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Blazing Ninjaman seems to be a series with alot of potential, that regrettably ends up being a mixed bag due to alot of rushed creative decisions. From a master of manga Kazuhiko Shimamoto, it seems to be him throwing a whole bunch of things at the wall to see what sticks, but never quite landing on a winning formula.

Plot: About this guy named Ninja who becomes a ninja and joins his high school's ninja club, and eventually morphs into this conspiracy story about ninjas vs other ninjas who want to take over the world. Theres also alot of romantic comedy throughout the scenes of ninjas ... shooting fireballs at each other and the humor always landed well with me. The overall thrust of the story is kind of forgettable, and suffers from changing gears multiple times in a short run (from school vs school, to romcom, to tournament arc, to worldwide ninja conspiracy, and the author never totally sure if its to be taken seriously or not). The parts that do work well are the individual character interactions on a chapter to chapter basis, which are always funny and entertaining. I get the sense that Kazuhiko struggled with popularity of the series throughout its run, and therefore tried many different things in an attempt to find an audience. I think the series is honestly at its best earlier on, and loses some appeal as it tries to become more complicated. 6/10.

Art: Always a strong suit. Very dynamic action, lots of double page spreads, good character designs, just overall a pleasure to look at. 9/10

Characters: A main boy and girl who are memorable and likable, but the size of the cast grows a bit too rapidly and some of the interesting side characters end up with nothing to do. Like Mantaro's rival, he pretty much disappears with no explanation. Or his uncle, who is introduced and promptly has nothing to do in the story. There are also many characters who get added in the last few chapters to shore up loose ends, but ultimately the series is made weaker by its large cast and functioned better with a couple of well written and likable protagonists. 6/10

Overall, a well drawn and often funny shonen series that struggles from a very disorganized creative vision. It doesnt overstay its welcome and theres more good than bad, but its frustrating to think it could have been as good as some of the authors other works if not cut short.

I usually dont write reviews for series that oher people already have, but this manga was such a piece of shit that I had to.

Story: Paper thin. Theres this female teacher who has no experience with men but who also loves sucking dick and titty fucking people shes just met, and she falls in love with this student who has no personality at all but "is kind". Alot of the chapters dont advance the story at all and its just other characters imagining fucking the main character. This makes it impossible to tell what actually is happening, since sometimes youll be reading an implausible sex ... scene and it will turn out to actually be happening even though it makes no sense, and youre like "wait shouldnt that have been a dream sequence". Theres also a lot of 'will they wont they' tension, but this doesnt really work because the main characters suck each other off literally every time they meet and are just like "no we cant do this" even though theyve came like 7 times already. The series ends with the characters breaking up and the main female lead using the main characters napkins that he jacked off into as masturbation aids for 4 years (this is not a joke).

Art: 90% of the art is just the luscious tits of the female lead. Hes pretty good at drawing nudity, I don't know why hes publishing in a mainstream magazine instead of just drawing regular porn. Backgrounds suck, character designs suck, bit too much censorship for a work whose sole point of interest is sex.

Characters: Innocent porn star female lead, protagonist kun boyfriend, a bunch of teachers who want to rape another teacher. Never bothered remembering anyones name.

Overall: I wish id just read porn. The art is decent, but the story is so dumb that it actually made me appreciate the well thought of coherent narratives of the Brazzers franchise.

3/10

From the mind that brought you the batshit insane antics of "Riki-oh" comes another manga about over the top kungfu with great art.

Story: Not really trying to reinvent the wheel, its about this badass guy doing karate and fucking up bad guys, often while ripping out of his shirt and with women swooning in the background. The story definitely got cut short by a cancelation, which leads to it kinda feeling disjointed, but its interesting enough and gives some character motivations for all the karate chicanery. It somehow manages to both go too long and feel cut short simultaneously. 6/10

Art: Awesome, easily the highlight ... of the work. Very conspicuously inspired by Fist of The North Star and the classic work of Tetsuo Hara, the pages are a treat to look at, very aesthetic and impactful. I would have liked a little bit more gore and I'm not sure about the artist's decision to depict characters as literal giants (it kinda fit the post apocalyptic vibe of FOTNS, but why is there a 20 foot tall guy in just normal modern Japan?) but those are small gripes in the midst of overall high quality work. 10/10

Characters: Forgettable, but youre not here for the characters. 5/10

Overall: Good cheesy 80's action, will be appreciated by fans of early JoJo, HnK, or later similar works like Baki. Even if you dont enjoy those pieces, its short and doesnt overstay its welcome.

7/10

A prototype story for Ayakashi triangle. It seems Kentaro Yabuki wanted to test out the idea of a martial artist being turned into a girl and then having a series with lots of ecchi, martial arts, and yuri undertones. BUT, while this later became a full length work, this is only 6 pages and doesnt really contain much content. Its notable mainly just to see how it later evolved into a finished work, but unlike some prototypes which are self-contained this all feels very random and disjointed without knowing it was later expanded on.

