Is Nisekoi Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga, 240 chapters, 25 volumes
Run	2011–2016 · completed
Community score	AniList 7.5 · MangaUpdates 7.4
Where to read	VIZ — official

Overview

Raku Ichijo's life gets a lot more complicated the day he takes a knee to the head from Chitoge Kirisaki, the new transfer student and, as it turns out, the daughter of his yakuza father's rival gang leader. To keep an uneasy peace between the two gangs, Raku and Chitoge are forced into a fake relationship, pretending to date in public while privately unable to stand each other. Complicating things further, Raku is still holding onto a promise he made to an actual childhood sweetheart years ago, sealed with a locket he can't open and a name he can't remember.

What it does well

The fake-dating premise is a well-worn setup, but Komi Naoshi builds a genuinely large, well-defined cast of girls around it, and rather than treating them as interchangeable options, gives each one a distinct hook, personality, and real claim on Raku's attention. That keeps the "who does he actually end up with" mystery honestly compelling instead of a foregone conclusion. Raku and Chitoge's bickering-into-something-real dynamic carries real chemistry, their fake relationship slowly growing more complicated as actual feelings sneak in underneath the performance. The comedy is reliably sharp, mining real laughs out of misunderstandings without leaning entirely on repetition, and the series backs up its jokes with a genuinely long, satisfying 25-volume run that gives its central mystery real room to build.

Where it falls short

This is still, at its core, a harem rom-com, and the structure of one guy with several genuinely interested girls around him is exactly what it says on the tin. If that setup doesn't appeal to you regardless of how well the cast is written, the character work here won't change your mind. The childhood-promise mystery that drives a lot of the plot gets stretched out over a very long run, and some readers found the pacing around it sagging in the middle volumes before picking back up toward the end. And like a lot of long-running harem rom-coms, the eventual resolution proved divisive: years of build-up toward a single answer was always going to leave part of the fanbase unsatisfied no matter which way it went.

Verdict

If a well-executed harem rom-com with a genuinely large, distinct cast and a long-running childhood-promise mystery sounds appealing, this delivers on a beloved, complete 25-volume run. Just know the resolution split its own fanbase, so temper expectations about a universally satisfying answer.