I bought Yotsuba (which is surprisingly hard to pirate for some reason despite its tremendous popularity). I think this series and Azumanga Daioh are backwards in compositions and time, as in this should've been the first series with 4 or so volumes while Azumanga Daioh goes on for a while, simply because Yotsuba doesn't really have that many interesting characters or subplots. Yotsuba is like 50% Osaka + 50% Tomo but she doesn't have very interesting interaction with everyone else. Although there's no shortage of good ideas it seems like you're just limited when you only have one real character. Even Azumanga Daioh is not just about Osaka and Osaka is a lot more interesting than Yotsuba. Some of the stories feels like it's just an endless repeat about the gullible child. Even Chiyo knows Santa Claus isn't real but it doesn't seem like Yotsuba will ever know that. It just seems like a lot of wasted potential because what you can do with a story from Yotsuba's point of view is a lot less interesting compared to the daily lives of the girls of Azumanga Daioh.
Next a thought on the wave of 'mind game' manga, probably started by Death Note and loosely related to the detective subgenre. Sherlock Holmes was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who can actually do the investigation stuff Sherlock Holmes does. On the other hand if you're trapped in an unescapeable world with alien death rays forced to answer Microsoft interview questions, the average 'mind game' manga writer is not going to be someone you'd count on. In fact those guys would probably die horribly right away just like any other average guy. I feel most of these 'mind game' manga is really like Emperor's New Clothing, where it's a 'only smart people gets it' deal, even though most of them makes no sense. To actually 'solve' the problem here you usually need to have access to information that the reader cannot possibly know. The classic example would be Kindaichi where he knows the DNA test is wrong because the murderer is the identical twin of the wrongedly accused guy that no one knows about (except him). Another good one is in Death Note how N faked out Light by having a FBI guy handcopy every single page of the Death Note in one night (looking at the amount of writing that exists on the DN, that guy's got to be some kind of insane demigod). I mean before the solution came out I saw one guy drew some parody where they just secretly drug up the guy with crazy drugs so he ends up hallucinating the whole time, and since you need a name plus at least some kind of mental identication of the person (otherwise it'd be impossible to resolve identical name people) so if you're halluincating the whole time you'd be incapable of using the DN correctly. As dumb as that is, it'd actually be something doable and might even work, while 'copy every page of DN by hand' is definitely not something anyone can reasonably figure out.
It's not a 'mind game' if solving it requires the reader to know stuff you cannot possibly know ahead of time, and sure some of this stuff you can say certain things are only known by some people but there's also rarely any indication why someone would know this. If you're in a 'mind game' manga with Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy records guy) who knows the answer to every weird question that'd be fine. If tOWS is a setting for a 'mind game' manga I could have say a question like 'come up with 10 wordplays on why Microsoft sucks in 60 seconds or die' and then Zeus show up calmly providing 10 of them in a minute and says he can come up with 30 in 60 seconds if needed, this can be easily explained by having a chapter on Zeus's background as an Internet warrior. I mean it's just insane how all the characters would randomly know stuff that'd be hard to find even with Google on your side for no reason whatsoever and you'd have to know this stuff to figure out what's happening.
Next a thought on the wave of 'mind game' manga, probably started by Death Note and loosely related to the detective subgenre. Sherlock Holmes was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who can actually do the investigation stuff Sherlock Holmes does. On the other hand if you're trapped in an unescapeable world with alien death rays forced to answer Microsoft interview questions, the average 'mind game' manga writer is not going to be someone you'd count on. In fact those guys would probably die horribly right away just like any other average guy. I feel most of these 'mind game' manga is really like Emperor's New Clothing, where it's a 'only smart people gets it' deal, even though most of them makes no sense. To actually 'solve' the problem here you usually need to have access to information that the reader cannot possibly know. The classic example would be Kindaichi where he knows the DNA test is wrong because the murderer is the identical twin of the wrongedly accused guy that no one knows about (except him). Another good one is in Death Note how N faked out Light by having a FBI guy handcopy every single page of the Death Note in one night (looking at the amount of writing that exists on the DN, that guy's got to be some kind of insane demigod). I mean before the solution came out I saw one guy drew some parody where they just secretly drug up the guy with crazy drugs so he ends up hallucinating the whole time, and since you need a name plus at least some kind of mental identication of the person (otherwise it'd be impossible to resolve identical name people) so if you're halluincating the whole time you'd be incapable of using the DN correctly. As dumb as that is, it'd actually be something doable and might even work, while 'copy every page of DN by hand' is definitely not something anyone can reasonably figure out.
It's not a 'mind game' if solving it requires the reader to know stuff you cannot possibly know ahead of time, and sure some of this stuff you can say certain things are only known by some people but there's also rarely any indication why someone would know this. If you're in a 'mind game' manga with Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy records guy) who knows the answer to every weird question that'd be fine. If tOWS is a setting for a 'mind game' manga I could have say a question like 'come up with 10 wordplays on why Microsoft sucks in 60 seconds or die' and then Zeus show up calmly providing 10 of them in a minute and says he can come up with 30 in 60 seconds if needed, this can be easily explained by having a chapter on Zeus's background as an Internet warrior. I mean it's just insane how all the characters would randomly know stuff that'd be hard to find even with Google on your side for no reason whatsoever and you'd have to know this stuff to figure out what's happening.
