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Momoka Sendou (nicknamed "Dragon Girl") and Ryuga Kou are childhood friends. Momoka is a martial artist, and Ryuga is a Chinese magic master who banishes demons. In order to increase his power, Ryuga calls on the spirit of a dragon to possess him, but the spirit enters Momoka instead. Now the two must unite forces and fight demons together!A demon serpent king who appears once every hundred years to select a bride has abducted Momoka's friend Shunran. Will Momoka and Ryuga be able to defeat the demon before Shunran is lost forever?

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2000

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Natsumi Matsumoto

69 books63 followers

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5 stars
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272 (19%)
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95 (6%)
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39 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
Profile Image for Sonia.
357 reviews
December 21, 2015
An old shoujo with some martial arts and demon fighting. The girl is obsessed with pandas and likes her childhood friend and wants to be his partner. Nothing, really new.

Let's face it, I read this for the dragons because the MC can turn into one. I loved dragons. (I regret nothing.)
Profile Image for Merb.
630 reviews66 followers
October 5, 2021
A fun little shoujo about a teenage girl who can summon a dragon. It follows different storylines where she defeats different villains alongside her childhood friend and crush. It definitely read younger, and had a lot of the more juvenile tropes, like the girl punching the guy and running away kind of thing. The art was a bit messy at times, but overall really cute. I’d consider reading more in the series.

~ I read this for Spoopathon 2021 ~
Profile Image for Holly Letson.
3,847 reviews527 followers
January 30, 2013
I quite enjoyed this volume, but as with M!L, I only own V1. I hope I can fins scanslations of the other volumes later on.
Momoko is not a normal girl. She's a fighter, who is an expert at martial arts. She uses this to win competitions.
Ryuga is a Chinese boy, who comes from a family that holds dragons to be sacred animals. When his relative, Shunran, is endangered, Ryuga calls forth a dragon to help him to protect her.
The dragon ends up fusing with Momoka instead, since she interrupts the ritual. This causes tons of weird things to happen.
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Now, let it be known that Momoko is very much in love with Ryuga, but is scared to openly admit that she wants to be more than friends. Ryuga teases her about this constantly.
So, when Kouryu--a relative of Ryuga--who is also handsome, comes to visit, and is totally smitten with Momoko, it's do or die time. Momoko is in a position where she has to decide which guy to be with. She wants Ryuga, but he starts ignoring her, so she chooses the vacation with Kouryu.
Turns out the vacation is a trap to take Momoko back to China with him. So, Momoko calls for Ryuga, which Kouryu assumes will not show up. Ryuga does, of course, show up to save her and teases her more about her feelings.
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The bonus story after the main story tells us about the author and her friend taking a trip to China. It ends with the funny finding that they could have purchased all that without ever leaving Japan, as it is all available in Tokyo as well.
Profile Image for Samantha wickedshizuku Tolleson.
2,157 reviews59 followers
February 2, 2016
Sendou Momoko is a 15 year old daughter of a martial artist, and known as the Dragon Girl whom has a thing for pandas. Her best friend, Kou Ryuuga, is a summoner from a long line of guardian summoners.
After reading this I remembered what a stinker this was. The bad guy is usually defeated by the end of each chapter. So this is kind saying that this is obviously a monster of the week type of manga.
Profile Image for Ckp.
23 reviews
June 25, 2015
I just couldn't get into this book so I returned it to the library. My neighbor who is 11 commented right before it went into the return that you are supposed to read it backward. Ugh! Maybe I will try another book in this genre but not right away.
Profile Image for Nazish Ahmed (Nazish Reads).
961 reviews38 followers
December 12, 2025
I first read this book and vol. 2 in 2012 (I think it was in the beginning of the year or in the summer) and loved it, back when I used to write long reviews for everything I've read, either I got lazier the older I got (which is likely) or I just realized that reviews aren't necessary for some books and really long ones are only necessary once in a while, plus I used to have a book blog back than and those used to be very popular in the book community (not sure why I never finished this series).
I wanted to finish one more series before the end of the year and wanted it to be from my physical tbr pile, so I decided to reread vol. 1 and 2 and finally finish this series. It's a good thing I decided to reread vol. 1 and 2 because I didn't remember anything from this. Some may say that's because I read it over 13 years ago, but I still remember some of the books I've read 18 years ago. Unfortunately, it wasn't as good as I remembered and for some reason I thought that the male lead falls first, although it doesn't seem like that, it seems like they both fell in love at the same time maybe? I'm sad to say that while I have almost the full series (can't find vol. 4 anywhere), I might not end up liking it and might have to get rid of it, which I really don't want to since they were so hard to find a few years ago and it might be the oldest written shojo manga series I have. If I didn't own the rest of the volumes, I would have reread vol. 2 and then maybe stopped, depending on how I felt about it. I've already started vol. 2 and so far, again I'm not recalling anything.
Even though I'm only on vol. 2 so far, I'm already annoyed at the way Ryuga is acting (I usually love that kind of banter between the two main leads but something felt different about him and I just got bored of him, I don't really like him. Also, the art style is cute sometimes and then kind of ugly other times, but overall I don't like it.

