The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

We Got Engaged!?

What's It About? 

Rin and Kai are childhood friends, but they got engaged one day. How will they react? Read more about them and other couples in this cute rom-com!

We Got Engaged!? And Other Short Stories has a story and art by sonno, with English translation by Nyoomu. This volume was retouched and lettered by Rene York. The first volume was released by Irodori Comics.

Christopher Farris

Rating:
There's something to be said for brutal efficiency. What you're getting in We Got Engaged is an anthology series that packs multiple micro plots into the same amount of page space other manga use for a single chapter. If you're looking for romantic comedies you can read through while waiting for a traffic light to change, author Sonno and the doujinshi specialists at Irodori Aqua have you covered on this one.

There's really not much to talk about this one without composing a review that would take more time to read than the release itself. Some entries like the title-opening story are the kind of basic romantic declaration platitudes that make me annoyed I already burned my Mr. Boop comparison earlier in my review of My Wife Is an Oni. For others, you've got stuff like a prospective couple winding up as step-siblings, which could have sustained a full-length story. The most unique conceit is probably "The Ladies' Man & Miss No-Nonsense", which also delivered the one big laugh I got out of this volume. Sonno's art is as simply-deployed as you would expect from something this minimal. They do definitely have a good sense for panel-based comic timing, and the last story in this volume gets a bit more ambitious in terms of layouts and actually having some backgrounds. Plus it features a cool gyaru as the love interest, so top marks all around on that one. Otherwise, this feels like one that might have been better served by waiting to gather up a full-length volume's worth of content to collect together, as opposed to the light sampler platter which is all we get here.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:
A short doujinshi published in English by Irodori, We Got Engaged is short on page count but decently sized on cuteness. Of the four stories collected here, the final one, “Confess Your Love to Me!” is the strongest, largely because it has the most plot. The story revolves around the boy being something of a serial confessor who has somehow never managed to confess to the one girl who likes him, and the entire thing is really very sweet as she listens to his woes and waits with a building lack of patience for him to get a clue.

This is more or less the format for all four tales – a boy and a girl have a conversation about love and struggle to reach a conclusion that makes everyone happy. In the third piece, that's a hard sell, because the girl in question isn't overly impressed with a boy she sees as a serial philanderer. In the second, the couple in question is in that unique manga situation where their parents have gotten married without letting their children know about it, and now they have to figure out what to do about their mutual crush. The first is about two high schoolers who have gotten engaged, although we're not sure if that's by their choice or their parents. Either way, they have some details of their interaction to work out.

With smooth translation and pleasant but not outstanding art, We Got Engaged is basically a bite-sized read. It's nice and doesn't aspire to be more, and while it would be interesting to spend more time with each couple, this still manages to tell stories that feel complete enough, as if we're overhearing their conversations while we're passing by.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:
The many individual stories in We Got Engaged! are simple enough to understand from their titles, and witty enough in their execution to be amusing. The art is very simplistic for each story, with few of the sequences having any backgrounds to speak of, but the character design is very cute and appealing. Full credit to Sonno for being able to make such a refreshing-looking cast, given that each pairing only really has a title and maybe two panels to establish their quirks. We Got Engaged! is rather on the short side, but it's good for a chuckle. Mildly recommended.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:
We Got Engaged is interesting because it's not really a story as much as it is a collection of individual one-shots. The one shots are incredibly short and just focus on rather orthodox circumstances of two people getting together. Some are cuter than others but the build-up and payoff for all of these one-shots feel like they should be the starting chapters for larger ongoing stories. Instead, it feels like we get a punchline revolving around the circumstance and then quickly move on to the next thing with none of these one-shots really leaving any impact on their own due to the overall lack of real estate. The first one-shot is literally about two people being engaged and one of them being unable to express how in love or happy they are about the engagement. There's no real talk about why they're engaged or even who these characters are, it's just a tsundere, her fiance…and that's it. I'm kind of having a hard time coming up with something to say because there's just so little to talk about here. Nothing here is necessarily bad but I feel like I'm reading the in-between fluff that authors sometimes put in their manga volumes between chapters. It's like these are side stories that are about the extra background characters we occasionally see in a bigger story for the sake of levity. There's something wrong with those things but I don't think I'm gonna buy a book that's just about those types of one-off story beats.