Kaguya-sama: Love is War vol. 27

The saga of Kaguya’s freedom wrapped up in the previous volume, and there’s only one volume left to go before the series wraps up entirely with vol. 28.  Though the lack of a central plot to drive the action would seem like a major problem for these final volumes, it’s actually a blessing in disguise.  With all of its drama wrapped up, that means the series is free to go back to the kind of comedic zaniness it excelled at for the majority of its run.  So we’ve got vol. 27 starting off with Chika wanting to do the “Weiner Samurai” game before Kaguya tries to start calling Miyuki “Miyuki-chan” without any knowledge of how traumatic that nickname is for him.  Then there’s the social awkwardness over Kaguay trying to find the right time to say goodbye to Miyuki before he leaves for Stanford and the climactic wrap-up to the Four Ramen Kings arc whose central truth is this:  They all lost the moment they decided to compete against Chika.

It’s not that I didn’t like these past few volumes as Miyuki risked a lot to try and save Kaguya from a fate dictated by her elder brothers.  It’s just that “Kaguya-sama” always found a way to showcase comedy above all, even when things did get serious, and it felt like the series wasn’t doing that as well as it did before.  With all that out of the way, mangaka Aka Akasaka looks determined to send us all out with smiles on our faces as this volume is pure, unrestrained silliness.  The start of a well-deserved victory lap for the series that consistently and hilariously skewered romantic tropes for a lot longer than you’d think its premise would’ve allowed it to.  I’m not expecting vol. 28 to offer up any surprises or last-minute drama, just more quality comedy of the kind this volume showed off in spades.