Metamo Kiss 3

Well, this is the last volume.  Honestly, it’s kind of anticlimactic, and it almost feels like the story ended a little early even though several chapters hinted the ending was coming up.  The big plot device at the end was kind of a shoujo cliché, but I liked it in the context of this series.   I hated Nanao, the female partner, up until the end.  She beat up and berated  Hanamaru for all she was worth right up until the end, though there were signs that she was beginning to get a crush on him.  All the sudden, Hanamaru’s twin brother, the one that Nanao liked in the first place, comes back, and suddenly she’s smitten with him again.  Then Hanamaru takes his support away courtesy of the plot device, and of course she’s angry and couldn’t care less, blah blah blah… I didn’t actually like how the two left things between them, but of course they were fated to be lovers forever.  There’s a little bit tacked on at the end.

Hm.  It’s a cute series without much substance.  Kinda middle-of-the-road in that if you like cute girly shoujo series, you’ll probably like this, but others should probably stay clear.  I still really like the switching bodies thing, but I’d get into that in any series, so that’s not necessarily a mark of quality for this one.

Metamo Kiss 2

I’m both glad and sorry that this series is only three volumes.  I’m kind of glad because it’ll be nice to see things wrap up next volume since there isn’t much plot outside the romantic triangle.  I’ll be sad because I would have liked to have seen more of a plot, however.  It is what it is, and it does all the cute romance really well, but I think I just wanted it to be something it wasn’t.

I actually like the art quite a bit.  It’s not just cute, but also really pleasantly chaotic, and I like the character designs quite a bit even though they don’t do anything special… and sometimes it’s hard to tell minor characters apart.

The main couple is also very cute, and I like the romantic triangle the series has built for itself.  Lots more of the body swap happens here, mostly prompted by the girl, but the two don’t get into situations like last time where they’re stuck “permanently” in the wrong body.  Mostly this volume deals with others at their school finding out about their curse.

But yes, a really sweet series that does a lot of things right, and I think it’s good at what it does, but it’s just not my kind of thing.

Metamo Kiss 1

I’ve been pretty good about not starting new series lately, though bad about not buying series which have been long finished (brace yourself for the rest of the sci-fi Tezuka books, by the way).  To make up for this drought of new books, which I’m sure was only in my imagination, I decided to buy a girly Ribon-like series from Tokyopop, because I don’t think I’ve had enough girly lately either.

Metamo Kiss is about as girly as they come.  I think I read about it immediately after finishing Day of Revolution, and although it sounded interesting, I did not want another gender swap series.  Metamo Kiss is really more of a body swap series, though the two characters who switch the most are male and female, so it doesn’t make that big a difference.

The main female character was really, really annoying.  She was like a shallow version of Miyoul from Bird Kiss.  As well as the main male character means, apparently he just can’t do right by her.  She has a big crush on someone.  The connection between the crush and the main male character is beyond belief and too convenient for my taste, and I also did not like the entire family element that seems like it was stuffed in there as a requirement.  The characters switch bodies due to a family curse from the main male character, and of course he’s got a huge family in the background, though they’re not quite as meddlesome as such characters usually are.

It’s pretty fun so far, though.  The art is really cute, the plot is staying interesting enough, things keep moving and bouncing around at a pretty good pace, and I may even grow to like the little romance that’s developing.  It’s a shallow kind of fun though, which is definitely more for little girls than someone my age.  It seems that it’s only 3 volumes long, which means it probably has a crappy ending, but I’ll keep reading it all the same.  It was a good random purchase.