Crunchyroll Manga

Alright. I’ll start off by saying this is a great app. Visually, it makes me feel calmer. A lot of orange, but it makes sense. Back on topic, it has great manga and it’s easy to use. It does not have enough manga. Of the manga it has, it’s great, (not a lot). A few hundred titles that vary in genre, length, etc., etc.. It has “My Happy Marriage”, “One Piece”, “Jujutsu Kaisen”, “My Hero Academia”, “Spy x Family”, and some more big titles, but it’s missing a bunch of them as well. Some manga I think should be added will be listed below: “Demon Slayer”, “Hunter x Hunter”, “Sailor moon”, “Seven Deadly Sins”, “Heaven Official’s Blessing”, “Oshi No Ko”, “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End”, etc. I do understand that all of this will likely be added in the future, and for how recent it is, and the price, it’s pretty good. This was just introduced late last year, so they will probably get more titles, and hopefully update their chapters in coming updates. Please. Additionally, I genuinely appreciate you all putting “Sasaki and Miyano”… AND “Hirano and Kagiura”. Thank you.

I was excited to see a dedicated app for the Crunchyroll manga library, but the content available barely deserves its own app in the first place. The series that are available often don’t seem to have every chapter. It would be so convenient and helpful to have one account for both anime and manga, but this isn’t the way to do it. You have to pay extra to read the manga, meaning if you’re in the fan tier you have to pay $4 more every month for manga access. This would be understandable if the library was more impressive. As it stands now, it’s infinitely better value to just get a subscription to the Shonen Jump app for $4 and have access to way more series that actually include every chapter. It’s sad because Crunchyroll could have something amazing here, and they could incorporate unique features like a chapter:episode list to make it easier to switch between reading a series and watching it. For example, if I’m reading chapter 850 of One Piece and want to watch a fight scene, I could easily look at the conversion and by tapping a button be redirected to the main Crunchyroll app to watch that episode. Except, wait, chapter 850 of One Piece isn’t even here. I hope this app continues to improve and become something useful.

From what I can see, this looks as though it could be really promising. It’s a great idea for it to be an extension of Crunchyroll and allows for ease because you don’t have to subscribe on a whole separate platform! I also like how it auto-signs you in when you initially download and open Crunchyroll Manga straight from a transfer from Crunchyroll. Makes the process easy! However (and I say this knowing this app is incredibly new) the uploads are not to-date. This could be because they are still uploading and scanning them, perhaps getting rights and access figured out— whatever the case, I really hope that my fears are not true and that their update times will NOT coincide with whatever is happening on the anime-timeline. I would love if this could mark “incomplete or ongoing” mangas, and upload the full extent of content each title has to offer, because it is a GOOD idea. Most people who start with anime reach for manga because they want to read up to the most recent chapter of their favorite titles! Having access to those will be crucial for the success of this app. So, while I really love the framework, it just needs work! Some of the quality needs some work too, I would appreciate if the manga page would fill as much of your screen as possible, if feels a bit small, but reading on a tablet or larger device could fix that! I will say I actually love the layout of the app. I believe it should be set up in a way that better advertises titles. Some of the covers are grainy— and the choices could be better. But, overall, there is a good amount of ease to browsing, and just having them set out for you to scroll with a setup similar to the original Crunchyroll app, or even search by genre is a good idea! I can’t wait to see where this goes! Crunchyroll has been nothing but great over the years, so I am for sure staying loyal. 💓