Taboo Tattoo

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Im re-doing this review because of how much i regret what i said the last time and im going to make this short and as least painful as possible.

The plot is about your average high school kid in japan (not very popular in school, female childhood friend, you know the type) named seigi, who saves an old man from some thugs. After saving him, this mysterious old man then gives seigi a crest, which burns a tattoo onto his hand, giving him special powers.

After this happens, the government gets involved. Seigi begins to learn to control his powers, fights random thugs/villains (there are ... some really awesome ones by the way) and gets deeper and deeper into this government world.

If you like the shounen genre, good battles, and the "main character gets powers and conquers his problems" types, then you will get an enjoyably good read out of this


Story 7, Art 8, Character 7, Enjoyment 9, Overall 8

tl;dr: A manga with some potential to the action and some good comedy but that fails at everything surrounding that.

This manga gets better as it goes on, but it’s still kind of a mess. The first third or so of the manga is simply complete nonsense where it feels like it has no clue what it wants to be or what it wants to do with characters being incredibly inconsistent, the tone shifting randomly in very jarring ways, and the pacing being awful. After that it seems to settle into what it wants to be, which is a fairly standard battle series with characters with ... extreme powers. It’s not all that great there either though, as most of the characters are pretty awful, with the majority being flat and the ones that are fleshed out not being all that great either. The action has potential at times, but it never feels like it really lives up to that due to the characters and plot not feeling like they’re that worth getting invested in.

The plot is also straightforward to the point of not being interesting. The villain with a tragic past wants to destroy humanity and needs to get a bunch of things in order to do so. The heroes want to stop that. Anything beyond that feels tangential and doesn’t really add to the narrative. The plot, especially the ending, is the kind that thinks it’s being deep, but is actually really boring in how standard it is at this point. In terms of themes it deals with pretty standard ones such as human nature being evil or how to stop violence, but it doesn’t do a really go into them properly and it just feels kind of braindead and superficial. This is especially annoying as it seems like it’s constantly going into exposition about random things for no reason. This manga is also really edgy. I have a very high tolerance for cheesy dumb edginess, even of the disgusting or vulgar kind, but this series had me constantly groaning over how stupid it was.

The comedy I think was kind of good, but it was kind of strange in that it was pretty constant throughout, even randomly in the middle of serious sequences. So it felt like the manga was the type that shouldn’t be taking itself seriously, but it also felt like was taking itself overtly seriously, so tonally it was off. I will note though, that a lot of the manga has to do with America, and the comedy relating to that from the point of view of an American was surprisingly relevant to current American society, though I don’t know if that was added in the translation or the original work.

The art I think had a good sense of style with a lot of really unique and good looking character designs. Thus it did manage to look good at times, especially with the covers and simple color pages. However, beyond that overall it felt pretty low quality and amateurish, especially when it came to the more detailed portions that just looked overtly busy most of the time.

In the beginning, the story seems pretty cool. Essentially a kid get mysterious powers from a stranger as a thank you. A pretty cool hero origin. But once the story picks up, and you meet more characters, the story begins to get muddied by an over-the top amount of characters you have to remember, which gets difficult when characters change their appearance or "side" or reveal themselves as a double agent.... But the "powers" are cool none the less. The idea was cool, but it just got too confusing and complicated in terms of the story, so I dropped it. But if you can keep ... a flow chart of characters in your mind, all the power to you lol. Also the fact the main "bad guy" which is the princess is a pervert makes is so dumb. Anyways, that's about it lol.