白卓 HAKUTAKU

HAKUTAKU

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
2
RELEASE
February 3, 2025
CHAPTERS
18

DESCRIPTION

Hikuma is a young man who seems to live in his own world. One day, he meets fellow high school oddball Noto and the two of them embark to create a video game that will impress their classmates. When the class finally plays the game that the two of them have put their blood, sweat, and tears into, their whole lives change! Can two high schoolers conquer the game industry in this new adventure from Shonen Jump?!

(Source: MANGA Plus)

CAST

Raika Noto
Daidai Hikuma

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

applestoreclerk
20/100
"To write something interesting, you have to write what you've seen, what you've done, what you've experienced!" —Rohan
Latest of the U19 club (for those uninitiated U19 club refers to a group of manga axed under 19 chapters named after the eponymous https://anilist.co/manga/98326/U19 ), Hakutaku is a manga about game development. As you can guess from its short publication, there was something seriously wrong with it to get axed. Simply put, it didn't have a passion.
And passion is what's most important to these genre of manga in my opinion. Passion about creating that something whether it be game development, calligraphy or even manga itself. Truth be told, the MC does seem to have a huge passion towards game design but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the mangaka's own passion towards creating that something. Tiny details that make the readers feel 'yeah the author knows how to do this stuff'.
In one of my favorite works in that genre, a manga about mangakas named Bakuman has a tiny plot about how one of the side characters start drawing about his hobby on a suggestion by his editor and the manga he creates end up placing consistently in the high rankings, giving competition to the main characters. This seems like a no-brainer advice but for struggling manga artists, I kind of get their situation. You're struggling to get your works published, who knows how many ideas and premises you have gone through. Among the sea of ideas, this one about game development was considered as promising and accepted as a series. Now you have to make it work. So the Hakutaku author recruits an advisor and gets to work. Well, see... there is your problem.
I am not saying having an expert on game development who can act as an advisor is a bad thing, it is in fact a good thing! But this very act in itself, add in with how the manga was axed so quick, it says something about the author's expertise on the situation doesn't it?
Other than that glaring problem, the overall story beats, panelling et cetera seemed competently done, not any worse than your average shonen anyhow. I can see the author making it with their next work. The deuteragonist design was cool. I would've preferred it if the other characters leaned more into this realistic but with unrealistic design quirks rather than having normal boring designs.
Actually let me amend myself. I said the story beats were good but Chapter 1 was horrible. It had this weird bullying story about how the class got impressed with the MC's game at the end. The game was supposedly about the classmates themselves and their routines etc but we're not actually shown enough of that to feel like this game hit their target audience. The way the game was incorprorated into the story was just too clunky maaan.
The ending is also quite bad. Weirdly enough, it ends without any sense of an ending as if there is gonna be next set of chapters. But I give it a pass because it was axed.

TL;DR Rohan was real for this:

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