In your typical fantasy world filled with humans, elves, angels, and all sorts of beings, it’s easy to see how many different species might interact with each other on a day to day basis. But, when it comes to more intimate matters, some folks just want to stick to the familiarities of their own race.
Not for these guys! Stunk, Zel, and their friends are more than willing to experiment and explore what makes each race so unique in the bedroom and tell everyone else about it too!
For those who are curious about why I’m reviewing this title in the first place: we’ve had so many fantasy manga come out lately that I got mixed up and thought that this title went with a completely different story. Since yes, as someone who isn’t terribly interested in boobs, etc, I am not the target audience for this book and not even the shrinkwrap can hide just how raunchy this story will get. I have a NSFW twitter thread with some snippets of what you can expect from Interspecies Reviewers visually, but honestly the back cover alone just about sums it up.
I went into this book with low expectations because of all of this and I was pleasantly surprised that, while supremely raunchy and ultimately not for me, it’s not a mean-spirited story or one without any good points. The fact that all of the prostitutes (“succu-girls”) that Stunk, Zel and their friends visit are willing participants is a nice change from non-raunchy manga series where the leads are put into uncomfortable “romantic” situations (which are also meant to titillate the intended audience on some level) and, while I wouldn’t quite put this series in the “monster girls” sub-genre, it does feature an interesting line-up of non-human races which makes the entire series feel more planned than off-the-cuff on the creators’ parts.
The girls also are rarely the butt of jokes, as the jokes much more often land on the male characters, such as how Stunk the human really likes elves, regardless of their age, and how this horrifies Zel the elf (who would much rather be with a 50-year-old human than a 500-year-old elf and makes a solid case for why). Some of the jokes about the angel character Crimvael, who has gonads for both sexes and tells the rest of the group that they are a boy (it’s unclear if they identify as a guy or if they were saying that more to fit in/not be teased by the rest of the group, they are clearly hiding the fact that they also have female gonads but they don’t seem ashamed of it), feels a bit more meanspirited, but even those jokes often come back around to hit Stunk and Zel instead. There were even a few, completely non-sexual jokes that made me laugh which I never expected going into the story. Also, despite how close it gets, no actual on-page sex ever occurs, although the story truly toes the line with suggestive imagery in more than a couple of places.
Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a ton of substance to this sex-comedy, but it truly has more good points than bad points! I won’t be sticking around for future installments (since again, this is truly outside my range of interests) but I can certainly imagine an audience for it that will.