Still, worth a read if you enjoy ayakashi triangle, or are ... just a completionist for Yabuki, the degenerate who brought the world To-Love ru, darling in the franxx, and other series youre not allowed to read within 100m of children.

TLDR: Kenshiro working for the IRS.

The stereotype of a "maverick cop who won't play by the rules" is pretty well established in fiction, but never quite has that been done in a story about investigating tax evasion and embezzlement. But thats just what Nakabou Rintarou is, splitting his time between smoking cigars, bedding beautiful women, beating up Yakuza, and uncovering the shady financial dealings of Japan's industrial and political elite. The whole notion sounds kind of ridiculous, but the story takes itself seriously enough that it somehow all works.

Story: 8. With late 1990s Japan severely beset by economic problems with the popping of the economic ... bubble, the public is none too happy with the close alliance between money and politics. Thus we get badass police officers investigating these dealings to establish financial transparency and restore order to the world economy. The story isnt very long, but its very unique and consistently interesting, while also exploring the seedy underbelly of Japan's byzantine ruling class.

Art: 10. Tetsuo Hara is one of the greatest manga artists of all time, not really up for debate, and his skill is on full display here. His use of shading and dark tones makes every manly character look like theyre about as strong and heavy as a black hole, and is just a pleasure to look at.

Character: 7. A little forgettable with the exception of the cigar chomping Nakabo Rinataro, who makes Kenshiro look like a 98 pound nerd.

Enjoyment: 8. Just alot of fun to be had reading, once you get past the occasionally boring segways into financing and such.

Overall: 8. Would recommend, good work done by Hokuto no Gun scanning it.

Tetsuo Hara gave us Fist of The North Star, an all-time classic of manly 80's manga. He also gave us this, an extremely forgettable action manga about a guy who looks just like Kenshiro.

Story: Something about aliens and corrupt politicians being unwilling to execute teenagers. It makes no sense, was probably intended to be longer and ended very suddenly. 3

Art: Tetsuo Hara does great and detailed art work, though you could critique the fact all his works look exactly the same. But if it aint broke, why fix it, and the art is definitely the high point of the work. 9

Character: lmao I finished reading ... it 5 minutes ago and cant even remember the characters. Bill Clinton shows up at one point, so that was cool. 2

Enjoyment: Its a goofy, well drawn, empty calories manga for people who thought Hokuto no Ken was too subtle. Can easily be read in under an hour, check it out if you enjoy manly martial arts stuff. 5

Overall: 5

Raw Hero is a work that alot of people reading it probably have an in-grained bias towards, as Akira Hiramoto lost a great deal of good will among fans after the controversial ending to Prison School. This being his first project since PS ended, readers tend to hold that ending against Raw Hero. Putting aside real life events, is Raw Hero any good? It is one of the weirdest works ive ever read, with bizarre plot plots, insane character motivations and backstories, extremely over the top fanservice, and you're basically more than halfway done the manga before the plot even starts. Point by point:

Story: Super ... weird. Sets itself up as kind of an X-Men superhero story, before becoming a crossdressing harem romance, with some chapters of pure sex comedy and some chapters of shonen fight scenes. I'm honestly not sure it even has a plot, given how seemingly random everything is. At the very least, the ending is extremely dissapointing, giving zero resolution to the romance, the superhero plots, and literally not mentioning what happened to a few of the major characters. The manga might be trying to make some kind of point that fixating on the larger plot is pointless and you should just have fun along the way, but it just comes off as disjointed and unsatisfying. I'd give it 4/10.

Art: Looks very similar to Prison School, which is to say really great. It emphasizes a sense of photorealism, which really highlights the clash between the insane events and the realistic visuals. Hiramoto also draws maybe the most fetishy manga women I've ever seen outside of Hentai, so if you enjoy that style you'll like this. 9/10

Character: Characters are polarizing, since they're not very fleshed out and seem to more be tools for comedy than actual human beings with personalities. I wanted to avoid making this whole review a comparison to Prison School, but the characters in PS had fleshed out personalities and were easy to become emotionally invested in, which I can't really say was the case for Raw Hero.

Enjoyment: Despite having so many flaws on a technichal level, the work is so idiosyncratic its hard not to at least have some fun with it. Hiramoto has a weirdly philosophical sense of humor and an earnest approach to life, so there are parts of it that are fun to read, but you have to get through the thick layer of bizarre crap and unexplained plot points to get to it.

Overall: 5/10. Its a work with alot of flaws, but at the very least it will stand out in your memory.

Final thoughts: Prison School's ending pissed people off because it was a manga they loved and the ending robbed them of a satisfying conclusion. While this ending was also rushed and unsatisfying (it may have been axed prematurely) I don't actually care enough about the story to be that upset by it.

