Kagurabachi

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Kagurabachi is one of the best mangas I've had the chance to read. The fights are thrilling, and the characters are wonderfully written. It's a perfect blend of action and world-building.

At first, I felt like I was reading an average shonen, and the artwork seemed just ordinary. However, as I kept reading more chapters, the manga constantly surprised me. The panels are truly impactful and have a lot of aura; the story is captivating, the power scaling is simple and enjoyable, and although the plot isn’t particularly groundbreaking, it’s executed exceptionally well.

The characters are diverse, and while some of them are simply typical tertiary characters, ... the supporting characters get a lot of attention and play a key role. There’s no shortage of character development here, which is often a problem in shonen manga, so Kagurabachi has pleasantly surprised me in this regard.

The manga is genuinely impressive, and reading it keeps me on the edge of my seat. It’s also quite easy to feel a connection with the characters.

It's just average. Not amazing but definitely has elements that are below average. Functionally it's one of those manga's where the fights end up with people staring at each other monologuing (internal and external) about whatever until someone does something and someone gets one-shot. The pacing is both extremely fast and slow at the same time which is a feat in itself. Getting you as fast as possible to the next fight but then dragging it out by having flashbacks to just a little bit of what happened inbetween fights... but not enough to explain much of what's happening beyond how they got into said ... situation or provide a deus ex machina that was totally planned the whole time trust me bro.

I'll still read it for some of the action scenes because it doesn't shy away from the actual violence, but reading this for any other purpose is a exercise in wasting time.

At this point in time, 14 chapters of Kagurabachi are officially out, providing enough material to form a solid first impression of the manga. Looking back at the community's initial reactions to Kagurabachi, most people made memes about it due to its generic and edgy premise. However, as the weeks went by and more chapters were released, the memes died down, leaving the original readers either dropping the manga entirely or sticking with it to see if it would turn out to be the biggest fighting Shonen of the new decade, as some were saying.

In the early stages of a manga's storyline, there needs to ... be a certain element for the manga to stand out. Bleach had its amazing art, One Piece had its mysterious treasure, and more recently, Chainsaw Man and Dandadan stand out for their wild premises. However, Kagurabachi lacks such distinctive elements. The art is mediocre at best, with most characters having the same dull expression on their faces and being drawn in very stiff positions from a flat angle. The premise is an edgy revenge story that we've seen many times in many different anime and we've already seen it perfected in Vinland Saga. The fights use magical swords with powers, similar to what we've already seen done better in Bleach as well as generic sorcery, which consists of uninteresting abilities like teleportation and magnetic control. There are also certain plot elements, such as a person who is the last remaining survivor of their clan being hunted for their special abilities and a large underworld auction where something related to the protagonist is being sold, of which both have been seen before in Hunter X Hunter.

The characters are easily the weakest point of the series, with all of them given only a simple personality and lacking any distinctive traits, charisma, or chemistry together. The same goes for the villains, who have all been forgettable evil bad guys up until this point. This is mostly a result of the plot of Kagurabachi moving way too fast. Recent anime like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen gave their characters some backstory, motivations we could get behind, and distinctive character traits before the main plot started moving, while Kagurabachi has already jumped straight into it with characters nobody cares about.

Current Scorings:

Art: 5/10

Artstyle + 1 (Bland)
Consistency + 2 (Consistent)
Character Designs + 1 (Generic)
Backgrounds + 1 (Standard)
Storyboarding + 0 (Uninteresting)

Story: 4/10

Premise/Setting + 0 (Generic)
Pacing + 2 (Consistent)
Plausibility + 1 (Somewhat)
Complexity + 1 (Not much)
Conclusion + 0 (Not concluded)

Characters: 1/10

Personality/Presence + 0 (Close to none)
Motivations + 1 (Revenge)
Interpersonal Dynamics + 0 (Lacking)
Development + 0 (None)
Appeal + 0 (None)

Enjoyment: 1/10 (Only read this to write a review on it. Didn't enjoy a single thing.)

Current Score: 2.75/10 ~ 3/10 (Very Bad)