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"If you let your enemies kill you, you win"

Vinland Saga is one of the highest rated manga on the site and a part of the seinen "big three" with Berserk and Vagabond, so when I sat down to read it I expected at best a new favorite, at worst perhaps an overrated but still fun manga about cool vikings.

What I did not expect was the most vile manga i've ever had the displeasure of reading. This thing cannot be considered a story, just a rant by an author who knows nothing about history or war but wants to tell you that violence is bad, war ... is bad, revenge is bad, vikings are bad, you're bad for liking them and the only things that are good are working on a farm and letting your enemies kill you.

Some concede that Vinland Saga "declines" after 100 chapters or so but it was disgusting from the very beginning, it just got worse. The first event of the manga is the protagonists father letting himself be killed when he could easily save himself, orphaning his son to a life of misery and leaving his wife a widow, and this is portrayed as the most ascended wise thing ever because "a true warrior...doesn't need a sword!" The climax of the "Farm arc", one of the most praised manga arcs of all time, is a hilarious scene where the protagonist, also now a pacifist for some reason despite seeing how badly it worked out for his dad, lets himself get beaten to a pulp and his enemy thinks this is such a moving scene they do what he says and immediately call off their invasion.

After the 100 chapter mark containing the two "masterpiece" (lol) arcs of the manga, we only sink to lower and lower depths. During some of the most boring meandering that makes post Golden Age Berserk look positively focused, we meet Hild the girl genius, who started an early industrial revolution all by herself when she was 10 before she turned master bear hunter, but don't worry she's not a Mary Sue because she is self conscious about a tiny cool looking scar. Later we meet a big hulking man who wants to be a woman. Our characters, being the authentic people from 1000 years ago that they are, immediately accept and love the cute and valid trans girl, chide the mean villain for misgendering her and she joins the crew (I do not care about LGBT and political stuff like this but I hate anachronism, and anachronisms are constant in this manga)

We skip past what could've been an interesting visit to Greece and so we can finally get to "Vinland" (America) the current arc of the manga where we get nothing but tiresome "philosophizing" about the inevitable conflict between natives and Europeans. By the way, the natives have magical future sight powers that allowed them to see the progression of war up until the nuclear bomb (this is after Norse Mythology like Valhalla was explicitly shown to not be real).

I can keep going, the problems with Vinland Saga are endless but I understand that some do not consider these to be problems. If this doesn't sound too bad for you then give it a shot but for me the mere description of this content would've warded me off even starting, and I was only pushed on by my enjoyment of my anger. The series has its good points, the art is solid, Thorkell is funny and Askeladd's arc is the best thing about it probably. But it still gets a 1, because beyond being bad it made me want to puke and is my new least favorite manga of all time.

The best slice of life ever.

Before getting into it i'll admit this review is biased due to sentimentality, this is the first manga I read completely in Japanese (I suggest you make it your first as well as it is very understandable while still introducing a fair bit of vocab) so naturally I spent a lot more time on it than most manga, and associate it with good memories.

Still, there's a good reason よつばと！ doesn't have a single bad or even mixed review on MAL, and that's because it's damn great. Almost every single chapter is hilarious and memorable, Yotsuba herself is an adorable ... true to life portrayal of a dumb kid, the other characters are also well written and bounce off each other fantastically, and there's basically not a single thing wrong with it. It's the kind of manga only someone actually interested in people could write.

The art is cute and expressive, often there are pages with few to no words that just let the excellent panelling flow take the storytelling wheel. While the art is usually simple and efficient as befitting a comedy SoL the artist will flex and draw beautiful architecture and nature just because he can.

I could keep going but honestly よつばと！ doesn't need me to praise it. It's great, you already knew it was great, an entire website of degenerates even has Yotsuba as their mascot and one sacred cow because it's so great, go read it (In Japanese) if you haven't already.

The art in this manga is possibly the best I have ever seen, easy 10/10, I must say if I were to ever write a manga I would want this man as the artist. It has a delicious faux-90's quality to it with sharp black and white contrast that I love, it gets so creative with the paneling and the designs of the beastmen/women and the spreads of the Mesoamerican imagery in particular are magnificent. I would recommend this title to most people on the strength of the art alone, it's seriously that good.

So why mixed feelings? Well there's a problem with Kouya. Kind of ... the biggest problem a manga can have.

The story and characters are not very good. Not irredeemable but subpar to say the least.

It's all very fast paced and has a bunch of different organizations and minor characters (a great portion of the dialogue is dedicated to expositing about this) all after our amnesia having MC for different reasons. Basically it's just a vehicle to get the reader from one incredible looking sequence to the next, which is fun for what it is but leaves you not caring at several moments that should be emotional because these characters give you no reason to be attached to them or their relationships. Indeed there is only one character from this series you see posted everywhere and that's Makura. Fittingly this isn't because of the strength of her writing but because she's a sexy well designed monkey waifu.

