Hakutaku commits the cardinal sin of...just being an incredibly boring manga. Hakutaku is about a team of incredibly young students making video games together. These students have varying levels of knowledge in making games to begin with, but somehow they manage to create games far beyond what they realistically should've been able to make with the time period and knowledge they were allotted in each circumstance. This is the first huge problem with Hakutaku: suspension of disbelief is extremely hard to pull off when your work is not entertaining. It's okay to do things that are unrealistic in a work, even in a more realistic setting,but if there is nothing to pull the reader in, then their suspension of disbelief is not going to kick in and the work's logistical problems are going to be in the center stage, and that's exactly what happens here. It does not help that the story has no real goal or aim to it, making the characters just kind of float around and make random games and further preventing the reader from making an emotional connection to the story.

The characters are generally one-note with a singular personality trait given to them if they're lucky. If they're not, they just kind of exist in panels to advance the story and do nothing else to make the reader care about them as characters. The main character is a pushover who seems to get weird, creepy positive feelings from people enjoying his games. The female lead is pushy and generally rude but somehow has way too many industry connections and knowledge despite just being an ordinary gamer who was kind of intense. From there everything else just doesn't matter, and once you've seen the main character and the female lead interact once, you know how all of their future interactions are going to play out, because neither of them develop as characters. I guess they're too busy developing games.

Despite being a manga about game dev, the manga frequently fails to go into detail about the actual necessities of game dev and to a degree seems to be actively avoiding going into any serious detail and instead just nudging things along to show the next bootleg of a popular game that the cast has made. Because of this, Hakutaku feels lazy and as though it isn't particularly invested into its own subject matter. The main character just kind of goes, "Oh, can we make this?" The other characters look at him like he's a genius, maybe a few other panels showing them poking the game, then oh it's done. Many things feel like they are given to the characters on a silver platter.

There are certainly comparisons to be made between this and Bakuman in terms of the kind of tone they were trying to aim for, but that would honestly be a disgrace to Bakuman. I would highly recommend just checking that manga out instead of this.