This won’t be an issue for 99% of Crunchyroll subscribers, but the lack of manga in Japanese, it’s original language is a huge bummer for me. When Crunchyroll Manga was first announced, I was excited to be able to enjoy my favorite series while polishing my language skills. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. I was further disappointed to find out that an additional paid subscription would be necessary to read manga. Other reviewers have already touched on this, but there seems to be a lack of content when you consider how much a subscription costs. I guess I’ll have to continue loading suitcases full of manga whenever I go back to Japan again.

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.

For one comments were removed and were a beloved aspect of Crunchyroll. They did this because of on incident where comments were unpleasant. Next up is the force fed content. To find old content you must search. Only new content is forced into the front page. Crunchyroll not only sidelines older content but they straight up did not honor funimation digital ownership that came with buying movies and series from them. The more this big company gobbles up the worse it gets. Next up was right stuf which now Crunchyroll just had mid sales and they do not stack with your ultimate or mega fan membership. Who’s even buying stuff when it isn’t on sale? What’s the point if the discounts don’t stack. On top of all of this the voice acting Crunchyroll does for American audiences is terrible, especially for the male actors. Fire these people and get some actual va’s with talent and diverse voices.

I have had Crunchyroll for quite some time now and remember when they first had their original manga app, so I decided to download this app and recently started using it. I have enjoyed it so far and cannot wait to see more manga make it onto it. I have, however, recently had an issue with closing out the app. While reading “Delicious In Dungeon”, every time I close out the app and reopen it, I find myself back at the beginning of Volume 2. I don’t know if it’s a bug or not, but I did not have this issue with Volume 1. If it is a bug, I hope it gets fixed soon. However, if it is not, I think being able to Bookmark the page you are on would greatly help. Other than this issue, I have enjoyed the app so far and I look forward to seeing what becomes of it.