Manga UP!
reviews and complaints

Like everyone says, it’s just renting even if you purchase coins.

Confusing at first because there’s UP, XP, and Coins Some chapters can only be ready by using certain ones.

Biggest disappointment is the horrid cash grab of splitting chapters. Makes no sense.

The one good thing is it has some manga that I feel were unlikely to be licensed/translated. However everything else about this app is very off-putting.

Good to have for those series however I wouldn’t spend any money here.

What goes through their minds when making something that is so horrendous like this app? Tons of panels are censored for no reason, chapters are split into 5 or even 8 separate sections that you can’t even buy for free all in one day. Also you can only rent the chapters for 3 days? F that, I could literally find a pirated site that doesn’t censor every page for free in minutes. The cherry on top is that this company literally doesn’t care either and will not stop doing things poorly. If you really want to support the artists, do so through another avenue because I’m 99% sure this company isn’t doing anything to support said artists and only want to micro transaction it’s very few users.
Bad app.

This is the worst manga reader app I have ever seen.

I will start with the most offensive. You don’t purchase anything. You rent the ability to read 1/3rd of a chapter for 3 days. After the 3 days, you have to rent it again. They artificially split every chapter into 3 sub chapters to make you purchase the rental 3 separate times.

They heavily monetize everything, with three separate types of currency.

They will ban you if you screenshot anything.

They also heavily censor everything, even when a manga is rated 17+. Fully clothed people in swimwear are being censored! Got a warning for screenshotting an example of the terrible censorship to show my friend.

This is such a bad app and a blatant cash grab, it’s almost funny. Stay far away from this trash fire.

The censorship is ridiculous in this app, you have black bars over pretty much anything a woman wears that shows more skin than a turleneck sweater. No, even then, it could happen. They’ve put black bars over a woman just standing there in jeans. A woman simply EXISTING is too offensive to be seen without a censor bar.

And you can’t read more than like 5 pages in a row without the app bugging you about running out of free views and requiring money. It will do this several times within a single chapter. It’s incredibly annoying and ruins the flow of the manga. It’s monetized like those predatory games that try to get children to tap away money from their unknowing parents’ cards.

Do not use this. If you want to support these manga, there are plenty of better options.

Look, I get it. They need to make money but this is insanity. They break up chapters into multiple parts then tout you can read up to 8 free chapters per day if you read twice a day. Then you have to pay per chapter which isn’t a chapter really since they’re segmented. I want to support the industry but this is just predatory. On top of that there are 3 currencies. It makes it super confusing. Oh and when you unlock a ‘chapter’ it’s only for a set period. You can’t go back after a couple days and re-read it. You’d have to pay again to unlock it.

On top of that the censorship is purely insane. They put massive black boxes of everything and anything. I’ve seen a black sensor box over a knee. Like what?

Viz figured out a solid model. Webtoons has a different but still great model. Just mimic one of those and this could be a decent app

The app is structured terribly with the whole coin/xp/up system. If such a system works for the Japanese reader (I feel bad for them), it doesn’t work for a global audience. The FAQ page does mention a subscription style membership, but it is nowhere to be seen in the app.

To make matters worse, every risqué series is censored. Why have an app age rating of 17+ if you’re going to censor things anyways? The company’s response to their censorship is laughable and they basically told us to purchase their manga on other platforms

That could be a better option seeing as the Manga Up’s reading structure (coins/xp/up) would probably end up being more expensive in the long run than purchasing the volumes and a person owning them. This structure only allows you to unlock a chapter for a few days!

Furthermore, the chapters are divided into multiple parts, so you essentially have to spend more of your coins/xp/up to read a full chapter since each part is counted as a chapter on this app.

In summary, terrible structure, probably would end up being more expensive than buying the actual volumes, and censored. Is there even a reason to use this service?

the app is rather well put together. The UI is nice, reminds me of the manga plus app, and there are series here I never expected to get an official English release so that’s a nice surprise. Now for the bad. Square enix decided to go with the coin system. You buy coins to read chapters apparently. I say apparently because the whole system is very convoluted. There are 3 types of tokens; coins, UP, and xp. The up replenishes once a day and is enough to Read 8 chapters a day, after that you have to pay to unlock, and that chapter only remains unlocked for 3 days, after that you pay again. Their most expensive coin bundle is $80 and it allows you to temporarily unlock 330 chapters. Let’s say a one piece like series of 1000 chapters was pay to read on this app. It would cost you around $250 to temporarily have access to every chapter. Thank god VIZ understood what a dumb customer pay model this was. If you can ignore the extortionate pay model maybe you can also ignore the egregious censoring. Use your free chapters to check out dress up darling to get a sense of how terrible the censoring is. Full on black censor bars covering even a hint of cleavage. Literally blocking Marin’s entire upper body. I wanted to like this app so bad. I wanted to support the official translations of series I really enjoy. I wanted to enjoy the official release of those series. I can’t do any of that at this point in time. The atrocious pay model and the deliberate misrepresentation of the artists works have made this a complete failure on square enix’s part. I doubt they will care to fix these problems which is why the most dedicated fans will continue to source their reading material elsewhere.

