Crunchyroll

Crunchyroll for newbies, what is Crunchyroll?

If you are a fan of anime and Japanese drama, you may have known Crunchyroll already. Beside the streaming service, Crunchyroll is also a place for manga lovers. Established in 2006 by a group of graduates in Berkeley, Crunchyroll’s subscribers have soared to more than 2 million, making it one of the largest and most lively communities in the industry. 

Manga library

Although Crunchyroll is a large anime and Japanese drama community, its manga community is unimpressive. They only have 50 manga available on the site at the time of this review. Their forums and discussions are active but not many. The manga are organised by Popularity, Promotion, Simulpub, Update and Alphabetical, which is very inconvenient as lacking genres categorization.

Some of the popular titles on Crunchyroll are Attack on Titan, Genshin Impact, Inside Mari, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Fire Force, EDENS ZERO, Sun-Ken Rock, To Your Eternity, Talentless Nana, Four Knights of the Apocalypse, Is this Girls for Real?, Tales of Wedding Rings, Knight’s Magic, Scum’s wish, Grand Blue Dreaming, One Toom of Happiness, Lofty Flower, fall for me, Fairy tail, Honkai Impact 3rd, Shangri-La Frontier, Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, A Sign of Affection, The Daily Life of Crunchyroll-Hime, UQ HOLDER!, In/Spectre, Love Theory, Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, YanOta: The Delinquent and the Otaku, Orange, The Grim Reaper and an Argent Cavalier, Hoshi no Samidare: The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer, Crossing Time, Holmes of Kyoto, Arakawa Under the Bridge, The Morose Monokean, Joshi Kausei, Girl May Kill, Okitenemuru, Restaurant to Another World, Father and Son, Elan Palatinus, Moon Shadow, Silver Nina, Final Fantasy Lost Stranger, King’s game: Origin, Space Brothers, The Heroic Legen of Arslan, Restaurant to Another world: New Edition, The World of Summoning. 

Pricing and subscription

To read manga on Crunchyroll, you need to buy monthly memberships. The service offers 3 different Premium options:

- Fan: $7.99 per month (excluding taxes), no offline viewing, no 16% discount of Monthly Plan billed every 12 months, stream on 1 device at a time.

- Mega fan (12 months): $79.99 per month (excluding taxes)

- Mega fan (1 month): $9.99 per month (excluding taxes), no 16% discount of Monthly Plan billed every 12 months

All plans offer unlimited full access to Crunchyroll’s library such as manga, anime and shows (up to 30,000 episodes) ad-free and subscribers can watch new releases 1 hour after aired in Japan. If you are not sure what plan to subscribe to, Crunchyroll also offers a 14-day free trial for every plan. 

Website design 

Personally, I find Crunchyroll’s website too simple and unappealing from the visual to the fonts and layout. The only acceptable thing is the orange colour palette. 

The primary and secondary menus of Crunchyroll is merged into one. It has the logo – the logo image and the name of the brand – on the left following links to Shows, Manga, News, Games and Try free Premium. Next is Login, Queue and Randomizer button. This Randomizer button will randomly show you a free anime video without the need to log in. Lastly to the right of the top menu is the search bar where you can search every on Crunchyroll. 

When it comes to the manga section of Crunchyroll, below the top menu will be all manga titles and posters. As mentioned above, these manga are organised by Popularity, Joint Promotion, Simulpub, Update and Alphabetical. This is such a bad way to organise manga. What if you want to read a Romance manga? They lack the genres category, which, to me, is a common sense of a manga site.  

Below the filter bar is the manga display. Each manga only has a cover, name and summary, which will appear when you hover over the manga. This is so far the best feature of the Crunchyroll manga site. 

The sidebar is the invitation to download the Crunchyroll Manga app on Appstore (iOS device) and Google Play (Android device). Below the app download invitation is the Crunchyroll Manga Forum, links to its social media and at the bottom is the information, such as chapter and date, of the coming soon manga. 

The footer is where you can get access to Popular shows, links to download Crunchyroll on different platforms and devices, information about Premium Memberships, change languages and get support. Currently, Crunchyroll offers 8 different languages on its website and is compatible with 13 platforms and devices. This is another great thing about Crunchyroll as it makes reading manga much more convenient. 

Manga pages

Just like another manga website, when you click on any manga, you will be led to that manga information page. While Crunchyroll Manga’s homepage is badly executed, the inner pages are much better. All the information including the summary, Publisher, Author, Artist, Copyright, Translator, Letterer and cover image are on the sidebar of the page. In the middle of the page are the manga’s Volumes, Comments and Anime. You can sort Oldest or Newest for the Volume. When you click on the manga volume tab’s arrow, you will see a drop-down of a list of that volume’s chapters. If any manga has already been made into an anime, you can get access to the Anime from here too, another plus for Crunchyroll. 

Reading experience

Crunchyroll's reading window is the worst to be frank. Unlike other manga services like Bookwalker, AZUKI, Manga Plus,… which offer the page spread, the page turn direction and many more options, Crunchyroll Manga’s setting has only the full screen and the progress bar features. There are a lot of features a manga reader needs that are missing such as zoom in and out. When using the site, you can only zoom the whole site if you want to zoom the page. How inconvenient is that! At the time of this review, Crunchyroll says that they are updating their reading window to HTML5, let’s stay tuned for that but I have to say, this is very disappointing. The resolution of the manga page is good whether you zoom it in or not. The pages load fine as long as your internet connection is good and stable. 

Update rate

The update rate of Crunchyroll Manga is relatively slow and inconsistent. Some manga's volumes haven't been updated on the site while other volumes have already been released in the market. For example, many people have complained that the manga Attack on Titan’s entire series isn’t available although they have paid for the “all-access” plan. 

Negatives 

Overall, Crunchyroll Manga falls short of the big brand name. The user interface is not friendly and convenient for readers as it lacks so many important features such as the genres category, the zoom and page spread options in the reading window and many more. The manga library is too small, only 50 titles appear to be available but in fact, some of the manga, even the popular ones like Attack on Titan, aren’t updated the whole series. Because of all the above negatives, I don’t find the subscription to Crunchyroll worthwhile if you are only interested in its manga library.

Source: Top Streaming Sites