Customer Reviews

Gakuen Heaven-Nakajima

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved the Anime! I adore the Manga! Its very cute and very mysterious. A mystery surrounds Keita and his childhood. I'm a mystery junky, so any story with mystery and romance is addiction to me.

Gakuen Heaven is probably one of the most popular light Boys Love stories out there. Based on the PC game by spray, it is more or less your typical High School Cinderello story line featuring Keita as the ordinary boy brought into the elite world of Bell Liberty school full of amazingly talented & handsome princes. The mangas from Higuri You & Spray will feature different pairing w/ Keita (our protagonist).

I actually like Keita x Nakajima pairing. Nakajima's worldliness & sometimes wicked character gives a delicious contrast against Keita's sweet & innocent demenour. However, despite Nakajima's sometimes brusque & obnoxious manner, he loves & is very protective of Keita in his own way. He just has his own way of 'teaching' Keita not to be so blindly trustful of a scheming antagonist.

The story line is very typical but the art is gorgeous! And this volume contains more hot bedroom scenes than those typical dosage found in the other Gakuen Heaven volumes. The big drawback is Blu's publishing. Due to their effort to boost margin - they up the price to $15.95 but cut the quality of the book itself - the papers used are brownish, super thin & almost translucent like onion skin & of course, as usual - none of the SFX is translated. I was so miffed when I received this book I did swear off buying any Blu manga for a while until I heard that they have upgraded their quality recently. I hope should they get a chance to do 2nd or 3rd reprint of this manga, they would do a much better job of it.

After reading several of the reviews I wasn't sure I would like this take on the Gakuen Heaven. I'm a huge fan of the anime but the "alternate universe" version of the story actually was refreshing. This book is much steamier than the anime but I enjoyed it and it's a great compliment to my Gakuen Heaven collection.

Absolutely awful! Pairing Nakajima with Keita didn't seem like a good idea to begin with, but after reading this book, I am appalled that the author would allow her beloved Keita to become such a pathetic character. With an A-hole like Nakajima as a partner, Keita has been reduced to a spineless, whining, and insecure-sorry excuse for a guy who doesn't have a shred of confidence in himself. He lets Nakajima mentally torment him, and is constantly blaming himself for being the cause of his cruel partner's sadistic behavior.

The book has a second story at the end, which reflects a little on Nakajima's past. But instead of justifying or at least explaining his inexcusable behavior towards Keita, that story only goes to show that Nakajima is a real jerk. He doesn't care about others unless they are worthy enough to impress him.

Nakajima hasn't changed from the previous manga or the anime (he's just as rotten). But what happened to Keita? I was always rooting for him to find his place amongst the other characters. If I had to base the character of Keita on just this book, I would be disgusted at his feeble behavior. My advice is to skip this one or at least get it on sale. I'm sure that there are a ton of GH fans out there that will be as shocked as I was at the road they've allowed poor Keita to take.