Sep 26, 2023
I was captivated by its absurdity in the same way a clown car pile up is captivating rather than a good book. Many other reviews can attest to some of the manga's strengths, but many of those strengths felt were overshadowed by the stories' weaknesses.
Much of Shigurui's art is meticulous with a strong sense of flow, a strong amount of detail, and horrific depictions of violence. The violence while understandably brutal quickly became oversaturated, what at points felt like the turning of a page in a horror manga soon was coming across more as hyper violence for hyper violence's sake. While there are moments
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where the art style of characters flourishes, for the most part far too many panels have characters looking more akin to grey aliens than people, their upside pear shaped heads with eyeballs as big as fists creates more of an ugly uncanny effect than an amusing absurdity of something akin to Baki.
The story and pacing did not manage to hold strong, peaking in the middle in an admittedly very memorably intense and well paced fight, only for the latter half of the story to become a slog. What proved the most tiresome was how the story made use of women, reliably it felt like the story could not go more than a few pages without flashing a boob here and there, often mid-fight scene as well as if the reader would lose interest if something sexual wasn't shown often enough. The story is littered with sexual assault in a manner that felt all too frequently revelling in it rather than simply trying to depict the sleaziness and cruelty of the era, if a woman is shown it's pretty much a countdown clock appearing until they appear in a scene with sex, violence, and all too often both.
Shigurui came across to me as a manga that had potential if it had been more reserved, using those moments to heighten a situation or make a point with violence rather than having every page dripping with it. Sadly, I doubt that Shigurui would have managed as large an audience if it was more reserved, its current fans seem able to excuse a lot of problems for an extra blood splatter across the page.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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