HomeMangaStrawberry Marshmallow - Volume 5 Review

Strawberry Marshmallow – Volume 5 Review

-

Strawberry Marshmallow - Volume 5 Review 1

In the morning, she tripped on the stairs.
During Japanese class she dropped her pencil and bonked her head coming back up.

In swim class, I kept her company in the shallow end the whole time, as always…..

– Ana describing a normal day for Matsuri

This is the fifth and currently last released english volume of the Strawberry Marshmallow series. For those who have not heard of the series before, I would suggest a handy search on wikipedia to know what this series is about. This volume follows in the same pattern as all the other volumes….. sheer random humor injected with mild levels of cuteness and odd scenarios. As with the other volumes, if you want a comedic manga that keeps a relatively stable and sane storyline, please move on now. For those who are interested in any sort of comedic or cute manga, then please read on! Of course, having said that, even if you do want a storyline, I am sure you will read on anyway!

This time at the Ito house, Nobue looks for another part-time job while the girls discover the meaning of their names, dabble in English and play hide-and-seek. After looking through an old photo album, the girls reminisce about the past and decide that it ‘s time to find out where they came from. Miu starts a quest to rehabilitate Matsuri, and in the process, discovers what it means to be a best friend! And just when did Nobue start smoking? Surprises abound in this volume of Strawberry Marshmallow!

I really do like this summary, since it essentially summarises the whole volume in a few sentences whilst I would have taken paragraphs to do the same thing. Overall, I thought the storyline was good as usual, however a lot of the chapters didn’t have the same level of humor as chapters in previous volumes, however there were some very entertaining scenes such as Matsuri finally getting some hits in on Miu for her constant bullying (Even if it was accidental) and the chapter ENGLISH GIRLS IN HAMAMATSU also proved very funny…. I do find when manga uses English as a joke within the english subs, they usually end up so weird they actually end up pretty funny. That being said, a number of the chapters seemed to have been copied in completion to the OVA Anime series, which having watched myself, lowered my interest in reading those chapters. The content I hadn’t seen however was an entertaining read however. Character development continued with certain chapters such as THE ALBUM outlining the odd way Nobue got into smoking and MATSURI IN REHAB which covers a day in the life at school for Matsuri. My only complaint overall for the content would be that in a couple of scenes, they would try to make one or more of the characters cute, only to make the whole scene incomprehendable.

Graphics wise, I can safely say that from Volumes 1 to 4, there has been no lowering to the quality of the graphics. However there wasnt as much white backdrop then I remember from the previous volumes, which is always good! Good as always.

Extra content seemed relatively lacking in this volume, with only these being available:

  • The usual character list
  • Cute title page
  • Fashion to Season match up for all five main characters, similar to what they did in Volume 1
  • Advertising mangas, none of which seemed to be in the same genre as this.

This manga is as good as always, however by now, if you are up to volume 5 you would already know if you like this series or not and would continue reading it anyway. For those who read this review without reading prior volumes, pick them up, you won’t be disappointed as long as you can handle comedy over storyline!

Overall Score

Storyline: 7
Character Development: 7
Artwork: 8
Extras: 4
Personal Opinion: 7
Total Score: 7

Sam
Sam
Founder of The Otaku's Study. I have been exploring this labyrinth of fandom these last fifteen years, and still nowhere close to the exit yet. Probably searching for a long time to come.

1 COMMENT

  1. I can’t wait to get my hands on this series. Hopefully, it will retain its comedic element when I watched the animated series.

    Keep up it with your writing spree!

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Advertisment

Recent Posts