May 6, 2021
Overall relatively mediocre but with good art. The manga has some very good visuals especially at the start, and the mystery aspect of it is pretty engaging, however it quickly starts to fall apart.
The characters are mostly boring until they're about to die which is when the author remembers they forgot to make you care about them, so they have to put in some backstory to make it sad. This happens for most of the characters at the start, some characters are developed later and do actually have good arcs, Shion/Nurugai being the best written characters in the entire manga. They actually change in a
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meaningful way as the events of the story play out, it's nothing spectacular but it's well done and the two are a likeable team. The main characters Sagiri and Gabimaru are unfortunately pretty boring. Gabimaru's entire character is really that he seems like a bad guy but because he loves his wife he's actually a nice guy, and Sagiri's entire arc is that accepting her weaknesses make her strong. Ultimately I found the side characters a lot more interesting, they're more stakes and character development, Gabimaru is just an extremely boring shonen protaganist, while Sagiri is better I still didn't care that much. All the side characters like the brothers, Yuzuriha and Tamiya Gantetsusai are more interesting albeit still not great.
Another major problem is the pacing, it seems like the author had the structure planned out but didn't put much thought into how these events connect or why. For about five fights in a row we hear from characters that they're at their limit from fighting and could die if they make one mistake, well the fight ends and then not even few hours later another fight starts and the process repeats. The issue here is there's just no tension, characters are pushed to their limit and then go on to fight an even tougher enemy in this weakened state multiple times, it's not a one off occurence. Even a quick explanation of "I need to rest for 30 minutes to gather tao from my surroundings before I can fight" would have sufficed but especially from the middle to the end it's just a nonstop string of fights with increasingly tougher enemies.
This pacing issue is also really noticeable at the end, it's almost comical how the way the author tries to increase tension is adding a bunch of characters we don't care about to die to really up the stakes. During the final confrontation a second group out Iwagakure and Asaemon show up, it's been teased throughout the manga, these characters are tough and you're looking forward to how they impact the story, and then they really don't. The Iwagakure except for one are all just cannon fodder, they could have brought 50 or 100 or 500, it's totally irrelevant. The Asaemon are all boring and extremely forgettable, none of them except for Shugen and Jikka are memorable. Shugen is only memorable because he plays a major role in the ending confrontation with the main antagonist, however his character is another that is just extremely boring. If Jikka had never left the island and a second expedition was never launched, it would have almost no affect on the story, the only point to it was to try and make the ending more exciting by introducing a ton of new characters to fight who are even more boring than the ones we already have.
The ending aside from that is fine, I liked the final antagonist Rien more than the rest of the Tensen group, Tao Fa and Ju Fa were the only other Tensen that were interesting. What happens after the final confrontation was also good. The author does have talent no doubt but I was not surprised to see this was their first full work. I'd pay attention to their future works but Jigokuraku as it is has a lot of issues that are hard to ignore.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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