Yamada and the Seven Witches Review — Body-Swap Chaos for People Who Miss Mid-2010s Romcoms

Who is this for? Anyone who wants a school romcom with an actual plot motor. Yamada and the Seven Witches takes a premise that could coast on gags — a delinquent discovers that a kiss lets him swap bodies with his uptight honor-student classmate — and treats it like a mystery to be solved. There are, the title promises, seven witches hidden in this school, each with a different kiss-triggered power, and the 2015 series spends its 12 episodes actually chasing that question rather than stalling on it.

The body-swap material is where the heart sneaks in. Walking around in someone else's life turns out to be the fastest possible route to empathy, and the show mines real feeling from characters who understand each other because they've literally been each other. Yamada and Shiraishi's prickly partnership grows into something sweeter without the series ever going soft on its comic timing.

The caveat worth stating plainly: with seven witches and a full supporting cast crammed into a single cour, the pacing gets breathless, and several characters who deserve whole arcs get a scene and a half instead. It's a compression problem, not a quality problem — but you'll feel the manga straining against the episode count. Come for the chaos, stay for the unexpectedly earned romance.