The mangaka is obsessed with constantly pointing out that Momoka (the main character) has really small boobs, a lot of older series did that and I forgot how annoying and stupid that was, thank God it's not as common anymore. Joking about it once in a while is fine, but Ryuga mentions it a lot and in the author messages section, she mentions it a lot as well. We get it, it stopped being funny after the second time. While I was reading the first chapter and Ryuga was teasing her about it, I was confused because on the cover she looked like she had a c-cup, but then later the author talked about that and if I remember correctly (I don't feel like going downstairs again to go get the book to confirm), she said that she made the cover before deciding and decided to just leave it.

I don't know how I thought this was a 5 star read at the time. There isn't much world building, if any. It just starts like it's a second chapter or second volume. You just have to guess what the world is like with the small amount of information given and what is happening. It seems like this is basically our world but with magic, demons and monsters, like an urban fantasy if I'm understanding everything that's going on.

A few things I don’t like about the printings themselves is that there are barely any page numbers (some publishers still do this with some series like Wind Breaker and I hate it). As someone who NEEDS to know what page she's on so that she can tell how many pages are left because that's just how I read, it was excruciating😡 Once I saw page numbers, I flipped through to see the last page number and counted from there and after that I felt better, although it was still annoying that I had to count the pages as I read😑 Another issue is that for some reason there is no table of contents, so you don't know which chapters are in the books, who thought that was a good idea!!!😡 Was this one of the first shojo manga published in English!? I don't know but I'm so glad they don't do that anymore.





Below is my review from 2012, I decided to leave it here, but decided to change the rating since that's how current me is feeling.


I just reviewed this on my blog.
To view the full review, click here St. Dragon Girl Volume 1 by Natsumi Matsumoto




This is the first book in the St. Dragon Girl series. I read and finished this yesterday.

Sex: No
Gore: No
Magic: Yes

Romance: (I've decided not to rate the romance in mangas, especially not with volume 1, I'm pretty sure it's self explanatory, so I'll just say yes) We know that the protagonist (Momoka) is in love with Ryuga (her childhood best friend), since she was thinking it a few times. This is rare in the first volume of a manga, since a lot of the main characters dont even know that they're in love until many chapters later. I'm pretty sure Ryuga already loves her too, since there were many moments that hinted on this.
Action: 4 stars (there is a lot of fighting)
Pacing: 5 stars
Plot: 4.5 stars
Drawings/Art: 5 stars



As you know, I'm a huge fan of shonen manga and I don't read many shojo mangas because there is mostly romance and not much fighting in those, but this was one of those few shojo mangas that has a nice amount of romance in it, at least not yet (which is not too much) and lots of action (so that it doesn't become boring for me).

A few of the things that I loved about this book was the plot. I enjoy reading books about demon fighting and magic, so it's only natural that I would end up reading this series and liking it. Plus, I love the characters too. Also, I haven't read many books where the main character is a dragon or has dragon powers.

