Doubt 1

Edgy

I read this series fan-translated back in the day, and as a teenager who was very involved in online games of Mafia at the time (which is the same basic idea as the Rabbit Doubt game the characters in this manga are re-enacting), I thought it was conceptually cool but not mind-blowing. Returning to it as an adult, I've downgraded it to an edgy mess that I probably shouldn't have picked up again, but I'm at least happy to continue through the series in Japanese as a low-brain-power study break.

The difficulty did not feel very hard considering the dark subject matter and conspiracy elements, and the text density is quite low, so it's a fast read. There is full furigana, and outside of the edgy vocab about murder and drugs and such, the language didn't strike me as very advanced or uncommon. One character speaks a bit roughly, but otherwise there are no dialects or idiosyncratic speech patterns that make parsing the dialogue challenging. From a learning standpoint, I liked reading it just for the sense of accomplishment I got from being able to blaze through it with not much effort.

The killer is the pacing. There were several times characters completely changed their reactions to each other or their understanding of the situation, and I would need to flip back a couple pages and re-read just to make sure I wasn't missing something that would have made the development less jarring. Otherwise, there isn't much about the book that I outright disliked, but it just felt rushed in a way that made it hard to appreciate the mystery, understand the characters, or maintain suspension of disbelief, so I didn't feel much emotional investment in what was happening.

Edit for full series review: The first volume is a good representation of the rest of the series, with no real improvement in (or degradation of) the terrible pacing and eye-rolling edginess going forward. The difficulty gets continuously easier from the already-breezy volume 1 benchmark as the story progresses, because there are fewer and fewer characters to talk to each other and the depth of the dialogue peters away as the tension increases. The last volume reverses this pattern and has probably a higher concentration and complexity of dialogue than all of the previous books combined, as it's mostly just exposition about how and why everything happened; it might feel a couple levels higher than the first 3 books for that reason, but the first 3 books should arm you with enough vocabulary and context to finish it comfortably anyway.

Overall, I did not enjoy the story much and wouldn't really recommend reading the series for entertainment alone. However, I did consistently look forward to my sessions reading it as a learner. This manga is like study junk food -- the dark/edgy content feels like it should be much more difficult than it is, so it takes very little effort for the accomplishment of destroying a 'mature' 800-some page series in Japanese.

I remember reading this as a child and liking it, so I thought it would be fun to read it again now in Japanese. It wasn't as exciting now as it was 10 years ago, but still a fun and quick read.

The version I read on BookWalker had full furigana, so it was very easy to read and check even the kanji I did not immediately recognize. The language is very simple and there is very little unique vocabulary, so it is easy to get accustomed to the expressions and vocabulary throughout the 4 volumes.