Toriko

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Toriko is pretty good. Please read it.

This series is something that I will always have fond memories of. I read this all the way through high school and it was possibly one of my favorite series ever. Bursting with character, creative ideas both by the SHIMABUKURO and his fans, and really AWESOME fights, Toriko is definitely something to behold.

Food is not just food in this series. SHIMABUKURO, throughout the series, shows the importance that food can have on society and the individuals that inhabit it. It is used not only to give sustenance, but it can be used to make economies thrive and helps us ... create deep, lasting relationships with others. Meals bring family's and friends together, and no matter how small or big the meal is, no matter how well it's cooked, it'll always be tastier when you and your loved ones are around the same table.

Though this series does have it's flaws (similar character designs, underdeveloped characters, a rushed final arc, etc.), I think it's still worth checking out.

I wanna put toriko as one of my all time favorites manga, I really do, but it’s just not an amazing manga contrary to what other reviewers say. It has too many flaws to be considered great. OG Gatsu nailed it pretty well.


[Warning, this review containers quite a bit of spoilers, DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPOILED]


Story: Pretty basic for a Shonen. Toriko and friends go to a new location to get a new food -> Monsters/Villain stands in their way to prevent Toriko and friends from reaching their goal -> the Monsters/Villains get defeated by Toriko and friends -> ... Toriko gets a new power up from said food, and decides on adding it to his full course -> Next Arc with these steps repeated.

It gets repetitive very quickly, and the overall structure doesn’t change much besides the Cooking Tournament Arc. Although, the ways the author goes about these steps are interesting, the best are the food pyramid and Meteor garlic arcs. But the rest are pretty much the same.


Characters: We have a large diverse cast of characters, the problem is that we barely have any of time to see the majority of them develop and after the arc their introduced in, their forgotten, barring exceptions like Match and Takimaru who appear as major characters in two separate arcs. But after that, they become irrelevant to the story.

The Gourmet Corps shows us a very large cast of villains with interesting designs, but they have the exact same problem, barely any of them are seen fighting, much less see them develop as characters. The only members that matter are Midora and The 3 sous chefs. Everyone else doesn’t matter. We are told that the head chefs are stronger then the sous chefs, but since we never seen them fight once, this point is moot.

Also on a side note on a thing that pisses me off, Tommyrod is said to have the strength to survive in the Gourmet World on his own, one of the few to be able to do so. Yet, he was defeated by a pre-Century Soup Toriko who couldn’t even get past the first area of it. Wtf is with the shitty sense of power scaling.

Later we are shown that a whole bunch of Gourmet Corp members have been brainwashed by Joie, but since we never seen these characters develop, who cares about them?

Now onto the main characters. Toriko is rather generic. He doesn’t have anything that really distinguishes him from other Shonen MCs. He always does what’s right because he’s supposed to be a righteous kind-hearted person. He’s a glutton. He loves fighting. He’s a genius at fighting, but stupid anywhere else. See where I’m going here? He has too many similarities with the most popular MCs like Luffy or Goku with nothing to call his own besides his blue hair.

Kamatsu is a Gary Stu chef in every cooking competition. He can cook ingredients that could take thousands of years (hint ANOTHER) and somehow reduce it 65 years. He makes the top best chefs like setsuno look like amateurs.

Alongside his bullshit cooking skills is his “food luck” ability, which is said he has one of the best food luck ever. E.G him getting dragged down the sand into the food pyramid EXACTLY at the level he needs to be at for the Mellow Cola, him somehow hitting the EXACT spot needed for PAIR to appear, him hitting the EXACT spot that is needed for AIR to fully ripen, etc. besides that, we don’t know much of Komatsu’s life other than the fact that he had two friends in the past.

Food luck is basically plot armor disguised as a precognition ability. Even then, this ability gets abused to the authors own needs whenever he wants. The reveal that astral sprits were the ones controlling food luck felt like a complete ass pull.

