Square Enix Launches Manga UP App, Featuring Censored Art Of Dress Up Darling And More

by W

in All, Anime, News

Reading Time: 2 mins read

Square Enix has launched the Manga UP App globally, though fans aren’t too happy that the platform features censored art of their own manga.

On top of that, the app’s own platform has bizarre decisions made regarding its monetization plan, rather than sticking to a buy-by-the-issue or subscription-based model.

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One of the Manga UP App’s big draws is its selection of isekai titles, with the other being it hosting english translations of the My Dress-Up Darling manga.

Considering both of these rely quite a bit on fanservice, you can imagine the distress when fans installed the app, only to discover that Manga UP has censored fanservicey elements.

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Characters with exposed cleavage suddenly find themselves plagued by a swarm of black boxes, as is the same with any character daring to expose a bit of hip, or in more extreme cases, the lewdest pants of all: jeans.

This appears to be far from the end of complaints about the app, however- the game uses a bizarre microtransaction system for reading manga, with free UP points that replenish every day, as well as additional Coins and XP that can be bought from the store.

Worse still, individual chapters are split up into multiple parts, making you burn through your free reads as you try to finish reading your manga of choice.

Manga UP Square Enix — If you need a three-point chart for reading manga with two appendices, maybe you’re overcomplicating things

UPDATE: The Manga Up! Twitter account has responded to criticisms about censorship, though made no mention of the other problems.

Regarding the Censorship on the MANGA UP! App pic.twitter.com/npsmrbiQhw

— Manga UP! Global (@MangaUpGlobal) July 27, 2022

On top of that, you don’t even unlock the chapters permanently, since users report the manga will disappear after 3 days, prompting you to repurchase it if you want a re-read.

Over on Twitter, some fans are bemoaning what should have been a simple tool to read their favorite manga:

“This is the most painfully confusing app I’ve tried for manga omg. They have 3 different “currencies” that they don’t explain anywhere and they split chapters in to 2 or 3 parts and charge per part“, writes Twitter user Yazy.

“It shouldn’t be this complicated to read a manga chapter, and your app shouldn’t be splitting up chapters into smaller chapters to sell to make maximum profit. Why do Japanese companies continue to try and push this stupid model on manga websites? Do not want”, writes another user, Aila

Monetization in comics and manga is a tricky field to navigate, especially for English readers since official volumes will often release much later than fan-translated versions.

While the manga industry has been trying to find a way that’s both convenient for readers and fair to artists involved, “censoring ecchi manga while having a bizarre monetization scheme” is probably gonna find itself more of a miss.