Thanks to AloneScans for making it available in english

A quick, pretty average manga that is made more interesting by its rarely featured subject matter.

Story: 5. A traditional western story about the real life western Lawman Wyatt Earp, who is foundational to the American mythos of the "Wild West" of the late 19th century. The story is too short to really cover much ground, but its a decently entertaining story about exacting justice in a land where law and order has broken down. I get the hint the manga was meant to be longer (as it lays some foreshadowing that never gets followed up on) but its fine for what it is. I found ... aspects of the story a little ridiculous.

Art: 6. Not great, not terrible. I thought it was a poor artistic choice to depict all the main characters as handsome young men. Besides being historically inaccurate, the story and setting want to be gritty, but the main characters look like they just stepped out of Haikyuu. If youre going to tell a story about the WIld West, at least embrace a rugged, masculine art style, since theres alot of dissonance between the setting and the character design in this version.

Character: 5. Dissapointing. Kind of annoyed they were all very white-washed from the real life versions of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, both of whom were extremely interesting and flawed human beings, who have in this version have lost alot of their nuance.

Enjoyment: 6. Even though theres many flaws, its too short for them to really become unbearable, and its rare to see the Western genre in manga form (its this or Steel Ball Run) so it still managed to keep me entertained.











If you're looking for manga westerns, its basically this or Steel Ball Run. A

Baki Dou (2018) is still relatively early in its run (60ish chapters in what will likely end up being a couple hundred) but I thought I'd write this review to encapsulate some of my problems with the early parts of the series, how it continues some of the biggest flaws of the previous series and why so far this has been more or less the nadir of the long Baki series.

First, the good. Baki still has great art. The art is detailed and has a sense of weight that feels very rare in modern manga. Everything Itagaki draws has a sense of momentum and vitality ... to it, and it makes the fight scenes feel very meaningful and impactful. Secondly, Baki is still weird, and this gives it a surreal sense of charm that makes it hard not to love. Whether its Conor McGregor lookalikes or sumo wrestlers participating in rock climbing, it is still consistently memorable. There are very few series that seem to have the earnest sense of passion that Baki has, and this remains true over 130 volumes into this long, LONG, series.

Now for where things go wrong (spoilers forthcoming). Baki Dou (2014) managed to annoy people with how it seemingly overwrote the original ending of the series, where Baki fights Yujiro and everyone goes home fairly happy. It opted to introduce an entirely new character, who was far stronger than the established main cast, while also being less interesting and likeable. In a bid to make this new character threatening, he came in and kicked the crap out of characters who fans actually did like, hogged the spotlight as far as storytelling, and more or less seemed designed to artificially extend a series that had reached its natural conclusion.

Why am I rehashing this? Because this series HAS THE EXACT SAME FORMULA. A new character, never previously mentioned, who is a famous martial artist from a prior era of Japanese history, shows up, hands established beloved characters their own ass (sorry Oliva) and then gets a bunch more chapters to stress how great and undefinable they are. This could get better from here, but what I've described is basically the story up till this point. And it all just feels so unnatural and uninteresting after I've been invested in the story up till this point.

So, in conclusion, Baki remains a very weird and very well drawn martial arts series with alot of unique appeal, but the story has been pushed beyond its original scope repeatedly and new, uninteresting characters are being pushed over the ones people actually wanted to see. I hope it gets better from here, but so far it just doesnt have the sheer awesomeness of the earlier parts of the series.

Thanks to Spinybackteam for making the series readable in english.

Story: 5
Art: 9
Character: 6
Enjoyment: 6
Overall: 6

Firstly, for anyone interested in reading this it was published about halfway through the publication of Kengan Ashura, so it will be much more enjoyable if youve at least read the first 50% of KA. For the most part, this is an enjoyable if not particularly necessary preuqel.

Story: Most of the chapters are just looks into the stories of some of the main KA characters prior to the beginning of the series. These are fine on their own, but they dont feature much in the way of the series best strength, namely its fight scenes. The lack of action causes some of these chapters to ... drag. The standout chapter is "The Conqueror", which focuses on one of the most enigmatic KA characters, whom did not have his origin explored in the main series.
TLDR: The Conqueror is a 9, everything else is a 6

Art: Consistently great, just like the regular series. Doesnt have any great drawings of fight scenes, but still well done

Character: This will ultimately come down to which characters you personnally enjoyed from the main series, but I thought it was weird how this gaiden focused on some of the least interesting KA characters who already had been explored alot in the main series. There were some fighters with pretty limited screentime who could have benifited from getting space in this volume, but its still basically an enjoyable read.

Overall: 7. This volume doesnt really deserve to be its own entry, since it functions much better as volume 13.5 of Kengan Ashura than it does as an actual independant prequel, but if you enjoyed the main series you should enjoy this as well.