FAKKU Manga Review: Monster Smash by Mizone

A few years ago, the world of anime and manga was hit hard by the boom of monster girls. The idea of sexy two-dimensional girls with horse legs and snake bodies had been around for ages, sure, but mainstream series like Monster Musume brought them into the spotlight in a whole new way. More than ever, people were fantasizing and reading about dating dinosaur girls and having harems of beautiful bird babes at their beck and call. A lot of these series were wholesome works that kept things quaint or ecchi experiences that pushed the boundaries. With Monster Smash, though, Mizone combines the wholesome with the raunchy for a hentai manga anthology full of cute stories about monster girl action.

Monster Smash is a bit lighter than other hentai manga anthologies, clocking in at 198 pages and 9 chapters. Over the course of those 9 chapters, though, Mizone delivers a loosely connected series of stories about beautiful monster girls experiencing a charming mix of love and sex. Every chapter is a standalone story unrelated to the others, but they each carry a similar tone and style that helps connect them in a broader sense.

Each chapter has a cute and romantic vibe to it. If the confessions of true love and infatuation in some chapters don’t make you smile, the goofy interactions and fun dialogue in others certainly will. There isn’t a huge variety of fetishes or sexual scenarios on display in this book, but the vanilla interactions are still wildly unique thanks to the fact that they involve various yokai and monster girls. Headless dullahans and translucent alien girls add a huge amount of variety to the otherwise ordinary scenarios of the book.

In the first chapter, a group of men get lost in the countryside and happen upon a beautiful traditional Japanese inn. They decide to stay for the night and cut loose with some drinks in the open bath. Things get a little wild, though, when they find out that the inn is run by three beautiful yokai women who want to get wet and wild with their human customers. It’s a simple and sexy story that helps set the scene for what the rest of the collection has to offer. This chapter also opens with a brief, four-page full-color intro that is definitely appreciated, if not a little basic. The color palettes of the characters are unique and vibrant, but the shading and lighting work is simplistic, and the backgrounds are practically nonexistent. These are the only full-color elements in the book besides the cover illustrations, but thankfully, Mizone’s art is much stronger when it’s rendered in black and white.

Mizone has incredibly charming art that I couldn’t get enough of. Part of that charm comes from how natural and grounded their art-style is. Scenes in Monster Smash without sex look like they’re straight out of a regularly published manga, with expressive linework, simple shadows and adorable faces reminiscent of a shoujo manga. There’s a healthy mix of sexy women and innocent girls in the book, but they’re all rendered in a soft and delicate style that I couldn’t get enough of. The men in the book also sport a variety of designs and personalities, and just as much care is put into how they’re drawn in each chapter.

The second story is all about a heavy-set man living on his own who ends up befriending an akaname. These are “filth licker” yokai who love to lick up anything dirty and smelly, and his constant sweaty nature ended up tempting this beautiful akaname girl to stay with him permanently. Despite the somewhat gross premise of licking up sweat and filth, none of the art for this chapter leans into it in that way at all. It’s just a dark-skinned demon girl with a super-long tongue licking her boy-toy all over, and it’s one of the hottest chapters in the entire book. Like many of the other stories, it has a sweet and heart-warming ending that pairs with the sexiness of the scenario perfectly.

The third story in Monster Smash is about Satou Harumi, a beautiful and elegant office lady… who also happens to be a centaur. She lives in an age and place where humans and monsters have the same rights and work alongside each other in society. Despite that, though, Satou constantly runs into bad luck with boyfriends and dates who don’t find her horse-half attractive at all. When she shares her recent break-up story with her male co-worker over drinks, he decides to show her just how attractive she is to him. The dynamic between Satou and her junior, Watabe, is really fun. While she’s meek and shy about them hooking up, he’s blunt and direct in a way that adds some unique humor to the story.

As I made my way through Monster Smash, I found that the bodies and proportions of Mizones’ characters can be a little similar. Despite how sharp and cute their artwork is, every girl tends to have the same slender frame, but with varying sizes of cleavage. Thankfully, those repetitive features are kept fresh by the fact that each of those girls is a different and wildly unique monster girl. The fact that one chapter will be about a centaur girl and the next will be about an elf helps keep the designs of the cast varied and unique.

Further into the book is a hilarious called “I’m An Oni, But Still A Girl!”, and it’s one of my favorites. In this chapter, a laid back older dude named Kacchan is smoking a cigarette on his way from the corner store when he runs into a tiny oni girl named Yuki. She tells him off for smoking, but when he promises to give her chips if she doesn’t rat him out, she ends up thinking he’s the best person in the world and vows to be his girlfriend when she grows up. He laughs and accepts jokingly, thinking that won’t happen for at least a decade. However, since oni have wildly different growth rates than humans, she ends up becoming a tall and fully-developed woman in barely two years. The sudden shift in their dynamic, and Kacchan’s wild reactions to the way Yuki comes onto him were some of the funniest moments in the entire book.

Monster Smash is a wonderful book that kept me smiling from beginning to end. While the premise of a manga anthology all about horny monster girls sounds like it would be a pretty deviant affair, every story in this book shares a common theme of fun romance and silly vanilla interactions that kept me well entertained. The small number of color pages and a few typos in the translation bring the package down a bit, but it’s still a wonderful book that’s well worth picking up.

Monster Smash by Mizoneis available at our shop here, along with many other great hentai manga series.