Sundome Review: Strong Ecchi With Deep Story

Sundome tells us a story of Hideo Aiba and Kurumi Sahana. Hideo is a otaku who belongs to "Roman club" and who doesn't have any friends, but after girl named Kurumi Sahana transfers to the school, joins the club and sits beside him in the class everything changes. Soon Sahana makes a very strange proposition to Hideo and him life changes totally after that...

Art of Sundome is very good: it's a pleasure to read and the author sometimes makes pages which uses shading very well to it's advantage. It's suits very well with the general flow of the story and makes the ecchi scenes work very well in terms of making readers excited.

Characters of Sundome are very well designed: usually I hate Hideo Aiba's type of a character, but somehow the author has managed to make him tolerable. There's also a great character development story concerning Hideo Aiba which comes evident only on the later part of the story. Kurumi Sahana is a bit more complicated character who seems to be at first very mean and dominative, but the further the story progressess there are a lot more depth to her character than it first looks. Side characters of this story are decent, even good at times and I liked them enough, since they don't get much screen time. I have to say that Kurumi Sahana may have in my opinion one of the best female characters designs that I've ever encountered.

Story of Sundome seems to be very shallow at first: it looks like it's only objective is to get (male) readers hard with it's strong ecchi content. It relies a lot on "Sundome", which literally means "Stopping the moment before", which refers to the sexual relationship between Hideo and Kurumi. After the reader has read long enough, as I did I realized that the story hints very strongly towards something that makes a shallow story very deep very quickly. The further the story progresses the more the reader cares about Hideos and Kurumis relatinship rather than the sexuality between them. This series, despite how it starts, after being finished it lingers for an unnecessary long time, which is a sign of strong flow and design of a definitely good story.

Conclusion: Sundome succeeds well in all of the criteria that I use in my reviews, Art, Characters and especially in the story. It's a definite recommend not only because strong ecchi content, but a deep and emotional story behind the seemingly shallow cover that it has. I have to say that I rarely (read: never) like any mangas that have romance as one of their main themes, but Sundome has that and a lot more. Though if it didn't have such a strong ecchi content I wouldn't most likely had read in in the first place.