Tales of the Unusual seemed to me like a series I would really enjoy seeing as I really love horror series and I think that episodic horror leaves authors a lot of room to really do as much as possible with their work as they can with little to no limitations beyond their own imagination.
This series started off somewhat promising with a few hits and misses for me personally. It strayed a little too far into campy comedic scifi territory with many of the stories and while I understand some people like that I didnt.
It seems like the author ran out of ideas very early on and was desperate to find something that stuck. He was just throwing whatever ideas were possible at a wall and it really shows. I think a lot of the stories themselves fall very flat and they are kind of boring.
Theres one story The Beauty Water that really picked up steam with a lot of readers worldwide and you can tell once the author saw that he really sought to replicate that story in any way possible. It was a boring shallow story about What if you could be pretty with no effort. Its a bland uninteresting premise.
For whatever reason though it picked up it has an adaption now and nearly the entire series just turns into What if humans had this really shallow product all of these premises not really doing much differently than before. Its insanely repetitive.
I think this series was extremely boring you can read about halfway through and you would pretty much have read the entire series. In fact near the end of the series there is even a part 2 of Beauty Water. I skipped it I didnt care and thought it was lazy. I can only imagine how lackluster it was.
Besides the very circular nature of storytelling the art itself is very very mundane and average. With little to no differentiation between a lot of characters just the art itself is boring to look at as well.
The author tried to circumvent this by having recurring characters and making everything interconnected. So that it seems intentional but to me it seems lazy and like the author didnt care enough to try to make new characters stand out. That or he simply couldnt.
The reliance on old stories to push to new ones the inability to make up new characters and just lazily picking out ones that were popular to reuse is to me a sign of laziness and ineptitude.
I dont recommend this manhwa for any binge readers. It gets old and stale extremely fast. Even if you like it its not good enough to binge. Its far too repetitive. It needs to be broken up and viewed in brief spurts over a period.
I think you should only read this if you have nothing else to read even if youre an avid horror fan or a rare lover of episodic storytelling structures.
48
/100