Is A Hidden Side to My Crush Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga (seinen), 222 chapters
Run	2020–2025 · completed
Community score	AniList 6.9
Content	Ecchi/fanservice content

Overview

Tomoya is a college freshman with one clear goal: get a girlfriend before he graduates without one. He's close with Waka Sakuraba, a popular, charming girl in his club, but can't work up the nerve to make a move. Then he accidentally sees a side of Waka nobody else does — calculating, self-aware, and far more deliberate about her charm than her sweet public image lets on. That discovery doesn't scare him off. It pulls him further in, and drags him into a much messier, more manipulative relationship than the shy-crush story he thought he was signing up for.

What it does well

The best decision this manga makes is Waka herself. Rom-com love interests are so often written as simply nice, or simply mysterious, that a female lead who's openly, knowingly playing an angle stands out. Watching Tomoya realize just how deliberate Waka's 'accidental' charm actually is gives their dynamic a genuine edge that a more straightforward will-they-won't-they wouldn't have.

Setting the story in college instead of high school is a small choice that pays off more than you'd expect — it lets both leads make messier, more consequential decisions than the genre's usual teenage cast is allowed to, and it removes some of the more tired classroom-romance tropes. The full-color art carries a lot of the character work, particularly the visual gap between Waka's practiced public smile and the sharper expressions she lets slip in private.

Most importantly, the manga knows exactly what it is. It doesn't dress up its love triangle and manipulation as prestige drama — it's openly a soapy, entertaining rom-com, and it leans into that with enough confidence that the melodrama goes down easy instead of feeling like a cheat.

Where it falls short

Tomoya's passivity is the main drag on the story. He spends long stretches reacting to what's happening around him rather than making decisions of his own, and that can make entire arcs feel like they're being done to him rather than driven by him. The love-triangle plotting also runs through fairly standard rom-com machinery — jealousy, timed misunderstandings, will-they-won't-they stalls — without doing much to reinvent those beats along the way.

And fanservice is a constant, not an occasional flourish; if that's not your thing, it'll grate well before the plot has a chance to win you over.

Verdict

This is a solidly entertaining, unapologetically trashy college rom-com carried by a love interest with more edge than the genre usually offers. It won't surprise you with where the plot goes, and its passive male lead holds it back from being more than comfort reading, but it's honest about what kind of story it's telling and executes that story well enough to be worth a read if the premise appeals to you.