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RIGHT TURN ONLY!! - Night Head Kobato.

And I'm getting a vibe of disdain for all things mahou shoujo. Did one steal candy from you as a kid or something?

This guy for Right Turn Only reminds me why nearly all reviews I've seen online are worthless. Giving the shoujo titles a D-ranking, while giving the shonen ones a B-C obviously smacks of bias. But you come to expect that from upstarts that want to put themselves on a pedestal.

I don't know why he expects some kind of literary greatness out of Runa -- it's a manga designed and marketed towards young girls. They don't break out of the tried-and-true mold, because it's a temporary viewerbase -- in a few years those girls will be into a new age demographic. So in comes a new generation being sold to, and it's "new to them", etc.

Considering the praise Carlo has for Sugar Sugar Rune, I don't think that it's a genre thing.

EVIDENCE FOR:
Baseball philosopher Bill James once said that the faults of pretty girls are too much tolerated—but when an artistic work is as pretty as Kobato, who's complaining?

The visual style is as pleasing as they come, with the requisite population of six-foot-tall pretty boys and doe-eyed young women (including the title character, of course). Every few chapters there comes a moment of eye-catching brilliance: the sight of winter's first snowfall, the swirling petals at the end of the flower-viewing chapter, the sudden fight scene when Ioryogi is visited by a mysterious rival.

EVIDENCE AGAINST:
It appears that the fandom's worst fears have come true: CLAMP has become a parody of itself.

The very premise of Kobato—"earn enough points to get the bottle so you can collect X number of hearts to fulfill your Very Important Wish"—sounds like a fill-in-the-blank plot device, a story in search of a story because the authors got lazy.

Is this perhaps a sarcastic commentary on the sorry state of Japanese popular entertainment?

Or a legendary team of artists seeing how much they can get away with on name recognition alone?

(I've had it with Christmas chapters, why doesn't anyone ever do a Boxing Day chapter?)

and by the time it looks like there may be proper characters and a plot after all, it's already the last chapter in the book.

What knowledgeable CLAMP fans may find even more irritating, however, is the use of gratuitous character cameos, to the point of being distracting rather than being cute or clever. Look, it was cool when they did it in Tsubasa. This, however, is just stupid.

FINAL VERDICT:
If this is CLAMP's idea of a joke, then, congratulations to them! The fact that such a pointless series was allowed to exist past the first chapter is hilarious. Pretty pictures can't compensate for what is essentially D-level content.

Considering the praise Carlo has for Sugar Sugar Rune,

I don't think that it's a genre thing. I watched the first episode of the recent Kobato anime and yeah, I pretty much have to agree that it's as formulaic as they come, without anything special to really redeem it (especially when put beside, say, CCS).

However, the restriction is that she is not allowed to fall in love with any person whose heart she heals.

"Based on a webcomic." Really, that's all you need to know about the quality of this series. Make of it what you will. Read it if you dare.