Yandere Kanojo

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The first important distinction to mention about the title is that Yandere, in this instance, is formed from Yankee + Dere. The female protagonist is a delinquent, not a yandere character. Another review already mentions this but it's good to provide for a potential reader asap

This is a good manga, not amazing, not bad, just cruising, which is quite a feat to do because the art in this is... bad. It looks like someone drew anime in microsoft paint, there's no two ways about it, it's bad.

The quality is also forgivable due to these reasons:
The manga is a half and half mix of ... 4 panel yonkoma gag manga and regular page layouts. Because the the style is secondary in the yonkoma format, most of the space is filled with the characters and speech so there's no real need for fancy backgrounds and the art becomes somewhat less jarring
Also because of the yonkoma elements, most pages are stocked with dialogue, providing more bang for your buck per page

Outside of that, this is a pretty standard romcom, there's no deeper development, I would've personally liked just a bit more content on the romance side, the comedy isn't that good to carry this into a higher ranking position by itself even if makes you chuckle from time to time.

I feel like this manga is very underrated souly for the character development later in the story. its first half if fun and light hearted, very normal and cliché, but acts as a baseboard for the latter half. Usually when a romance author tries to add in a deeper story element it falls flat on its face because they generally don't know how to write characters beyond romcom. but here it feels so expertly done. As it elaborates on familial matters, taking a deeper look into the families of the main character, but also having deeper plot points on multiple side characters. it doesn't feel ... like it was shoehorned into the story, it feels natural, like there was a progression to this point. and the execution is so good its hard not to like it. It even has one of my favorite scenes ever when (Spoilers) Later in the story, the MC finally meets his dad who the story was building up to, and he just acts like a normal guy, and they have a perfectly normal conversation. But at the end, as he's about to leave, he suckerpunches his dad and slams the door, never speaking to him again. At this point in the story too, we see that Reina, instead of solving his problems (Which is usually how these stories go), she acts more as a support for him. As her presence alone is enough to give him the strength to actually face these things.

Overall, very underrated in the Romcom genre, 8/10

tl;dr: Come for the gags, stay for the interesting plot supported by strong character/relationship development. 

Firstly, I should note that though its called Yandere Kanojo, it doesn’t mean traditional yandere (yanguire-dere), but rather yankee-dere. There’s no actual yandere in this series.

Now with that out of the way, I suppose I should start off by saying this series completely surprised me by how much it grew. It starts off as a simple 4koma gag manga with flat characters that aren’t much more than simple tropes and small stories that don’t seem to have much purpose beyond having a punchline after every 4 panels.

However, as it goes on those repeated ... jokes start adding up, small details that are slowly inserted with the jokes start adding up to flesh out characters pretty well, and the characters start feeling more and more developed as not just characters that are amusing, but characters that are easy to sympathize with and get invested in. It isn’t clear to me exactly when things changed, or rather maybe there wasn’t really any single point where things changed, but ultimately the stories started getting really well developed. It takes the characters that had been developed through the gags, and starts telling really good stories with them, ones that involve complex relationships complete with flashbacks, drama, twists, etc. that all contribute to quite a lot of character and relationship development.

And the thing is, it does that for pretty much everyone, not just the main couple. Characters get introduced and feel incredibly flat and like they’ll never be anything more than that, but they too get well developed back stories and good character development. While this is happening, it often drops the 4koma format, but it also keeps it quite a bit, even for the more serious portions. The end result of that is that it ends up moving quite fast. And that combined with the fact that it keeps the solid humor it's had from the beginning with running gags that built up over the course of the 17 volumes, and the fact that it deals with so many characters, gives the series really really good pacing.

This is a series that truly vastly improves as it goes on, eventually building up to an ending that while not epic, wraps up quite a bit more than I ever expected such a series would ever need to wrap up and wraps it up really well, and ultimately left me very satisfied with the series. If there’s one complaint I have with the manga though, it’s the art, in that it starts off not very good and ends barely decent. Still, this isn’t a hindrance to the story it's trying to tell so it's not too much of a problem. The art actually looks pretty good occasionally during covers and such so I’d assume this was an issue of having to get through so many panels per chapter, which was a strength of the manga so I’d say it was worth it.