If you did somehow get yourself emotionally invested despite the lack of reasons to, prepare to have it dampened every time the too frequent meta humor interrupts a serious moment. I wouldn't call this more than an annoyance usually but there's an entire poorly integrated subplot dedicated to meta humor about being a mangaka.

But it didn't have to be like this! The concepts of the story are so cool! I love beastification stuff! I love Mesoamerican mythology and i'm happy to see a manga utilize it! I even love the somewhat cliche points about humanity it tries to make!

But concepts aren't enough, because I know if it had average art i'd probably forget about it the second I finished it and it's all down to the frustrating execution. Still, it does have it's art so even though I just called it a subpar story i'm going to give it a 6/10 and a cautious recommendation just because I love looking at it and it's sexy monkey so much.

Kengan Ashura with furries. If you want to see that concept executed far better than it should be, you need to read this manga.

I can't believe this thing is below a 7 on MAL, loads of crap manga have only sex and violence going for them yet get rated way higher than Killing Bites which combines that appeal with tight well paced tournament storytelling, dynamic art that gets better as the series progresses, consistently funny humor and a cast of lovable characters. I couldn't believe my eyes when something I expected to be fun schlock managed to emotionally move me, more than once!

I like the ... animalistic moral compass of this series, it's refreshing for a series to present actions as they are without judgement. This leads to scenes that could understandably turn a lot of people off so I'll say if you don't want to see rape, odd fetishes or "bad" people go unpunished then you should probably give this one a pass.

Speaking of animals, the author clearly loves them. The narrator bombards you with mostly accurate animal facts to explain why fights turn out the way they do. I usually dislike this sort of explanation of abilities in fights but since it's tied to Biology which I find interesting it actually works for me. This information doesn't just aid the fights but also cleverly ties in to why characters act the way they do.

Killing Bites isn't perfect of course, the main problem for me is the fakeout deaths which takes away from the premise a bit. In addition some fights are a bit anticlimactic, some animal "facts" are more like asspull powerups and the story is unfinished so I can't give it a full appraisal yet.

None of that stops me from thoroughly enjoying myself with every chapter of this underrated gem.

Sadly, Shingeki no Kyojin has completely jumped the shark.

*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*

Story (3/10)

The first half of the season is exciting and may trick you into believing that SnK is peak fiction, until the hype wears off and you realise that it has introduced ancient genie worms, (pseudo) time travel, hard determinism, a 2000-year-old stockholm syndrome loli and the end of the world at the 11th hour of the show, and that these aren’t concepts the story can handle going forward.

The second half throws all the potential complexity of the story out the window for a cliché “former enemies team up for the greater good against ... the ultimate evil” final arc. This part is boring, tonally off and somehow both rushed and drawn out. It also becomes incessantly preachy about war and hate, what happened to all that “nature is cruel, fight for yourself” energy of S1-3?

Characters (2/10)

Easily the worst part of the season, most of the cast are a shadow of their former selves. Eren developed into a cartoonish omnicidal final villain offscreen, Mikasa and Armin have lost all their qualities to become despicable wastes of oxygen, and don’t get me started on Connie.

The real crime occurs during the alliance team up. Characters personalities, motivations and histories are skimmed over in one episode before these former enemies fight as one cohesive unit forevermore, all past crimes pushed to the side. These are not characters anymore, they are action figures for SnK to play with.

Furthermore, SnK seems to have no idea how to assign screentime to it’s bloated, plot armoured cast, as core characters like Levi and Historia get less focus than nobodies like Yelena and Onyankopon. As a parting insult, the final episode abuses three main characters for shipwar bait.

Visuals (5/10)

MAPPA’s adaptation has certainly improved from the first part, the CGI is much better and well used, there’s more 2D titans and episodes 3, 5, 6 and 11 have some impressive sequences. That said, the ugly shading, ever-present filters, bizarre directing choices and off-model faces are here to stay. Ultimately, comparing even the best parts to S1E1 makes you mourn what could’ve been.

Sound (6/10)

The old SnK soundtrack is great as always despite some inappropriate uses of it. The new music is a mixed bag but the OP and ED are fire. The sound design is alright, the voice acting is mostly good with some exceptions like Armin’s unfitting VA. Eren, Zeke and Connie's VAs are the standouts for me.

Enjoyment (4/10)

I have a love/hate relationship with SnK; I love the ideas, but the actual product frustrates me immensely. It makes me want to dissect and argue about it, hence the review.

Overall (4/10)

It’s not the worst thing in the world, it only becomes that when you compare it to the show it once had the potential to be.