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Mar 16, 2023
Takuma Kurosumi, young head of the Kokuyo-Kai clan, fears only two things: talking to a girl and going to the dentist. Everything changes when he meets Tomori Shirayuki at the Pearl Dental Clinic, a young doctor who knows how keep him at bay. From this premise I thought the plot of this manga revolved around the comedic interactions between a dentist and a terrifying looking yakuza who happens to overcome his fear thanks to her.
What a disappointment.
You have an annoying dentist-yakuza with a cross-dressing fetish and an inept protagonist who gets turned on by talking about poop and toilet analogies. The twists and misunderstandings
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are too demential, a conglomerate of repetitive gags that aren't funny. The artstyle is mediocre and bland: idiotic characters with same face syndrome. If you don't have the sense of humor of a schoolboy in the throes of an hormonal storm, stay away from this trashy thing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jan 31, 2023
Given the grim cover and the setting, late 19th century England, I was hoping "From the Red Fog" would be an interesting story with a controversial protagonist, but sadly this manga turned out to be a wasted opportunity, because it's bad, really bad.
The story begins in an unspecified city in the English province and the protagonist is a boy named Ruwanda. Her mother is immediately introduced as the most ferocious killer in the world, who kept him locked up in an underground room throughout his childhood to deal with "fixing the corpses" for her. At one point he runs away and starts killing random people.
Even
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though he is presented as someone who since birth "never felt the sun's rays on him", as soon as he steps out into the outside world he doesn't suffer any kind of shock. So it completely bypasses how the outcast is supposed to experience an unfamiliar world for the first time. Ingenuities like this are innumerable, but nonetheless the story takes itself ridiculously seriously. Other examples are wanting you to believe that a frail little boy who has lived in unsanitary conditions in a cellar for 12 years has the strength to slit the throat of a large adult - the same adult by whom, on page one, he was easily blocked in an half rape scene thrown there, or that he is capable of learning fighting techniques from an expert assassin in just one night, who knows how to hold a gun without ever having seen one, who is very intelligent for his age and therefore knows how to get by in any situation.
Even wanting to leave out all this because it is still a shonen and within certain limits a little absurdity could even be tolerated, the most serious flaw is the terrible narrative rhythm: everything is too fast, often there is no continuity between the panels, so much so that it seems to be reading a series of events thought individually and stuck together without any logic. All then seasoned with trivial and embarrassing dialogues.
The secondary characters are all forgettable and have a non-existent characterization, essentially they appear and the next page they are taken out, also in the clumsy attempt to redeem the protagonist in the eyes of the reader, they are more or less all presented as bullies who want to hurt him. The adults in this manga, on the other hand, are apparently all imbeciles since no one can stop him.
After various pages in which exactly the same things follow one another, at a certain point the villain of the situation comes into play who, we don't know how, becomes aware of the protagonist's great abilities and wants to use him to dominate the world through the traffic of a some kind of drug - the platitude fair. He is presented as an apparently wealthy and influential man who has a group of henchmen on his side, the "cruelest and most evil killers", but obviously in their place he hires Ruwanda, this little killer boy found by pure chance because, quote from the text, " he will change the world”. Okay, the Victorian age became known for child labor and in the manga itself the children of the slums are shown in inhumane conditions, but this is an exaggeratedly stupid gimmick, the meeting between the two and the motivations behind their collaboration could certainly be handled more plausibly.
The psychological introspection of the protagonist is too inconsistent, the insights necessary for a story with similar premises are missing. Everything is based on the superficial picture of a childhood characterized by the sketchy figure of an absent and abusive mother, what is supposed to be his tragic inner conflict would be wanting to find friends but at the same time wanting to kill them, against the background of some tearful skit full of set phrases and comic moments badly inserted into the narrative. In fact, they clash annoyingly with the gloomy atmosphere established from the beginning, proving the lack of continuity and the ill-defined temperament of the characters. In summary, Ruwanda is not interesting at all.
The gory scenes are poorly drawn, going against what should be the horror nature of the manga itself. Faced with such scenes, being so frequent and repetitive, one remains almost indifferent, since they are absolutely devoided of pathos.
