Time to delve into another mature title from Seven Seas Entertainment, from their Ghost Ship imprint. This one is about a girl starting a new life at a new school – innocent enough so far, but then she goes and tells her new classmates that she is a succubus. Oops.
The story and art is by Horitomo. This first volume contains chapters one through to four.
Front cover of the first volume of I’m Not a Succubus!, featuring Sakura Yamamura, Hayate Ōzora, Ai Komoro, Chisato Abumi, and Nina Nozuchi
Monster Girls Need Love, Too!
Adjusting to a new school is always rough, but that goes double for Sakura, a shy girl attending a monster girl academy! Her new classmates include a kiss-curious harpy, a sarcastic lamia, a cyclops with an eye for Sakura, and a plain-spoken centaur. Eager to blend in, Sakura declares herself a succubus! But can she keep up the ruse while fending off the touchy hands, claws and scaled coils of her new friends? It’s gonna be a long, hot school year!
What we have here is a monster girl harem. But not just any monster girl harem – a yuri monster girl harem. One that gets it start from a little white lie, and said lie snowballs into something much bigger. Sakura’s lie comes from wanting to fit in with her demi-human classmates, and by the time she actually looks into what succubus actually are… too late.
So what follows is Sakura getting to know her classmates – rather intimately, too. On her first day alone, she has stripped a cyclops of her skirt, got personal with a lamia, and kissed a harpy right on her special place. Well, that’s how the harpy chooses to describe it, but either way, she does get a face full of harpy crotch pretty early on.
In case the “mature title” part from my introduction hasn’t clued you in yet, this is a manga that some might describe as “spicy”. I kind of feel like that term might be a little mild when describing the content, because Horitomo goes all in in when it comes to the characters getting intimate with each other. Sometimes it happens accidentally, other times it is something that very much gets initiated on purpose. Quite a lot of detail tends to be present, even from underneath the girls’ underwear.
This particular volume introduces Sakura, naturally, but also serves as the introduction for three of the monster girls: Hayate the harpy, Ai the cyclops and Nina the lamia. The rest of the class do introduce themselves in the first chapter, but it is with those three girls that Sakura happens to get really intimate with over the course of this first volume. She also happens to discover that the school nurse, Naomi Hishimori, has a secret of her own.
Out of those characters, I find myself liking Hayate a lot. She happens to be Sakura’s first, but she also has this really cheery disposition that I’m a big fan of. Shy cyclops girl Ai reveals quite the surprising side to her (or perhaps not surprising, considering what they say about the quiet ones…), and I’ll admit I wasn’t too fond of Nina at first. Her chapter does go quite some way to changing that, though.
I really did quite enjoy what I read here. Sakura and the monster girls make up an interesting cast of characters, and somehow Sakura manages to settle in to her role as a succubus – you know, despite not actually being one. The clue is in the title.
So yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing how she gets on with the other girls. For now, though, I am firmly team Hayate.
Rory Muses 