Shikkoku no Ten
Pitch-Black Ten

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tl;dr: A shounen battle manga that doesn’t really fit its subject matter and felt really half assed.

This feels like a manga that never really goes anywhere. The premise is somewhat interesting in that the antagonistic faction is a literal Christianity inspired death cult and the main characters are a guy that left said death cult and the girl that persuaded him to do so. The issues are that it doesn’t feel like it’s treating any of this with the seriousness it should be. As the villains are a death cult that believe death leads to salvation, there’s certainly room to explore some pretty heavy themes ... relating to the value of life, death, happiness, etc. The thing is that saying that this manga tackled these in even a superficial manner would be charitable. It kind of sort of mentions them but doesn’t really do anything with them properly at all ever. This is probably because this is a pretty standard shounen battle manga that actually feels like it’s targeted mainly at kids. But the manga still heavily revolves around death, which means that scores of people randomly die pretty much every chapter, but because this doesn’t seem to want to ever get even close to heavy or dark, the manga just sort of glosses over that, which results in a very strange tone that just feels weird and hard to get into. Beyond that it doesn’t really do anything too badly, but it doesn’t do anything well either. In terms of characters, plot, action, and comedy it’s all okay as far as shounen battle manga go, but never good enough to be particularly memorable. Still, these aspects are elements that generally take time to properly flesh out in shounen battle manga, and this manga simply doesn’t last long enough to do so at all. The manga very quickly comes to a resounding flop of an ending that likely came about as a result of the manga being axed as it was clearly forced and resolved nothing. The art was also pretty generic and not particularly good quality either.