This manga is clearly the immature and pretentious work of an amateur, I struggle to understand why it has been published.
A better work with a madman as the protagonist, who succeeds in everything this manga fails in, with well-conceived gory scenes and a truly ruthless protagonist but still appreciable in his madness, is "Brutal: Satsujin Kansatsukan no Kokuhaku".
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Nov 19, 2022
"In this world, everyone is made the same. They all have that fake innocent expression on their faces, but the truth is they're all nothing more than animals in clothes. And it's terrifying".
Mako Higari is the protagonist of this story, a 29 years old hygiene freak, with a singular pathology that makes her nose bleed profusely (it’s exagerated to the extent that it's like a crime scene every time) as soon as she comes in contact with something dirty, whether they are objects or people, a condition that limits her life considerably.
With an effective mix of odd and funny moments, this manga shows the
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reality of those suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder: loneliness. Mako will desperately seek out a partner who will accept her for who she is and help her have a more normal life.
The plot never becomes corny, with the ability to deal with such delicate issues with an ironic tone and at the same time also showing the right amount of drama.
From a bizarre and grotesque incipit, with quite unexpected developments, we arrive in the end with a deeper message of acceptance: in choosing between compulsively repudiating in fear everything that is dirty or wanting to wallow in it blissed, where "dirt" takes on a sinful meaning, which contains deceptions, love and even destiny.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Aug 5, 2022
Brutal: Satsujin Kansatsukan no Kokuhaku follows the life of Hiroki Dan, a detective of the homicide squad who has a secret identity: he is actually a serial killer.
The manga opens by instilling in the reader a feeling of distrust of the police, powerless in some cases beyond the reach of the law, where doing justice to the victims seems an unattainable end, thus causing malfunctions and abuse.
And that’s where Dan comes in, taking care of the unpunished in his own way.
The first case presented involves an assassin, Souzen Yoshi, clearly inspired by the terrifying crimes actually committed by “the Otaku assassin,” Tsutomu Miyazaki. In fact,
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he kills two girls at the age of 16 and sends the remains of the corpses to their families. He serves 18 years in prison and once outside, as a free man, he presents himself repentant in a television lounge in a disgusting script, in an attempt to receive forgiveness from public opinion. The truth is that he is not really sorry, is satisfied remembering what he has committed, would do it again and refuses to apologize to the families of the victims. In addition, mocking the people around him, he concludes an agreement with a publishing house to write a book about his life. And this is where Dan comes into action who performs, as he calls them, one of his “good deeds”: he finds him and subjects him to the same suffering he has inflicted on his victims.
And this is how the manga goes on, episodically structured and with the absence of an horizontal plot (at least for the 5 volumes released so far): always with the same modus operandi, in the most disparate situations and occasions, Dan finds his victims - people capable of all treachery, dangerous to society or criminals who escaped justice - and as the title suggests, he kills them brutally.
He repeatedly claims not to do it out of revenge, but for himself, to admire satisfied the desperate face of executioners when subjected to atrocities similar to those they have inflicted on others. The arrogant side of Dan will soon show up: always confident, he will commit murder after murder following his own moral code.
The protagonist feels joy in what he does and in feeling omnipotent, in being in control of justice. Those who he kills are criminals, which makes it easy for him to justify his actions and be at peace with himself because, after all, they deserved it.
Given his abilities, he is considered affable and reliable in the workplace, he is esteemed by everyone for his charisma. In the eyes of the reader, despite the awareness that the actions he performs do not make him very different from the terrible people he kills, with his sometimes eccentric ways he is almost fascinating: the tic in the eye, the hobby (if it can be called that) of pottery, his almost comic passion for the film “The Exorcist” (to which many references are made) and the gestures with which he performs wicked actions.
In fact, the authors do a great job of presenting human scum of all kinds, selectively highlighting only the most disgusting aspects of their being and effectively eliminating any possibility of empathizing with them or feeling sorry, so that the reader can’t wait Dan enters the scene to give them what they deserve.
Dan with his duality is an enigmatic character, he will not get lost in ruminations about life and death, right and wrong, and the narrative in this sense is not weighed down: in a curiously simple way he does what he has to do, without being verbose about it.