On paper, a manga app with a library of Square Enix and Yen Press titles is a great idea! However the execution is one of the most backwards and anti-consumer practices I've seen for this kind of service. The manga selection itself is solid, having. popular titles like Soul Eater, Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun, The Case Study of Vanitas, and Daemons of the The Shadow Realm by the author of Fullmetal Alchemist, among others.

While it's a good selection, it would be insanely time consuming and expensive to fully read even just one series fully. This is due to the app's "point system", which is the only way to unlock chapters past chapter 1. Chapters either cost 30 UP points or 60 XP (why there is a point system at all let alone two types of points, only the "employee who came up with it and should be fired for it" would know). Your UP points automatically replenish every day at 8 AM JST, though with a max of 120 you can only buy 4 chapters with this currency a day. UP points can only be used on "normal chapters", which is a very limited selection. XP on the other hand can be used to unlock "Advance Chapters" which is a majority of chapters, as well as normal chapters. XP can only be gotten through events or as a bonus for buying coins. Yes, there is a THIRD currency system for a manga app. Why? I'll be asking my therapist that same question at our next session. Anyways you buy coins with real money and they work exactly the same as XP, so why this is a separate system from XP I don't know. To add one more wrench into this, chapters you buy can only be read for 3 days after purchase. The system is already confusing and anti-consumer, but when you compare it to the Shonen Jump app, a subscription service that's only $2 a month for 100 chapters a day and has access to every chapter of a much larger and more popular selection of titles, it's clear which is the better deal here.

But that's not even touching on the ridiculous censorship this app has. Some manga in the selection provided have scenes which contain partial or full nudity, which in the original version is normally completely uncensored. However on this reader, a majority of these scenes have been edited to have a black box blocking this which just looks absolutely ridiculous. And the censorship is wildly inconsistent, as some scenes with very clear sexual exposure aren't censored and sometimes just a girl's pants are censored despite there not being any nudity or partial nudity here. It's very strange and just makes these chapters an inferior version of what can be read through other methods.

Another hilariously bad feature of the app is that screenshots are not allowed. Not even that they're disabled similar to apps like Netflix or Hulu, but when screenshoting you get a warning that repeated screenshots. could get you BANNED. While it's a relatively small complaint comparative to everything else, longer length chapters end up getting split into parts on the app for no reason. This wouldn't be a big deal at all- if you didn't have to pay currency in order to gain access to each part.

Between the hilariously bad censorship, ridiculous currency system, and other problems, Manga Up! is a failure of a manga service in every conceivable way. There's potential for it to be good in the future if a majority of its issues are fixed, but in the meantime you're better off getting MangaPlus or the Shonen Jump app instead.

Horrid. Square Enix should be ashamed of having their name attached to this low-tier, money-grubbing waste of 15MB

Solid reader with some good features but the points and coins system is super dumb. Just go to a subscription for back chapters

Micro transactions are a blight. Doesn’t matter though. This app will be dead in less than a year because it’s so friggin terrible.

Unnecessarily confusing to learn about the in app currency to read chapters. Splitting the chapters apart feels very predatory to force users to spend more money.

Most of the titles are repetitive , the app lacks variety. Plus the titles on here are close to all being up to date. BUT MOST OF THE TITLES I SEEN ALREADY BEEN ANIMATED !

Do you like paying microtransactions for limited time access to fractions of chapters of censored art? If so, this is the app for you! As for me, I’m deleting this app and I won’t be back.

I feel like it would be way better if it was subscription based instead of having to pay for currency to read. Also having chapters split into 4 parts just to make people pay more leaves a bad taste in my mouth

Censorship is pretty strong as well as chapters being split. This costs more in the long run, and chapters only unlock for 3 days. App is slow and is kinda messy, they need to fix quite a lot to succeed. I would not use this app.

Shameless cash grab. You get enough points to read 4 items which seems like a good deal until you stare for more than 10 seconds and realize they split the chapters up into 4 parts. So you get a chapter a day or buy their crazy currency. Just make it a subscription.

Square Enix needs to learn from their competitors(VIZ/Shonen Jump app) and apply a flat subscription fee of $1-5 bucks a month and get rid of this terrible and complicated point system that suckers you into needing to pay an insane amount to complete or catch up on a series

I need to spend money to ONLY RENT? And some boxes, not characters scenes, full boxes are blacked out.

This is trash. Lots of chapters are now completely un-viewable. All I can see is the character dialog text not what is going on in a scene. Is it even manga at this point?

Edit: This works now but you have currency and gotta scroll all the way to the bottom for free issues, which taking screenshots gives you a warning for a ban. So it works, but is just as bad as my white screen with the initial launch (and no version history to see what is fixed).

This is the worst manga app I’ve ever seen the amount of unnecessary censorship’s and in app purchases just ruin the entire app and they can split up 1 chapter into at least 8 parts just so you have to pay more and there’s so many different issues that make this app completely unsalvageable