BUNGO, like many other promising manga, starts with a bang and then slowly fizzles out. This review will be spoiler-free. The first eight volumes worth of chapters were tightly paced, with story beats that matched its real-world style of storytelling. The characters were engaging, and the interactions between the main cast felt rewarding to read. It held my interest in baseball despite not being a fan of the sport. What was most enjoyable though, was the dynamic between the four members of our main cast: Bungo, Noda, Makoto, and Hakamada. **However** from around ch.85 onward, the story took a gradual but significant downward turn. Needlesslydrawn out drama about team positions that lead to pacing issues. Additions to the main cast the worsened the bond and interactions between the main four. Bland and two-dimensional side-characters who don't do anything to drum up emotion. While it is easy to see where the author was going, every single one of these things was **executed poorly.** What makes this worse, is that all of these negatives crowd out the positives that made the first part of the manga so enjoyable. Multiple story arcs could have been cut in half and still had the same exact effect on the story. The author meandered for far too long, and lost the reader's interest.

BUNGO is a manga that will leave a sour taste in your mouth because it will always be a "what if." It does not fail quite as spectacularly as something like Food Wars did, but it fails all the same.

**After reading over 300 chapters, I feel like my time investment was wasted, and I cannot recommend BUNGO.**