The Manga Works Review (Pucc Succ)
Everyone has a dream, but even more people give up on them every year, every day. But you, with the generous help of some invisible benefactors (likely your better off boomer parents that got moderately wealthy working 2 hours a week during the Japanese miracle economic bubble) - you too can become a victim of relentless corporate slavery! All under the guise of making art for the masses!
The Manga Works is a dream come true or a wide awake nightmare in slow motion, depending on whether or not you are a fascist, a communist or a cucked wage slave. Either way, what makes this game truly wonderful is the fact that we finally have a realistic, human-slavery simulator on steam.
For fans of Bakuman and also those who, for whatever reason, worship the Japanese work-to-death-culture, this game is honestly truly fantastic. Much like making a manga, it is frustratingly simple, addictive and you will lose valuable hours you could have spent enriching your life with cherished memories with friends and family. Instead, like a true mangaka, you will invest literal dozens of hours in your life to the benefit of some old guy in a suit who thinks "big number go up" is the only appropriate plan for any business.
"Slow and steady wins the race" is infamously the most tone-deaf advice to ever exist in the modern world. Whether under communism or capitalism, the only thing that matters is 1.) how poor you are 2.) how quickly you can become unpoor 3.) giving up on the latter and eventually dying. If you are "slow and steady", you are most likely stagnating and existing to merely make it to the next weekend, the next paycheck, continually dragging out a store that is moderately successful at a tolerable amount of effort to prevent literally becoming hospitalized. The only way this game could become even more realistic is if you just out right died of overwork by year 10 or decided to spontaneously commit scooter-ankle/sewer-slide/end game yourself.
In all truth, this game is a remarkably fun, simple, addictive sim that I have always wanted. And I am glad that it has finally come out, as I remember eyeing this on the story sometime ago. I watched the live action adaption of Bakuman on an international plane trip once and after having become even familiar with the creative entertainment world of Japan, specifically the studios and start ups in Shinjuku, I truly gained an appreciation for the nearly suicidal pursuit that is arguably the most successful, notable and prestigious entertainment medium printed today.
However, it does have a dark side and the game's cutesy graphics help you forget how often manga artists and animators truly suffer like a medieval Russian serf just to be told they are not working hard or fast enough.
As of now, in the game, I had several high effort manga reach millions of sales and yet, my dude is still broke as hell, living off a few hundred Gs a month. There have been times in the game where I became significantly wealthy for an entire week and in order to keep producing manga at an effective rate, I literally spent my small fortune on things like printers, video games you'll never get to play, visiting museums, treating everyone to a fancy dinner or just outright going to a coin mint to watch money be made while you stand there like a starving homeless person looking into an upper class cafe shop.
But before I reached the moderate level of "success" of not perpetually being in forever debt and likely living off of bread crusts dipped in mayo, my guy had a super ambitious solo project for a low-end magazine that literally made it one of the best selling seinen/shonen magazines in the game, competing even with not-Shonen Jump etc.
It was such a difficult under taking, that my artist was always a day late, had to literally kill himself and get hospitalized ritualistically, to submit a single chapter and often had to take two hiatuses a month to even have any resemblance of energy and plot points/PP to even make the next chapter. While getting paid virtually nothing, my artist was making the magazine hundreds of thousands of new sales a month, consistently remaining at the 1 of 20 spot for manga, winning ALL of the magazine awards and becoming a living legend at age 19...
And then one day, as per usual, I was late by an entire 2 hours on the most ambitious chapter yet and the magazine responded in the very adult way of firing me, lowering their star rating with me to 0, stealing all of my money and funding, literally hospitalizing me (again) and promptly having the demonic audacity to ask me for a one shot a week later for the stunning price of 50G.
In revenge, I started making cookie-cutter Witch-Battle-Arena pretty girl shojo for their rival and made 30x the money and turned my new magazine publisher into the largest one in all of Japan (at the cost of my mental health, my assistant's physical wellbeing as they lived in perpetual terminal poverty since all my money went to bookshelves, aquariums and feeding their dumb asses at Gordon Ramsay's Hell Kitchen for "inspiration")
It was very satisfying, but upon becoming a legend, selling 4 million copies, by the time my witch-shojo-battle-arena-generic-stadium-fighter manga ended, I had 500G.
The Manga Works is a brilliant game depicting the fatal flaws of the society the developed world is rampantly marching into! If you enjoy overworking, drawing cute girls and dying by age 30, this game is for you!