The other 3 Heavenly Kings are interesting in the beginning, but they get sidelined later on thanks to blatant author favoritism. Toriko gets 3 demons and they don’t? What the fuck? What makes toriko so special as too have 3 demons? Literally no one else has 3 demons, let alone 2. The 4 kings were equal in power pre-time skip, but after it Toriko easily bypasses them all and leaves them in the dust while he goes to save the world on his own. He only needed their help once in the pair Arc and that was it.


World Building: the world itself is interesting with unique locations. The problem? We don’t see enough of them! The world is like 4-5x larger then our world, yet we don’t even see 5% of the places it has. When we finally get to the Gourmet World after hundreds of chapters, it was a letdown. We only saw a couple of locations and that was it. Hell, we only saw a few parts of area 8, 7, 6, and 2! We have seen nothing of the other areas besides a few glimpses.

We don’t even see how the other items are gotten and how two people can acquire them by themselves when it took the whole group to acquire just one. And you know what puts the nail in the coffin? Zebra, Sunny, and CoCos dreams were to get the respective items of Acacia’s full course menu in these regions that we will never see. This would’ve been perfect to finally see them get their life long goal, but nope! Gotta rush to the end. 3 wasted arcs. This is just sad.

Toriko and crew also acquire a lot of nonsensical power ups that are forgotten after the Arc their introduced in. Enbu? The Martial arts style Toriko and gang needed to “defeat” Bambina and acquire PAIR? Well they used it in this Arc and never use it again. Food Honor? The system Toriko and gang needed to save calories for their attacks? Well they learn it, and it’s never brought up again. Heck, even the whole calorie system has been dropped. Many other examples exist. It’s as if the author forgets what he writes the previous chapters. The only things that stick are The strength boosts and Appetite demons.

The human world itself is pretty sinister if you look closely into it, if you don’t follow the worlds religion or don’t respect food the way they do, your ass is gonna land in the three harshest prisons or go to the chowlin temple and Ben forced to learn a mental discipline you probably never wanted to learn in the first place. Even as something as light as using a revitalizing kitchen knife is enough to be sent to the prison. Why? Don’t you realize the potential? If you used the rivitalizing knife, the food shortage after the Meteor Spice came wouldn’t have been as so impactful.

Food Honor encourages people to have fanatical levels of respectfulness me gratefulness towards for food. In return, they get more strength and speed. But, how are you supposed to to respect food 24/7 while your fighting and your daily life to keep your newly acquired power? I guess the author realized that and dropped the whole concept after that Arc. What hurts it more I see that there’s another concept called food pressure that does the exact same thing as food honor, but you don’t need to have the 24/7 food worship, you just need to have good intimidation skills and you’ll be granted the same power boost.

Why no one goes for the much easier alternative is beyond me, but probably because forcing food to do what you want is against the religions beliefs.

Now let’s go down to the capture levels, in the beginning they were rather tame and make sense. Level 100 was considered powerful enough to make Toriko go serious and a level 350 was considered a calamity like the Four Beast. After the timestop this system gets shat on and creates plotholes. In the timeskip, we get beasts that are in the 5000s, way stronger than anything the previous arcs showed us. That creates the question on how the four beast survived all of its battles against these creatures without getting owned.


It’s honestly sad how far toriko has fallen. Toriko was shown by toei to be the equal to one piece and dbz, but once the sales started failing, they threw it into the trash and immediately forgot about it. It’s all due to them and their heavy censorship of the anime that caused the low sales to happen. But even then, The authors own flaws as a writer brung Toriko down.

I bet you’re wondering “how can a shounen about food be interesting?”. I thought the same thing until I read it, and honestly it completely blew my expectations away... at first. I’ll explain what I mean later

Pros:
- Unique concept and setting (Can you name another battle manga about food?)
- Godly world building. Seriously, it’s one of the best in manga
- Amazing art, with brutal action sequences
- The hype is over 9000!!

These are the only pros I can think of for Toriko unfortunately, because i felt this series had a lot more flaws.

