Mushihime

Let me first say I had high hopes for this manga, because the art is truly beautiful, but sadly it falls into the category of horror mangas with great art and mediocre everything-else. It is enjoyable, but with that kind of art it could be great, and it's not.

Story: 4
The basic concept is actually alright, and it could be good. The problem is that after a while the manga is not about the story anymore, it's about the horror scenes. The pacing was kind of weird for me at times and the science of the whole thing is pretty silly, you can see it doesn't work like that even if you're not a scientist. They also tried to connect the story with japanese mythology at some point, but that fell flat too. For me the way the story was used felt very silly, and I cringed at times. Also, what's with that ending?

Art: 9
This is the reason I kept reading this manga, the art is phenomenal. I don't need to say much about it, no problems there, top stuff.

Characters: 5
Did the characters make sense? No.
Did their motives make sense? Also no.
Munakata maybe I get, she's half crazy, in pain, half-insect, ok. The rest of the crew is plain weird, except maybe the protagonist's friends. This is typical of horror mangas, the characters just don't make sense, but usually they try to explain their philosophy. The manga is a short one however, so I understand that there was no space for that.

Enjoyment: 6-7
It was a fun read, and some scenes were breath-taking, if you want to kill some time it is a cool little horror manga.

Overall: 6
If you enjoy monsters, violence and horror this is a good choice. However, if you expect a structured story and good characters this is not it.

Story (7): the story is pretty straightforward. Not revolutionary or anything but it aware if ut and not trying to be something else. So they use that to their advantage. The ending and revelation is quite predictable but what makes me enjoy this is the atmosphere. Idk how but they really got the disturbing factor spot on it gave me chills at every chapter. Just a simple depiction of horrifyingly big swollen bug bite, thousands of insects crawling all over your body and attacking your pets, relatable daily things like that and dramatise that just really works for horror. I like how it doesn't rely on ghosts or gore too much to scare the readers.

Art (9): Is probably the strongest point in this manga. It has a delicate, soft pen strokes, to have such pretty art style on a disturbing horror manga just adds the creepyness. Did I mention the word pretty? The character design is nothing unique (not that it has to tho) but it's pretty. It's gorgeous. The paneling is also awesome. And some shots were just beautiful like the scene where it has a spread image of dead bodies all over a lake with a kayak (?) in the middle. Powerful and pretty I could print that in a poster and hang it on my bedrooms. Also the insects, inflected bodies, monster designs are so grossly drawn it's so good. And the main girl (the instect Princess is terrifying, omg.

Characters (7): it doesn't have many chapters so it's not like we can explore the characters that much so nothing special. The characters reaction to things are pretty realistic which I really appreciate, not like some airhead horror main character that has the dumb mentality of "I neED tO sAve everYonE!". As if "saving everyone" is the only personality trait they have. The Insects Princess on the other hand does a really good job at being creepy and terrifying.

Enjoyment (9): this manga did a really good job at making me feel disturbed and creeped out like a horror manga should so thumbs up for that! I haven't really found a nice horror manga that's actually creepy aside from Ito Junji's work so this is really refreshing. I love how this manga doesn't really rely on psychopathic killers or such to make it terrifying.

Overall (8): totally recommend this if you're just bored and feeling like having an insect related nightmare at night!

Looks like this is gonna be my first review for this site. But this is not gonna take long, after all if you have read another short horror manga you will pretty much know how the experience will go. Personally I read manga like these when I have nothing to do and want a quick read. And as that, this manga works quiet well.

The story is short and self contained, and not over ambitious at all. What is presented is not bad, but enjoyable for what it is. The biggest strength this piece has is its art, just like a lot of other horror manga. The designs are not scary nor thrilling but cool instead. And it was fun to see how they applied insect biology on humans.

However being a short horror manga just like any other, I did not really managed to attach myself to any characters nor did not care that much about them. This is at best a story I will remember for about a week until it vanishes into the void of my memories.

As a final point I would like to read the original raw version as I felt the translation seemed a bit off. I can´t tell for sure if it´s a bad translation but I personally was slightly bothered by it.

If you have time and just find this manga randomly, give it a try. You probably won´t remember it well but during the time I read it, I was enjoying myself. And it´s also a quick read and a solution if you want to pass time.

tl;dr: Arbitrary nonsense. 

This manga felt incredibly terribly written. The two characters that were probably meant to be the most important, Ryoichi and Munakata, are an inconsistent mess, and as such their relationship which I suppose was meant to be the core of the manga, is similarly incredibly arbitrary and doesn’t really feel like it has any worth at all. I use the words “probably” and “suppose” because this manga is so random that I’m not entirely sure they are meant to be the focus as it's not like they really got the proper focus main characters should, but considering everything else matters even less I suppose they fit the bill. They’re not very likable though, in that Munakata is just kind of terrible all the way through, like a yandere that completely misses the point, and Ryoichi doesn’t do much of anything at all for the whole manga basically just being swept along by things. The two best characters were probably Kazumi, who was interesting in that he seemed crazy and never explained things but had it together and actually drove the plot forward, and Chiken who was totally out of her depth but tried her best in a traditional love interest type fashion. That isn’t enough to make them good characters though as considering the narrative it is really hard for any character to be all that good. The themes and tone were also all over the place, with random global warming connections and linking important concepts to Japanese mythology for no reason despite them being explained earlier or later as being due to DNA modification. It just felt like a long string of arbitrary twists leading up to an ending I still somehow managed to find disappointing. Also, the manga is about a lot of different things with it going in random directions completely randomly, but it's never about what the description of this manga describes it as, at least as of posting this, which is just frankly wrong. The art was okay for the most part, but the attempts at horror were terrible.