Finished going through my print copies...damned good stuff. This must have been my third or fourth time rereading the series, lol. I have to say, I came to appreciate the technical detail all over again that Morinaga put into things like hair care, nail care, and fashion, etc. When people talk about Girl Friends' sense of reality, (combined with Sugi-san's mastery of goukons and other aspects of handling men), that's the kind of thing they mean, and I have to say compared with other yuri series it's the type of thing which never really gets emphasized.
This, combined with stuff like the characters' thoughts/concerns about the future and college/career choices makes Girl Friends a really worthwhile read for pretty much anybody, and more than justifies the length. The only part which felt slow was when there was a fairly long stretch after Akko realized her feelings where misunderstandings kept happening and a resolution to their relationship kept getting delayed for arbitrary reasons. However, that issue still got resolved with more than enough time left to explore their burgeoning relationship. Ultimately Girl Friends is a fantastic series.
To comment on the print translation, I was quite impressed actually. The wording mostly felt completely natural. Unfortunately there was a tendency by Seven Seas to keep quite a lot of the original Japanese vocabulary which makes Girl Friends a bit hard to recommend to non-anime/manga fans. On the other end of the spectrum of over-localization, most of the text messages used a lot of 'netspeak' and abbreviations (like "u" for "you", etc.) that was kind of obnoxious and took you out of the story. Also, for some bizarre reason (I assume the original volumes weren't lacking them), Seven Seas only included translations of the author afterwords for volumes 1, 2, and 5. That was kind of disappointing.
To speak about Morinaga in general, I feel like one of her strengths which came out in this series (as well as another of my favourites, the Kisses/Sighs series) is the severity/weight of love. The longing/suffering Morinaga puts her characters through often twists/changes them in a way which persists even after they get together. In a sense, what Morinaga's works get at which I have not really seen with other yuri series is a sense of being completely dyed in the other person, in a way which cannot be turned back, irrevocably shaping the person afterwards. The sense of humanity in how Morinaga manages to show that love makes you both strong and weak (sometimes) is something that I'm really impressed by.
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