Genre Action Comedy
Age Rating For Older Teen
Price $9.99

Valentine's Day is coming--a time for boys and girls to share their heartfelt sentiments with one another and to revel in the glories of young love. Ayumu, a former classmate of Hayate, has kept a flame burning for the adorably overworked butler for some time. Is her chance for true happiness with a horrendously debt-ridden domestic finally at hand? Later, Nagi applies for her school's manga award but quickly learns that if her work is to be tempered with worldly experience, she'll need to get her upper-class hands dirty--both literally and figuratively.

Hayate Combat Butler seems easy enough to get into mainly because the chapters tend to be episodic and so you end up with several self-contained stories in each volume. Being unfamiliar with the series, my only complaint is that there was no introduction of the cast so I was a bit confused with the relationships of the various characters. This manga seems to contain a lot of elements, everything from the romance/love triangles, slapstick action, meta-fiction, and pop culture reference (although Viz censors itself by placing a strategically-placed 0 whenever a non-Viz title is mentioned).

On one hand, Hayate Combat Butler features some of the tropes of anime/manga, such as seeing a possible love interest naked. On the other hand, there are genuine funny moments that surprise me, such as Hayate hesitating to use his special move because it'll cause skirts to get blown away and that'll embarrass the girl next to him. The strength of this title in my opinion is its over-the-top comedy and the ludicrous situations its characters end up with. Because of its episodic nature, it's similarly easy for anyone to get on board with this title.

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