Forum › Review: Monster Wrestling Interspecies Combat Girls
Just finished this and since I don't think there's really anywhere on the internet that cares about this manga I thought I might as well go here. This is one of those series that got officially licensed for an english version but has no fan translations, so if you want to read it you're gonna have to either pay money or commit piracy (yeah I know all scanslations are piracy, you know what I mean).
Honestly, this is a manga that I feel almost could've been great, but had fumbled at several points. I still kind of enjoyed it, but I knew it could have been a lot better.
*Premise: You know exactly what the premise is from the title. Sexy monstergirls wrestling with each other. It delivers on that.
*Plot: The plot is fairly basic and generic. Protagonist trains to be a wrestler, starts out as an underdog (quite literally since she's a cerberus girl) who needs to believe in herself in order to succeed, has several fights then enters the big tournament. Then at the end some big threat comes and she has to defeat it with a final powerup. I'm not really complaining because this isn't the type of story that needs a deep or intricate plot. I suppose my main problem is that the villains who appear at the end just kinda show up and are like "we're evil and gonna destroy everything", so I don't really feel any emotional investment into that conflict at all. Not really enough time to make them feel menacing, or give us an actual reason to want to see them defeated other than "they're the bad guys".
*Characters: The characters are fairly distinctive. The monstergirl premise leads to a lot of unique designs and they tend to have memorable personalities and unique fighting styles too. The unfortunate thing is that since the series is so short (only four volumes long), I don't think anybody other than the protagonist herself really got the character development they needed. I feel like there's a lot more that could have been done with them that is left unexplored.
*Art: This is kind of a mixed bag. I want to say it has great art, because its pretty pleasant to look at. On the other hand, a lot of time during action scenes I had trouble understanding what was going on. I think a lot of it is due to attacks being too flashy. Wrestling is about watching two bodies interlocking with each other, which means its important in a wrestling manga for the choreography to be pretty clear and easily understood.
*Erotica: I mean, this is a fanservice manga, I kind of had to put it here. Characters are pretty sexy looking I suppose. There's times where it ventures into fetishes I dislike (like yeah, I can tolerate tentacles, but I don't want to see girls covered in squirming insects, that's just wrong), but it doesn't do it so often for me to say it ruins the manga. I suppose my biggest problem is for a manga with such an extreme level of fanservice, there's no outright showing of nipples. Which may sound like a weird complaint, but honestly it just kind of feels out of place when there's an extremely lewd situation but they're still hiding the nipple.
*Yuri Factor: Why I posted this review here in the first place. The main character Tirol and her mentor Kayla are obviously in love with each other and really have the hots for each other. I actually really like their dynamic, the whole "wrestling trainer who also sexually dominates their student" thing is pretty unique. Thing is that even though the story itself acknowledges they're in love, I don't feel like there's a proper resolution. They kiss near the end but I dunno, I feel like the ending would've been a lot more satisfying if they outright started dating. There's some other less important yuri stuff (main character's tag team partner also falls in love with her, there's a kind of yandere slime girl, and weird domination relationship between mummy girls) but as I said, since there's not a lot of time to develop characters these aren't really delved into much.
Suffice to say while I wouldn't call this a bad manga, I wouldn't really recommend it either. I would say I would want to follow the creator's careers because I think they could make something better if they improved, neither the author nor the artist appear to have made anything else I would be interested in from what I can see of them. It feels kinda bad because "yuri monster girl wrestling manga" feels like exactly the kind of thing I would be into, and I know that if it weren't for my attachment to this premise I wouldn't really care about this manga at all.