Warning, Spoilers

This is about a 16 year old girl, named Momoka Sendou, who was born in a martial arts family, loves to fight, and is really good at it (yay! I love protagonists that are butt-kicking girls and not damsels). She is best friends with a boy named Ryuga Kou, who is also her neighbour, and his cousin Shunran and they all grew up together. Ryuga is a summoner/sorcerer (in this volume it say summoner, but in volume 2 it says sorcerer).

The story starts with Momoka catching a pervert, then a boy says something and Momoka gets mad and she tries to punch him, and it turns out to be Ryuga, Momoka's childhood friend. Apparently, he called her dragon girl since the beginning. Everyone knows that Ryuga is a sorcerer. Momoka and Ryuga have been protecting their frend Shunran from demons for years (since she has high spiritual energy, demons are attracted to her). They always start fighting because of petty little matters, it's so funny. Oh, and Momoka is obsessed with panda bears. Momoka knows loves Ryuga, but she doesn't want to tell him her feelings because she's afraid that he'll tease her and not take her seriously (as I said above, this is rare to see in the first volume of many mangas).

Because Shunran is almost kidnapped by a demon king that appears every one hundred years, after a few days, Ryuga summons the dragon lord to possess him so that he's strong enough to beat the demon, but Momoka hears about this and tries to stop him but she's standing in the ways and the dragon lord ends up possessing her instead. So now she really is a dragon girl. Ryuga doesn't have enough power to turn her back, so instead he seals the dragon temporarily.
Shunran and Ryuga were supposed to stay home from school for the next few days so that Shunran would be safe, but she snuck out and then Shunran and Momoka got attacked by the demon that wants to kidnap Shunran. Momoka can hold her own against a demon even when the dragon powers are sealed. Although, the demon soon becomes too much for her to handle alone, and then Ryuga comes by and unseals the dragon so that they can seal up that demon for good. She adjusts to the dragon powers right away and easily. Then Ryuga seals the dragon's powers again.

Over the next few chapters in this volume, Ryuga kisses Momoka a few times, claiming that he only kissed her to unseal the dragon powers when his hands were tied, but he obviously enjoyed kissing her.

Different adventures in every chapter, which is great. Also, I love the art of this series, it's so beautiful. I heard that there is now a manga series called St. Dragon Girl Miracle by the same mangaka. Does that mean that it's the sequel to this series? Please let me know, because I'm confused.

Also, I was wondering, how come most of the characters are wearing chinese clothing if they live in Japan (I'm just curious).

I wonder why the main character in most shojo mangas has pig tails, not that I mind, I'm just wondering.

Momoka is not your typical shojo manga main character. She loves to fight, is really skilled at it, doesn't need someone to protect her, and knows that she's in love since the beginning of the series. Although, there are some similarities: she's gullible, has brute strength (many shojo protagonists are strong, but don't have much fighting skills), fights a lot with the guy she loves, and is a good person.

I wonder what happened to Momoka's mom, they only talked about her dad, but nothing about her mom, I wonder if she's even alive. This question is part of what makes want to read more quickly so that I can find out. Plus, there are only eight volumes in this series, so it shouldn't take me long to finish this series.

Those are some of the major incidents of this volume, of course more happened, but I don't want to bore you with all of the details.

Overall, I love this manga, it's one of my most favourites, along with Kodocha, FMA, Inuyasha, etc. I hope I still love it by the time I finish reading the series.

This turned out to be a longer review than I thought it would be, sorry about that, I'll try to keep the next ones shorter, I think it's because I'm in such a good mood today and because I love this manga so much, which is so hard to put into words.


I rated this book: 5 stars.

