IMO considerably better, due in no small part to the extended length of time spent with the characters.

Plot: 4
Characters: 8
Art: 8
Enjoyment: 8

tl;dr: A series of solid interlinked romantic stories that work well together.

This manga is a series of a lot of interlinked stories that show a variety of different romances. And by a lot I really do mean a lot as by my count there were 20 stories by the end of the series, though not all of them end in proper couples. The stories on their own are a mixed bag. A couple of them are really great, mainly Ryoko/Masafumi and Jun/Yuki. And only a couple of them I would consider especially weak. The vast majority of them I'd say are only decent, which I ... would say mainly stems from the fact that they're generally pretty simple and try to be pretty realistic over having any forced drama, major twists, or anything like that.

However, the manga ultimately feels like more than just the sum of its parts due to how well the various stories complement each other. Twenty stories going on at the same time may seem extreme, but they're very heavily interlinked. The characters that are being focused on in one story are side characters in others, which prevents there from being an overload of characters. Progress that occurs in one story, pushes progress in others, which allows things to flow much more seamlessly. Though there very much are distinct stories, they often blend together incredibly well, which is especially evident during major events such as the school trip, athletic festival, or cultural festival. Furthermore, handling it this way works really well in terms of pacing, because while normally such simple stories would begin to grow dull and the story would need things to spice it up, by allowing the focus to swap around, it allows for there to be stretches in character's relationships where nothing happens or things move slowly by just focusing on those characters less for those stretches, which results in the stories being allows to be simple and realistic while keeping the overall narrative interesting.

I would also like to note that this is a 4-koma, and as is generally the case it is humor focused, and there is a decent amount of good humor, but it also does have solid storytelling outside that. In my experience, how that's usually handled in 4-koma is that the manga starts off with every 4 panel set being humorous, but as it goes on it'll start hitting large portions where it drops the comedy and gets serious. This manga never really does that. Pretty much every 4 panel set has a punchline. This punchline is often something as simple as the character's internal reaction to the situation being shown, with it thus not being all that funny, but it's still somewhat amusing nevertheless. This greatly enhances the lighthearted tone, wherein even when things are going badly, it still doesn't feel dark at all, rather the feeling of watching these innocent characters slowly stumble their way through these various romances seems kind of adorable.

The art quality was decent overall and was especially great at having character's facial expressions showing emotion. The style was a mixed bag. It worked well in that it wasn't too realistic but not too unrealistic either, which allowed it to be both cute and grounded. However, it felt like character designs were somewhat of an issue, in that far too many characters looked overtly similar, especially with the girls, and with the small panels and constantly changing point of view amongst so many characters it got somewhat confusing at times.

I can't believe this manga is as highly regarded as it is on here.

This manga was nearly the same for its whole 212.2 chapter run.

The story for each and every single pair is almost always about misunderstanding, being embarrased to reveal their own feelings and doubting themselves. That's it, nothing else. All of these issues could have been solved in around a dozen chapters at the most, but apparenlty people stop talking to each other literally the moment someone else interrupts them (which happens all the goddamn time in this manga).

The art is pretty poor as well, many of the characters look the same, the ... facial reaction shots look exactly the same on each character which make them look even more similar then they already are.

This is the kind of manga that's as wide as the ocean (chapter-wise) but as shallow as a puddle. None of the characters feel real, none of these relationships feel real. All in all it was a waste of time and I don't really know why I even kept going.

The characters, like I said, most of these characters are pretty similar, but I would be lying if I said they weren't enjoyable.

Some grew to be my favourites and I dreaded reading others chapters. However because all of these characters had more or less the same kind of story that they went through made this a moot point in the end anyway.

The longer I read, the more I started hating all these "characters".

Would definitly not recommend, unless all you want to read is the same stuff just told with different characters for 212 chapters.