Merry Month of Shojo: OTOME MANIA!!

Yo dawg, I heard you like otome games, so they made an otome-style manga about making otome games!

OTOME MANIA!!, by Tsukigase Yurino.  First published in 2015 and first published in North America in 2017.

PLOT:  

Yuzumi discovered otome games as a teen, so she's excited when she's hired on by the otome game studio Trick*Star.  While she has loads of fangirl enthusiasm, she has no experience at being a producer.  Worse still, her supervisor never lets her forget.  Yuzumi is going to have to learn the hard way when her pitch for an educational otome game gets approved, learning what she can from her unusually handsome coworkers.

STORY:

Otome Mania!! thinks it's being clever with its otome-within-the-otome premise, but it never does anything interesting with that conceit.  Instead it's content to walk the reader through the process of game making while regurgitating the same old personality types.

My biggest issue was with Yuzumi herself.  Until the end of the volume she is never allowed to be even moderately competent at anything.  I understand that she has to be an amateur so that the audience can learn about the process of making a game alongside her, but I honestly have to wonder why someone so inexperienced was hired to be a producer instead of something like a production assistant.  The only thing she seems to have going for her is a germ of a good idea and her enthusiasm for otome games as a whole, the latter of which is also scorned at every turn.

Then there's the matter of her coworkers.  They all happen to be attractive men who all conveniently fit many of the standard personality types seen in otome games with little development beyond those stock roles.  That being said, most of them are fairly pleasant and supportive of Yuzumi and her endeavors.  The only exception is the person who should be helping her the most: her direct supervisor, Tachibana.  I think he's meant to be the tsundere of the group, but instead he comes off as a sour asshole.  He's constantly criticizing Yuzumi for everything she does, but he seldom has any constructive advice to support it and his rare moments of praise are largely backhanded.  Meanwhile, everyone (Yuzumi included) damn near falls over themselves to praise him for every task he takes on directly.  He's a miserable boss, and when combined with Yuzumi's incompetence it makes Otome Mania!! kind of miserable to read.

ART:

Fittingly enough, the character designs take a lot of cues from those seen in actual otome games.  Sadly they took all the wrong cues.  The guys suffer from a serious case of same-face, and those faces don't tend to move much.  Everyone (even those with hats) have the sort of artfully messy hair that you see in a lot of the more mediocre designs for otome games.  In particular, they have these carefully styled strands of hair right in the middle of their faces that I found endlessly distracting and frankly kind of stupid.  At least they don't have goofy, overly fussy wardrobes, as most of the office have fairly casual clothing and Tachibana has a perfectly ordinary suit.

RATING:


Otome Mania!! wants to teach readers about the process of making otome games, but it's not making a good case example when it has a bland, useless heroine, a lackluster cast of cliches, and a visual style totally lacking in originality or romance.

This series is published by Seven Seas.  This series is complete in Japan with 2 volumes available.  Both volumes have been released and are currently in print.