The World God Only Knows Review: Somewhat Amusing

Keima Katsuragi is called the God of Conquest because he can conquer any girls heart he wishes. The girls however are in videogames and Katsuragi is the master of dating sims. Somewhere in the netherworld "a chief of spiritual countermeasures" is worried about runaway spirits. He assigns Elsee to capture these spirits, which can be done only by capturing their hearts, in other words making them fall in love. They see that Katsuragi is notorious for seducing girls, so he is mistakenly 'signed up' as Elsees partner for their journey. If Katsuragi fails, he will lose his head.

Art: It's decent, a bit too simplified for my taste but it gets the job done.The simplifying appears mostly to enhance comedic scenes which is something that I'm really not fond of. It's been going for over 200 chapters so there's obviously some improvement on the art along the way.

Characters: I liked Katsuragis character almost instantly. He is somewhat original, overly confident and I find his way of disregarding real life very amusing. Elsee's character is one of those that I rarely like, but I believe that her kind of clumsy character is necessary to bring out Katsuragi's personality which is almost a complete opposite of hers. Side characters play a very important role as the girls with different personalities to be seduced: good thing is that there shouldn't be two girls that are too much alike who Katsuragi has to "capture" so the series bring some fluctuation with the rotation of side characters.

Story: The idea of TWGOK is obviously very unique and the author manages to make use of it very well. The story is somewhat 50-50 depending on humor/romance. Apart from being unique it's also a at its best quite enjoyable, even though I found a bit too many uninteresting and boring chapters along the way. I can imagine that the author must have had some problems thinking which way to make the series go, but he did pretty fine job on that part. I myself have pretty much never been a fan of mangas which rely a lot on humor or especially on romance, but TWGOK managed to be somewhat amusing, which is an achievement by itself.

I think that people should try this manga: in under ten chapters it gives a pretty good feeling how most of the story is going to go, so it doesn't hurt to read some of it.