For a while now, I've wanted to read more manga regularly than the paltry 3 chapters a month of One Piece I've gone through ever since 2008. Big name hits have come and gone which I never got around to. Ever since its 2019 launch, Shueisha's Manga Plus platform has been my go-to platform for that fix, both for the higher quality translation than the alternatives and for the fractions of cents that go Eiichiro Oda's way from my seeing the occasional ad after finishing the week's installment.
For these first years of its existence, Manga Plus has been Shueisha's awkward half-measure at beating the scanlation scene on its home turf by providing some of the library from its line of Jump magazines free of charge globally. The focus has always been on the series which in East Asia are exclusively serialized in the hybrid free/paid Shonen Jump+ platform. A number of them are good, but manga magazines always depend on an "anchor" of a blockbuster to draw people in who then might check the other stories published alongside it, and for a while those were only among the traditional Shonen Jump lineup, which had a severely restricted amount of chapters available. The hook depended on the readership being heavily disciplined to not miss more than 3-6 chapters and to already be up-to-date with the big series, which often required scanlations as not every Shueisha licensee for a given country had a robust digital distribution platform (or any at all).
31 January 2022 saw a massive shakeup for that scheme: now all chapters of a select amount of series currently running were made available, all but the first and latest 3 to be read once. This was a great opportunity for me: the limitations would lead me to build a routine so I'd need to read at a regular pace and then keep up weekly from thereon out. In practice it resulted in long stretches of not keeping up, followed by bouts of marathoning batches of chapters over a few days to be up-to-date on a given series (especially on the last few months of the campaign; I was adamant at getting through everything I was interested in before the deadline). But it worked: I got to read more manga and now have a dozen or so series I enjoy to experience a bite at a time every week.
These are my impressions on what I read, from oldest to newest. Some spoilers for Ron Kamonohashi: Deranged Detective and Ginka & Glüna below: