Unfortunately, the latest in the ‘battle of the brains’ type of Shonen Jump series is not here to stay.

Super Smartphone

(Hiroki Tomisawa & Kentaro Hidano)

May 2022 to October 2022

23 Chapters

What I Liked

• Problem solving – I liked how the search function had limitations and so Kyu had to think flexibly in order to construct search requests that would give him the information he needed
• Super smartphone personalities – the individual personalities per phone were cool and the reveal as to why was also cool.

Where I Think Things Went Wrong

• Kyu was too much of a loner – it’s hard to grow to like a character when all they do is talk into their phone 😅 Kyu gained allies too late into the story
• Zeniichiro as a villain – was too stereotypical and just kinda annoying
• So many characters – but none of them really got much of an appearance. It would have been interesting to see the motivations/approaches of the other users, but instead all we got was the JUSTICE, I-wanna-be-king-of-the-world and petty theft points of view. And because no one else really appeared, there was no way to set up the ‘web of death’ aspect of the story.
• The police were kinda irrelevant – they ended up taking up page time that would have been better spent on other super smartphone users
• Not enough information about Shu – it would have been more impactful if there were more flashbacks or something to demonstrate Kyu’s connection to his brother. And maybe could have provided more hints to the link between Shu and Kyu’s super smartphone.
• Lack of suspense – unlike other ‘battle of the brains’ series like Death Note or The Promised Neverland, Super Smartphone never made you feel nervous about Kyu’s fate, and I think that made the series too dry.

Conclusion

I think the premise was interesting but the implementation fell flat. It moved too slowly for it’s own good. While I personally was content to be patient because I was actually really interested in learning about the super smartphone personalities, obviously the general Shonen Jump readership were not, and fair enough. I hope that there is an epilogue chapter in Shonen Jump +, but if not, I think I liked this series enough to eventually buy the digital tankobon in order to get more of a conclusion.

Categories: Simulpub Review

Tagged as: Super Smartphone WSJ Graveyard

hikaru