One Manga Day is a short comedy visual novel about a Manga Scanlation Group. The ending depends on the choices you make.
The game is Free On Steam
A Humours Story
The story follows 'you' as a new member in a manga scanlating team, and your interactions with others in the team.
But what actually happens that instead of a story about manga, the Visual Novel is about people who slack at their jobs and their clashing personalities. All the characters are typical ones found in a lot of anime and Manga (Dex is the usual, Lap is a tsundere, Laiby is always serious, Carry is ADHD in human form) But they're still fun to read If you like comedy.
Other than the recurring battle with rival scanlation team, most of the Visual Novel dialog is jokes. sometimes it gives you stupid choices and don't give you the logical thing to do in that situation.
There are multiple endings, depending on your choices. The game is very short, it would take you less than hour to reach an ending. (5 minutes for the bad one) and 3 hours for all the ending. Less if you skipped the repeated scenes as there's only one route, with just few differences according to your choices.
(I liked the distant future ending)
Using ComiPo Characters?!
The game was probably made with a very tiny budget. Characters graphics are made with ComiPo predefined characters and poses. I'm skeptical about works that are made with assets like these, but it surprised me how good it worked here. As if these characters were made just for "One Manga Day".
The developers worked on scanlation team at some point, and based this game on their experience there, so there's some truth in what happens. And all the information about what makes a better scanlation is true.
(That world is more complicated than I thought)
Something I wished they touched upon is how "grey area" the scanlation is, it's not completely legal to take someone else's work, translate it and then distribute the translation for free. I heard arguments from both sides... But I wished this VN touched upon it a bit, with a joke or two.
An Okay Experience Overall
I recommend this VN to people who like comedy, cliche jokes and bizarre games. It would also be fun for people who are interested in being scanlators though it'll probably give you a vague idea about what scanlators think about what they do.
I don't recommend this to anyone other than those, and I don't recommend it as the first Visual Novel for someone to play.
Being short and free is a huge plus for "One Manga Day". And while I won't say it's a good Visual Novel I'd say it's OK and definitely not the bad.
What do you think?
All images are screenshots from the game One Manga Day.
If you liked this review you might also like some of the similar games I reviewed:
| Post Cover | Post Link |
|---|---|
 | Narcissu 2nd Side: Another free Visual Novel. I recommend it to newbies to the genre. |