Is Last Game Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Naoto Yanagi has never lost at anything — not academics, not sports, not popularity — until Mikoto Kujō transfers into his class and beats him at every turn without even trying. Wounded pride turns into a years-long, one-sided rivalry that follows the two of them from elementary school through high school and into college, where Naoto finally proposes a "last game" to settle things between them once and for all. Written and illustrated by Shinobu Amano, the series ran in Hakusensha's LaLa from 2011 to 2016 and is licensed in English by Seven Seas Entertainment.

What it does well

What sets this apart from a typical shoujo slow burn is how unflattering Naoto's original motivation is allowed to be. He isn't secretly interested in Mikoto from the start — he genuinely wants to beat her and hurt her pride the way his was hurt, and the manga lets that pettiness sit uncomfortably for a while before it starts curdling into real feelings. That gives the eventual romance more weight, because it's built on watching a flawed character actually change rather than revealing hidden good intentions he had all along.

Mikoto herself is the other reason this works. She's blunt, practical, and almost entirely unbothered by Naoto's schemes, which denies him the easy emotional victories he's used to and forces the story to find funnier, more honest ways for him to get under her skin. She's never framed as a prize waiting to be won — she has her own interior life and her own confusion about her feelings, which keeps the power dynamic between them from tipping too far in his favor.

Stretching the story from childhood through college also gives it room that a single-arc high school romance wouldn't have. Both leads visibly grow up, and the shift in their dynamic once they're adults navigating the same rivalry with more maturity is one of the stronger later stretches of the series.

Where it falls short

The biggest hurdle is Naoto himself in the early volumes — he's written to be genuinely manipulative and arrogant, and readers who need an immediately likable lead may struggle to get past that stretch before the story starts humanizing him. The core setup, a boy trying to make a girl fall for him purely out of spite, is also a hard sell even once it's recontextualized as a real slow burn; it asks for some patience and trust that the reframing is coming.

The supporting cast's own romantic subplots, while sometimes charming, do slow the pacing in the middle volumes without adding much momentum to the central relationship, and a reader mainly here for Naoto and Mikoto may find those detours drag.

Verdict

This is a rivals-to-lovers romance that earns its slow burn by starting its lead in a genuinely unflattering place and making him work for the reader's sympathy, with Mikoto's stubborn indifference doing a lot of the heavy lifting to keep it funny along the way. It asks for patience early on, but the payoff across school and college makes it one of the sturdier long-form shoujo romances out there.