Quick Answer
Yes, especially if you want a harem comedy that treats its heroines like people instead of prizes. The best individual arcs are small, well-told love stories, even though the format repeats a lot and the ending splits opinion.
Quick Verdict
“The capture arcs are sincere little romances hiding inside a harem comedy, and the joke never really gets old — it's the finale that lets the concept down.”
Best for: Readers who like harem comedies with real emotional stakes and don't mind a familiar arc structure repeating for dozens of chapters.
Not for: Readers who want a tight, fast-moving plot with a small cast and a romance played completely straight from page one.
| Quick facts | |
|---|---|
| Format | Manga (shōnen), 10 chapters, 2 volumes |
| Run | 2009–2010 · completed |
| Community score | AniList 7.0 |
| Content | Fan service, suggestive humor |
Keima Katsuragi is a legend in the world of dating sims — online, he's "the God of Conquest," a player who can romance any girl in any game without breaking a sweat. In the real world, he's a shut-in who thinks actual women are a waste of time. That contradiction is the whole engine of the story: a demon named Elsie shows up needing help catching spirits that hide inside human hosts by making them fall in love, and Keima — the best in the business at making fictional girls fall for him — gets forced into doing it for real, one classmate at a time.
Tamiki Wakaki structures most of the series as a string of "capture arcs," each one built around a different girl, a different emotional hook, and a ticking clock. It sounds like a harem gimmick, and it partly is, but the series gets a surprising amount of mileage out of taking each girl's problem seriously even while Keima treats the whole thing like a walkthrough.
The capture arcs are the reason people stick with this series. Each one plays like a self-contained short story — a girl with a specific, believable hang-up gets pulled into Keima's orbit, and the manga takes the time to make her feel like a person before the "conquest" clicks into place. Because Keima treats every capture as a puzzle to solve rather than a girl to win over, the arcs sidestep a lot of the ickiness harem manga usually can't shake, and a handful of them — the ones people still bring up years later — hit genuinely hard.
Keima himself carries the comedy. His entire inner monologue runs on dating-sim logic — flags, routes, save points, genre conventions as metaphors for real social dynamics — and Wakaki commits to the bit hard enough that it stays funny well past the point a lesser comedy would run out of jokes. Elsie gives him someone to bounce off of, and the wider demon-world cast keeps escalating the stakes without the story ever losing its sense of humor about itself.
The art keeps pace, too. Wakaki draws a wide, distinct cast of heroines who all read as individuals at a glance, which matters a lot in a story that cycles through this many love interests without most of them blurring together.
The capture structure is also the series' biggest risk: new girl, new problem, new resolution, repeat. Spread the arcs out and each one feels fresh. Marathon a big chunk in one sitting and the shape starts to show through — you can often guess the emotional beat coming two chapters out.
Early volumes lean harder on fan service and slapstick than the story strictly needs, and if you're hoping for the romance to be played completely straight rather than as a game mechanic, that framing device will grate rather than charm. The manga's endgame also shifts gears in ways that split the fanbase hard when it was running — without spoiling anything, expect the finale to feel like a different show than the one you started.
This is a harem comedy that actually bothers to write its heroines like people, which is rarer than it should be, and the best individual arcs hold up on their own even outside the larger series. Go in ready for a repeating structure and a divisive ending, and it's an easy recommendation; go in expecting a straight romance instead of a capture-of-the-week format, and it won't land the way you want.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Another long-running harem rom-com built around a rotating cast of love interests, played with a lighter comic touch.
A similar awkward-otaku-meets-real-women setup, though it leans into cringe comedy rather than heartfelt arcs.
Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches
A different hook (body-swapping kisses instead of demon hunting) but the same trick of cycling through a large, distinct cast.
Yes. It ran in Weekly Shōnen Sunday from 2008 to 2014 and is fully complete.
No. Keima explains his own logic clearly enough that the game references are flavor, not a requirement.
Not currently. Shogakukan properties in English typically go through Viz, but Viz hasn't picked this one up, so there's no legal English edition yet — worth re-checking down the line in case that changes.