Profile Image for R.
2,268 reviews6 followers
October 31, 2018
Interesting story and great characters.
Profile Image for Megan Ferguson.
895 reviews4 followers
June 29, 2020
Honestly, it would help if we had a y information on why she likes him so much...
1,797 reviews
September 9, 2020
Average art, below average story. Not enough character development, and the pacing was rushed.
Profile Image for Ally.
73 reviews2 followers
June 11, 2021
Oh, cute story but this manga is too childish, I think maybe I like this manga but I don’t want to spend all the evening time or morning time to read it
Profile Image for Kaitlynne.
1,683 reviews53 followers
March 25, 2022
There's an awful lot happening in this story, and it's just volume 1... I'll probably continue on with it at least for a few more volumes just to see what's going to happen.
Profile Image for Cookie_monster5493 .
7 reviews
October 16, 2025
omg so good usually there's no romance between the two top characters but there was and I loved it is super good 10/10 recommend!✨️
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Alyssa.
558 reviews
November 9, 2021
Re-read rating 3/5 (11/6/21)
I've been sitting on this book for years. I've had volume one since I was a teenager, and have only recently gotten the rest of the series. When I originally read this volume, I guess I liked it a lot to give it a four. Going back and reading it again to be able to read the entire series, I think it's a little too fast paced. I didn't feel a connection with the characters, but that might change after a volume or two. It's always hard to like or dislike a manga based on the first volume. The story was kind of action oriented and cutesy, which is fine. At this point, I think it's pretty average.
Original rating 4/5 (Date N/A)

Series Review: 3/5
This series is fast paced and episodic. Most chapters are independent stories, and the general tone is light hearted. There is little seriousness in the entirety of the eight volume series. Some of the humor is rather dated, specifically the slapstick stuff. I used to think that stuff was funny, but I've grown out of it. Rom-Coms where the girl hits the guy is no longer something I find funny. That kind of thing doesn't stand well on it's own, and needs context to support it. It falls flat to me if it's used constantly just for comedy's sake. I think Ryuga likes the abuse, though. He's always antagonizing, and having been friends since they were kids, I'm sure he knows well by now what the results of his comments or actions will be.
It took me two or three volumes to get a feel for the characters, but that's about what I expected.
Overall, I think the series was average. If you like slapstick humor, and don't want something super serious to read, this is good for that. The romance is, "will they, won't they," so don't expect anything heavy in the romance department. I think Ryuga is actually the problem. His attitude makes it difficult for Momoka to be honest about her feelings.

Momoka is a martial artist, and throughout the entire series, that's the only skill she uses, except for one random chapter in volume three. For some reason, there was a chapter where she had a symbol on her forehead and could cast magic with a talisman. This never happens in any other part of the story. I have no idea why it was included. It didn't make sense.
I'm not sure why Shunran is specified to be psychic. She never does anything to express psychic powers. She's just susceptible to demons and ghosts. I don't see how that makes her psychic.
There is a sequel series called Saint Dragon Girl Miracle, but some quick searching leads me to believe it never got an English release.
Profile Image for Tabitha (Bows & Bullets Reviews).
492 reviews77 followers
July 22, 2013
The review is also available on my blog, Bows & Bullets Reviews

My very first manga. I must confess that I've never gotten into them before. I took several different Japanese language classes in high school, but never could get into manga or anime, despite my best efforts. However, a few weeks ago, I came across a used book store that had a great selection of manga and decided to give it another go. I must say I'm rather satisfied with this decision because this was adorably cute and very funny.

Momoka Sendou and Ryuga Kou have been friends since childhood and though it's clear to everyone that there is a deeper attraction there, Momoka refuses to acknowledge it. This makes for quite a few embarrassing, hilarious moments. Ryuga seems to be aware of her attraction and is constantly teasing her about it, but when danger strikes, he's always there to save her. It's a pretty amusing fantasy type manga with adorable drawings. It also has the appeal of being one of the few mangas I've seen that features a protagonist with a small bust.

I have already purchases the next two in this series and can't wait to dive in. Momoka and Ryuga better end up together in the end!
Profile Image for Eden Silverfox.
1,228 reviews102 followers
September 18, 2013
Momoka and Ryuga have been friends since childhood. Momoka is also known as the Dragon Girl and does martial arts. Ryuga is a magic master and banishes demons.

But Ryuga wants to increase his power and so he calls on the spirit of the Dragon. Instead of possessing him, the Dragon possess Momoka!

