Products: An Eromanga Review

Note: No NSFW images on this post.

Products is an erotic manga about the ultimate sex dolls that incorporates psychological elements of what it means to be called a human. That’s the shortest sentence to summarize the plot and the it’s your average eromanga.

Created by Tamano, Minami and illustrated by Zenoshin whom I have trouble finding more about. I picked it up upon a friend’s recommendation because it has psychological themes they said, it would be interesting they said, and it turned out to be a disappointment instead.

Spoiler Warning: I’ll be mentioning some parts that will disappoint you if you want to try the story out.

Plot:

An underground rumor circulates online about mysterious women being overly obedient and sold from the black market. Our protagonist Shiba dismisses this as another urban legend until he gets into an accident which lands him into a hospital.

Upon waking up, he finds himself in absurd situations where the opposite sex tries to get sexually intimate but only a select few manifest such behavior around him. Shiba is a university student that has problems with communication, unpopular and bullied so a sudden rise in these weird encounters prompted him to question something was off. It became apparent things are more than meets the eye when a secret organization working for the government asked for his cooperation.

Sounds like your standard hentai plot because it is.

None of the characters really stood out, unless you count one of the products that eventually learned to have a sense of self. We have a main protagonist that showcases the socially awkward self-doubt archetype and a romantic relationship where hot girl meets nerd because plot said so. It’s a passive story where characters react to what gets being thrown at them that undermines their capacity for growth in the story.

The succeeding chapters add more depth to the plot but do a disservice to the characters when some facts about their backstory get tackled by a few panels quick and nothing else. You thought that there was a lot of mystery worth unraveling but the pages just throws the facts at you messing up the tension building. It's telling the story instead of showing which is one way to kill interest fast.

At least the self-doubt internal monologue is believable because there’s no damn way nerd gets that attention from the opposite sex.

The art style is a pass for an eromanga. Majority of the scenes aren’t even focused on the sexual acts but when they do, at the least the girls are drawn pretty while the guys are fat bastard except the main character just cause.

The pacing was rushed especially nearing the middle of the story where a lot of revelations get thrown into the reader. One can already guess how things are going to end based from the subtle hints. This becomes noticeable after getting used to the slow tension building for the first chapters.

Approaching towards the end was an example of Deus ex machina that made every tension built in the previous chapters pointless. It did try to introduce more plotwists but none of those tools could save the story. Secret organization greater than the individuals themselves societal implications of a product’s existence, none of those held a candle against the power of self-discovery, being human, free will, and all the generic good stuff.

Conclusions:

Did I expect to have some actual story from the plot? yes, you'd be surprised that there are smut themed eromanga out there that do have a story as a backbone and put sexual content second.

It ended up being an average eromanga in the end. A lot of its potential being wasted on introducing interesting concepts that aren’t followed up in the succeeding chapters. It tried to do a lot of things without focus so most of that potential went away through succeeding chapters eventually making the conclusion unsurprisingly underwhelming. In the end, it’s just an erotic manga that just happens to have a story.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.