I would venture to call the protagonist a better Light Yagami, or at least in my opinion more engaging. Still, only some vague clues have been provided about his past, so a more detailed psychological introspection is missing, but considering how the story started, for now it’s not bothering at all.
Clearly a manga of this kind cannot be free from flaws, even quite relevant onesband which can be more or less compromising depending on what you’re looking for in a story with an antihero as the protagonist. Regardless of similarities with other works, for now the plot has simply been: “Dan finds people and kills them brutally”, the last victim is the number 76, so it’s natural to ask questions such as: is it possible that no one notices it? That he is never caught?
To make it more credible, in the first chapter Dan himself says that there are many people who disappear every year: “no one will ever come looking for you”, thus making it plausible that he apparently has the opportunity to do whatever he wants. If you want to overcome these naiveties, the developments and coincidences present in history can be justified thanks to his role as a detective and the fact that he does not lack money: he therefore has the resources, methods and facade as a harmless person to allow him not to arouse suspicion and to escape police investigations himself. It is to be seen if these aspects will be deepened in the future given that, as effective as it is, the narrative cannot go on exclusively on Dan channeling his violent impulses to those who “deserve it”.
In addition, the supporting characters are a bit neglected and, as mentioned before, the “bad guys” on duty are quite one-dimensional, making it easy to dehumanize them in bloody scenes.
The drawings are well done, especially the expressions of anger, terror and disgust of the characters, the only flaw is sometimes the backgrounds, where you can see a little too clearly that photographs were manipulated to make them.
At this point it is clear that this manga - being representations of mutilated people, rapes and fairly explicit violent scenes of all kinds - is not a suitable reading for those who know that certain contents could disturb them, as well as those who do not appreciate morally ambiguous protagonists and a plot that you do not know yet where it wants to go.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Apr 10, 2022
The seven deadly sins is a conglomeration of all the usual unpleasant narrative devices of a shonen manga of the lowest quality, a feeling that is gradually exacerbated over the course of the series by a growing mediocrity.
The story takes place in a very summarily characterized fantasy scenario, perhaps in the first volumes a little superficiality was acceptable as the story is still in its beginning but going forward it will never be fully explored. The main setting is the kingdom of Liones, ten years after the seven deadly sins, once the group of knights directly under the king, became criminals accused of trying
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to overthrow the kingdom by subverting the established order. Traces of them are lost but for Princess Elizabeth they are the only hope of stopping the order of the sacred knights that threaten peace. Traveling in search of them, Elizabeth manages to meet Meliodas, the captain of the seven deadly sins, who runs a bizarre tavern called Boar Hat with the talking pig Hawk, a mascot that is immediately unbearable.
The sacred knights therefore present themselves as the villains of the story, although at first they may seem intriguing, they will soon seem devoided of any charm. They are evil usurpers who presumably have lost all their ideals after being corrupted by the two leaders of the sacred knights, who have a characterization bordering on ridicule and motivations behind their actions dictated by the simple "we needed a bad guy to defeat because he does very bad things as a villain ": Hendrickson who wants to resurrect the clan of demons motivated by the desire to wage holy war because that was the way he was feeling.
But sadly they are not the only ones, the author leaves the characterization of many characters to chance, in fact he makes them move according to the circumstances, as needed in the moment, that is, they suddenly pass over to the side of good or evil motivated by a bizarre sense of justice - they really change their minds even in the turn of a page - or that between various coincidences they make decisions that are inconsistent with their previous actions.
Proof of this are the often ridiculous foreshadowing attempts and clearly the result of a badly done retcon.
Certain choices give the very idea that the author was motivated only by the need to have plot twists at all costs and did not have the faintest idea of where to end the story, demonstrating only a great presumption of being able to effectively spread the story over 41 volumes or simply underestimating the intelligence of their readers who should bear an embarrassing number of coincidences and inconsisent explanations.
Also, in this manga everything seems to be driven by love.