This was a pretty enjoyable manga. The characters are fun, I like the story and I'm going to be honest here; it's pretty funny when Momoka beats Ryuga up for teasing her and saying the wrong thing sometimes.

Momoka definitely likes Ryuga, but doesn't want to admit it to him. While I will say that he does care about her, in this volume it isn't made clear if he feels the same way about her.

I really liked this. I'll be reading the next volume.
Profile Image for Elizabeth.
141 reviews3 followers
March 1, 2013
St. ♥ Dragon Girl is a great magical girl manga. Unlike many others, there is more focus on Momoka’s martial arts skills rather than her magic. Its characters are engaging, and the plot moves at a good pace. The story has a good balance of romance, comedy, and adventure. The story is appropriate for both older children and younger teens, and it will appeal to fans of manga like Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura. The series is complete at which makes it both a short read and a good introduction to manga for the unfamiliar as the reader will not have to wait to find out how the story ends. Overall, I give it four out of five stars.
Profile Image for Dani ❤️ Perspective of a Writer.
1,512 reviews5 followers
May 26, 2015
I didn't hate this but it seemed very old world style (it is from 1999) and its extremely fluffy. Momoka is a martial artist in love with her childhood friend Ryuga, a magic master who banishes demons. She's not ready to admit her feelings but will continue to fight the different Chinese dressed demons with him.

It was very cute but the fact they didn't travel together fighting these demons (it was just like high school) made the whole setup more hokey and less intriguing.

BOTTOM LINE: I'm not doing high school with demons.
Profile Image for Soobie has fog in her brain.
7,200 reviews134 followers
May 28, 2023
2023.05.29

Did I really read this volume ten years ago?! A lifetime ago. It also means that this year I'm celebrating my ten-year anniversary on GR.

I finally have all the eight volumes in the series, and I've started to read it.

Not sure where I saw "Ranma 1/2" in this story, to be honest. OK, lots of pandas and some Chinese clothing but... that's all, really.

A girl needs a big dose of shojo manga every once in a while.

-----

2013.11.16

It somehow reminded me of "Ranma 1/2", I don't know why.

I'll probably keep on reading this
Profile Image for Brooke.
Author 4 books25 followers
May 3, 2015
So amazing!! I really love it and want to read more!! I want to know when they'll admit they like each other!!! They both keep half admitting then some evil comes along and wrecks it all!!! WHY EVIL!! CAN'T YOU JUST LET LOVE WIN OUT FOR ONCE?!?!?!? I guess then it wouldn't be much of a point to read the rest of the books then would it... Ok, I GET YOUR POINT EVIL...

THAT DOESN'T MEAN I AGREE WITH IT!!
PLAYING WITH OUR EMOTIONS LIKE THAT!
YOU DO KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN RIGHT!?!?!
oh you don't?

I'M WARNING YOU!! DON'T GET TOO CARRIED AWAY EVIL!! GOOD WILL WIN!!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Kaysee.
203 reviews
May 30, 2013
I will honestly say this was better than I thought it would be. The story has some basic ideas that have been over done, but I like the two main characters. I think dragons in this story helped me like it more and I do enjoy the idea nevertheless even if it is something that has been done. So, I say if you are waiting on your other mangas to come in or you need something to read on a rainy day give it a try.
Profile Image for Starbubbles.
1,639 reviews128 followers
July 22, 2013
It read very much like Zodiac PI, with a slight middle school-like feel. I cannot exactly pinpoint why I feel that way, but I do think that I would have eaten this up in Middle School. It's extremely cute, and I think it has the potential to greatly love this.
Profile Image for Sara I.
860 reviews
February 18, 2014
I thought it was a cute manga and I liked the characters alright. For me, the story wasn't super exciting and it didn't connect really well with me. I'll probably still pick up the next volume though.
4 reviews
July 1, 2014
The series, in its entirety was incredibly sweet and cute.
At one point there was a whole section of dissatisfying fillers but they eventually led to a grand finale!
Ultimately adorable and a fantastic start to manga♥
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