DNA² · review
Spoiler warning
This review may discuss plot details.
While it started out promising, I've never seen a rom-com manga drop harder than Quantumania's second week box office. That's right. At its core DNA2 is a rom-com, with the potential to deliver the outlandish, sensuous, hilarious, emotional, and ultimately escapist teenage drama that rivals Ranma and Yatsura. Unfortunately I have no idea what editor thought it was somehow a good idea to turn the series' direction into a Dragon Ball knockoff second act in, and then an attempt at harem with a random incest event thrown in for no reason, and then it finishes with...social commentary? (Insert confused face) In the end this turnedinto neither a good drama nor a good comedy. It's sprinkled with simple moral messages that are made hollow by its exuberant silliness. Characters do not grow, react, or reflect on themselves, because they are dragged along the shipwreck of a plot. Most of the readers would be drawn in by the moral dilemma at the start complemented with relatively tame, comforting comedy, if not solely for the ecchi art, which starts to diminish around volume 3. They should've stuck with that instead.