Shueisha is one of the best known manga publishers in the world. It comes from Japan and its library of titles consists of works such as One Piece, Dragon Ball, My Hero Academy or Boruto. A volume of One Piece costs about seven euros, so completing the collection of 86 volumes (and increasing) would cost about 602 euros. If you multiply that by all the titles of the publisher, the money you could spend reading manga is important. Although you can also do it for free.
Free? Yes, how it sounds. Shueisha has an app called MANGA Plus which offers 30 works (not all complete yet) completely free, legal and official. There is no cheating or cardboard, it is simply financed through ads. Its operation is extremely simple: choose the manga you want, download the chapter, read it and go to the next, and so on. We have tested it and these are our impressions.
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A review of the application
The application has several sections, the first being “Recent”. It shows a grid with latest manga that have recently been added in chronological order (from most recent to oldest). Its purpose is that you can check at a glance what is new and what new titles have been added.
The one on your right is “Featured”, which shows the Weekly Shonen Jump and Shonen Jump titles and some categories like thiller and supernatural. It is not that it is an essential section right now, but as more works and genres are added, it may serve to better filter and find manga more related to our tastes.
On your right we have a search engine that does not allow you to search. Rather than “Search” it should be called “Browser”, since shows all titles that are currently available and, in a separate tab, the most popular ones. This ranking is crowned by My Hero Academy, One Piece, The Promised Neverland, Boruto, and Blue Flag. The fourth section starting from the left is “Favorites”, which, as you can imagine, serves as a personal library to keep the manga you are reading at hand.
The last one is “Settings”. From it you can add a username and a photo, change screen resolution from high to low (useful to download titles in slow connections), modify the reading direction from horizontal to vertical and access the frequently asked questions. As you can see, MANGA Plus is a simple and functional app that does its job.
Free manga yes, thank you
As a user who has left a good fortune in Naruto and One Piece, I have to admit that MANGA Plus works like a charm. When you select a manga, its file appears, in which you can see the author, the update calendar and a summary of the work. Below you have all available chapters sorted from first to last. In Naruto, for example, there are only the first three, while in One Piece there are the first three and the last three.
When you click on any chapter, the application downloads it and allows it to be read from the application. It is something similar to what Marvel offers in its comics app. If in settings you have selected the vertical reading mode (which is the most comfortable to read on a mobile) you will simply have to scroll to turn the page. If you selected landscape mode, remember that the manga reads from right to left.
The text reads very well and the level of detail in the drawings is perfect. Still, if you want to zoom in to see a particular area of the panel, you can pinch-to-zoom. Interestingly, it does not apply to the entire document, but the zoom is applied only to the page on which you have made the gesture.
At the moment, the application does not save the progress, so if you leave a chapter you will have to find the page you were going through manually
There are no advertisements throughout the chapter, so reading is comfortable. Advertising has been placed at the end, just above the button that allows you to download the next chapter to continue reading. It should be noted that at the end of each chapter there is a comments section where you can share your impressions with the rest of the readers, although visit it carefully because you run the risk of eating the odd spoiler.
One point that raises doubts is how easy it would be to get a free copy of all the sagas. The application does not have any anti-screen capture system on iOS, so anyone could take 57 screenshots of the first Naruto volume, convert it to PDF and upload it to the Internet. Possibly it is something that will be fixed in the future, but it does not hurt to review it. In Android it has been implemented.
Manga lovers are in luck
From the publisher they have confirmed that the most popular sagas will be updated simultaneously with Japan, so you won’t have to wait too long to catch up on One Piece. There are currently about 30 works, although they intend to increase the number to 50 in the coming weeks and months.
Yes indeed, each chapter will have a viewing period, and although they do not detail how it works, hopefully it will be a kind of expiration date after which the episode will no longer be available. However, a volume of One Piece or Naruto does not take long to read, a half hour or so, for the duration of the viewing period, it will be enough to read each chapter with peace of mind.
At the moment, the manga that are available are only in English and Japanese. Spanish will arrive between February and March