Love can make a person act somewhat crazy,do activities they may otherwise despise,or cause them to hatch extremely convoluted plans,such is the case with today's main event Punch!. It's one of those stories that is actually not that bad but has nothing really special about it either. There is some great comedic moments that aren't that memorable which perfectly compliments the forgettable story . There is effort put into to it but it ultimately fails to leave any impact on the reader
The female lead is
Elle,who comes from a family that is involved with boxing and lives
in a gym ran by her grandfather. She rejects her arranged marriage
based less on the guy being terrible and more on the idea she views
him as a brother. A concept neither her grandpa nor her fiance can
understand and write off as her being a brat. Which is not surprising
because she acts very childish,from her speech to bringing home a
street punk archetype who serves as our romantic lead,Kazuki. He's
the more mature of the two even if he takes a shine to her because
she looks like his family dog. His love for fighting boarders on the
fetishistic and he has that jerk with a heart of gold schtick going
too. That is really about it for him personality wise,and it's not
that interesting. By extension this makes the main romance really
uninteresting,as the two leads have no chemistry at all.
Once they start
formally dating it's the “I'm a jerk but I love you” routine that
doesn't work. They even take the time to flesh out his back story
with his blind sister and all these things he's seen and it's still
not interesting because he lacks a personality outside of stoic. Elle
is a childish idiot but still has personality. The struggles she
faces are more relate-able ,i.e trying to forge your own path.
However once she starts dating Rugged Mcbland, her desires to leave
the gym go clean out the window as now she has a sexy fighter
boyfriend to keep her interest as opposed to genuine enjoyment. It's
insulting to say the least and kills any chance that Elle had for
character development.
The rest of the
cast is a collection of idiot meat heads and female shojo archetypes.
Her fiance does have a jerk side that shows more as the plot goes on
that becomes over the top. He gets his own side plot where he decides
to get back at Kazuki by wooing his sister. It's really enjoyable
watching this guy try to be sinister while paying for this girl's eye
surgery and leads to a really funny title drop. There is also this
nice twist to the crazy admirer's trope in that Elle promptly curb
stomps them because she remembers she actually is a great athlete.
The plot itself
acts like a shonen sports manga but focusing on the lead character’s
girlfriend instead. This has potential to be rather funny but it
forgoes that in place of shojo melodrama. The events these characters
get into are not boring and stay with in the realm of plausibility
but because the charters are bland and uninteresting you don't care
what happens to them. The latter half of the plot deals with Kazuki
potentially not being able to box ever again but Kazuki is a poor
character so I couldn't give less of a darn. Then the story has the
guts to time skip to a completely bland match up between the main two
boys in Elle's life that no one was asking for.
There is a rather
well paced and decent plot barring that time skip hiding in these
pages but alas it also has terrible characters hiding with it as
well. As stated above there was genuine effort put into this series
but it's not enough to make up for it's problems.
Till Next Time:
Stay Positive