Surely there would be nothing wrong with giving more space to relationship issues but in this manga they are incredibly abused to keep the plot going and to motivate anything, it is a sequence of actions and reactions of the characters based exclusively on emotions and feelings. In some cases it succeeds, as for Ban and Elaine but for other characters the amorous component is forced and at times even boring. Think of King and Diane - not to mention Escanor and Merlin - the author again uses the trope of the girl in distress to show an angry King who comes to her rescue, against the backdrop of a flashback to a tearful past. The problem is that the girl in distress in question is a 915 cm giantess who in previous battles had not had any problems, indeed she had been presented incredibly strong and able to look after herself. Unfortunately, inconsistencies like this with the force hierarchy are a constant in nanatsu no taizai, starting with the quite ambiguous power system itself with the usual things like "I was not really serious" and other stuff to make Meliodas stand out above all others. Various power ups, characters mortally wounded before and who inexplicably look great shortly after, characters who come back to life to be recycled, powers randomly assigned in the clumsy attempt to give the clashes more pathos (since if nothing has more sense it is easy to make it impossible to know who will win, spoiler: in any case Meliodas is always the coolest), up to the ridiculous idea of the pig with the magic pendant that sees the fighting rank of the people as a Dragon Ball scouter. As these increasingly bad villains appear in this genre of manga, some sort of hope should arise in the reader that their favorites will have the upper hand, but the illogical motives that pervade them all make them lose interest in seeing them triumph.
Sore point are just Meliodas and Elizabeth, the most unpleasant protagonists of any shonen I have ever read. I found it impossible to empathize with them, Nakaba Suzuki makes never seen before favoritisms towards the protagonist, it is inevitable to assume that it is trivially a pathetic self-insert. From the beginning, Meliodas is detestable: he has no charisma, he always has the same indecipherable expression on his face, he is immediately very strong, he has no growth path and his only quirk is being a pervert. He is probably given the appearance of a child to make the constant groping of Elizabeth, who we remember being 16, less disturbing or even innocent.
While some fanservice may also be bearable in the context of some comic skits, the way in which Meliodas clings to Elizabeth and acts like a maniac become annoying and repetitive quickly. To make it less ambiguous, the author also immediately makes Elizabeth fall in love with her molester to give the readers a non-sense love story with a really creepy explanation that'll come later in the manga. With various embarrassed blushes the author gives the premise of some sort of consent and makes the girl remain motionless and mute while undergoing anything without reacting.
Elizabeth is truly insipid, she is always whimpering, she acts to be the perfect waifu and every clumsy attempt to make up for her uselessness is ridiculous. Obviously she is naive, she always thinks only of others and never of herself, she is always portrayed in weird positions for panty shots but at the same time is modest and genuine and oh my, what a bore, an extremely demeaning character whose role is commensurable to that of an ornament or to be more blunt to a sex toy in skimpy clothes that screams "noble Meliodas" over and over.
Not to mention the other female characters, if the main characters already lack charm the secondaries are even worse, both males and females, but in particular any attempt to deepen the psychology of girls is ridiculous: Diane, that becomes more and more useless and subordinate to King who has always to save her, Vivian, Liz, Jericho, Veronica, all demeaning. No girl in this manga seems to have a will of her own, they all act only in function of a man and above all they are all always half naked. Guila seems to be the only female character not overly sexualized, but she too unfortunately she gets lost later in the story.
It can be said that of the 7 deadly sins Ban is the only one with a decent characterization, along with the interesting power of Escanor, who is also badly treated.
Leaving out the poses and proportions of the characters at times a bit strange, the drawings are full of details and the backgrounds have well-made perspectives. The art style is perhaps the only merit of this manga.
Some decent characters with whom you can at least empathize, rare funny moments and a few successful clashes in a sea of mediocrity: the seven deadly sins can be said to "arrive late", bringing typical stylistic features of previous works that are already outdated (it is practically Dragon Ball in the Middle Ages), maddening fanservice, various sentimentalisms bordering on trash, disturbing love affairs as a result of the author's innumerable perversions and fetishes and making a mess of fantasy elements without anything innovative. One of the few manga that after reading it left me absolutely nothing, if not a sense of annoyance and remorse for having wasted my time and my money, which is why I had to let off steam by writing this very long review for the unfortunate who will want to read it all.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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