The Kemono Friends franchise was an odd one to capture the attention and love of anime fans across the globe in 2017. Based off of a mobile game that had gone dark only a month before the anime’s premiere, the anime was an all CGI-production that looked rough but people loved the story anyway. I haven’t seen the anime yet so I can’t say if diehard Kemono Friends fans will enjoy this wholly-unconnected manga but I will say that this manga made me a little more leery of checking out the anime.
This is probably unfair for me to say since, as I mentioned, this manga is completely separate from the anime adaptation of Kemono Friends. This manga started running the same month that the mobile game launched and features entirely different characters who live and work in Japari Park. In this story, Japari Park is still a functioning zoo/nature preserve where “friends,” animals who look a lot like high school girls with animal ears and tails tacked on, work together with human zookeepers to live happy, fulfilling lives. The story mostly follows Nana, a new zookeeper who has been tasked with taking care of Serval and Ezo Red Fox, and those two friends as the story lazily makes use of “cute girls doing cute things” conventions. There’s no tension to the story, no plot or character development, and unlike other “cute girls doing cute things” stories which are at least structured around something (like a school club) this feels like an incredible phone-in story.
It’s possible that this manga is aping the mobile game. I never played it but I could see how a game where you went on simple adventures with gijinka girls could be fun. However, it’s simply not fun to passively read about. The manga doesn’t even really make use of all of the fun stories you could do with animal girls; there are a few chapters where Serval and the other friends show off their fitness but otherwise, the chapters have storylines more along the lines of “the girls work in a cafe! The girls go out to eat!” and it gets dull very very quickly.
To top it all off, even the art is dull! The characters all suffer from same-face syndrome and even the animal-themed parts of the girl’s designs started to look really repetitive after a bit. Frankly, I got the impression that artist Fly was pandering to a very specific audience and few things are as annoying in fiction as having to put up with someone else’s pandering.
In a nutshell: this series was dull. It has absolutely no hook to keep me reading after the first few chapters and it’s made me more leery of trying the anime adaptation as well. This is the exact opposite of what you want to achieve with spin-off series, they’re supposed to help promote the franchise, not turn potential customers away!