... Plot (3/10):
The story takes place in the Gourmet age, a world where people live and explore various delicious food to eat. Our main protagonist Toriko, and his partner Komatsu explore the world to find rare and exquisite ingredients, to accomplish Toriko’s dream of creating the best full course meal. Toriko’s the gourmet hunter who searches for the food and defeats any opponents that comes their way, meanwhile Komatsu’s the chef who prepares the food.

The plot is simple and repetitive e.g. Toriko and co. go on a quest to find a food-> Toriko arrives and has to fight some monster who doesn’t actually give af about the food-> villains shows up, Toriko fights them and wins-> Toriko gets a powerup from eating said food, then decides if he’ll put it on his full course. Rinse and repeat for 300+ chapters and you have Toriko.

[Warning spoilers]

Characters (4/10):
There’s a diverse, large cast of characters, but they lack basic characterisation and meaningful character development. Our main characters, the four heavenly kings are just as bad in this aspect because they’re static and never really grow or change much throughout the course of the series.

Toriko is pretty much your typical shounen protagonist with nothing that really differentiates him to other shounen MCs. He will always do what’s right because of how righteous and kind hearted he is. Toriko shares too many similarities to Goku e.g. Toriko loves fighting, he’s a glutton, he’s dumb but a genius at fighting and he even wears a knockoff gi outfit. Toriko is essentially Goku with blue hair.

Komatsu is our deuteragonist in the series, but we barely know much about his life. All we know is Komatsu is a weak coward who works as a chef in the famous Hotel Gourmet, that he went to chef school, he partners up with Toriko-san and goes on adventures with him and the rest of the heavenly kings.

That’s why the best written character in my opinion is Midora because he’s one of the few characters who’s: fleshed out really well, has interesting abilities, a clearly defined personality and motivation, gets a proper character arc and good character development. The rest of the villains are poorly written and generic.

This brings me to my next point, the main cast become less interesting and sidelined as time went on. There’s blatant writer favouritism with Toriko who’s revealed having 3 demons, yet they’re poorly explored. Before the timeskip, the 4 kings were around the same lvl, afterwards Toriko creates a large power gap and leaves them behind.

Komatsu becomes a gary sue chef e.g. any cooking competition, Komatsu’s able to prepare ingredients that would have taken 100+ yrs down to 30 mins. There’s no tension in his matches. He makes experienced chefs’ like Setsuna look like scrubs.

Enjoyment (5/10):
There’s a lot of nonsensical powerups our 4 heavenly kings recieve that become forgotten after the arc they’re introduced. The calories aspect to moves gets dropped too.

The timeskip was trash. The structure was atrocious e.g. the whole point of the timeskip got resolved during it- Komatsu got rescued. The 3 kings spent a year and couldn’t find air, yet Toriko comes back from training and finds it in less than 5 mins 🤦‍♂️

Everything goes downhill after the Pair arc. Sunny, Coco and Zebra’s journey for the main food that pertained to their dream got offscreened. That’s 3 wasted arcs. Zebra, Coco & Zebra Vs Joie got offscreened too.

There’s overused plot devices e.g. back channels, food luck. Food luck is the most nonsensical, broken ability I’ve seen in any shounen. It went from simple precognition to search for food, to characters spamming it in fights when food wasn't even relevant. I broke down in laughter when it was revealed astral spirits was what was helping them.

Furthermore, there’s the convulted drama with Accia, the talk no jutsu turning NEO into a good ‘thing’. Many plot points were never resolved. There’s a poorly written, one sided relationship with Toriko & Rin (which made their wedding look like a joke) and missed potential with space.

Overall (4/10):
Overall, I enjoyed Toriko for what it is, which is a “fun, hype fuelled adventure story about food”. There’s not many manga where I’ve felt immersed into it’s world like Toriko. However, I won’t deny it went downhill after the timeskip and became worse as it went on. Toriko turned into DBZ so bad with a ridiculous power escalation. It went from "Toriko and Co. are going to hunt this rare ingredient and make a dish that will make you reader's mouth drool" to fighting some retarded Majin buu like blob that was going to destroy the planet because “he wants to eat it”.

Once you’ve gotten over the hype and start to analyse the story deeper, it isn’t that great. Toriko’s a mediocre shounen