I just noticed this poetry manga that's intermittently updated and somehow I totally forgot about it. I think the title is like "Chanting Poetry of the Heien Era" or something like that. It's not something anyone who doesn't speak Chinese or Japanese would possibly have any interest in it, and it's also nothing special. It's about some girl who really likes poetry of the Heien era got transported back in time there, and found out that back then people fight demons and stuff with poetry. For example if you say, "My love is like a burning fire" then you burn yourself to death (so don't do that). You get combo points for puns, so for example Micro$haft would be two hit combo and lets you do more powerful stuff, though keep in mind you have to come up with combos that make sense. Anyway, I just realized that they sent the wrong guy back in time. Zeus would totally clean up and get rid of all the evil back then in about a day and probably break the combo meter.
108 Fighters - AKA Suikoden, and not that video game stuff that barely resembles any sembalance to the original. Of course being a Hong Kong manga there's random martial arts fighting for no reason but the characters are roughly corresond to their counterparts. As you might already know from the Suikoden games, the leader of the bandits is always the Tenkai Star, and like the original this guy is actually some guy with a lot of brain and charm but no real fighting ability (Odessa probably should've been the Tenkai Star, except she died). The usual embellishment is pretty funny, like the Tigerslayer killed a single tiger in the original Suikoden barehanded, but in 108 Fighters he killed 500 tigers bare handed in one night. I'm trying to figure out where he could possibly have gone to fight 500 tigers in one night.
Cross Country Soldier - Commonly agreed as the best current HK manga, and it's pretty darn good. Unlike most manga in general that insists on selling you a stupid main character, Cross Country Soldier's author seems to be aware that nobody actually like the main character, Cross Country Soldier (this name is not as weird as it sounds in Chinese), so he's usually nowhere to be seen in the major fights. Right now, shortly after the rise of the Song Dynasty (whose Emperor was immediately killed but the martial arts illuminati no doubt had a body double just in case), the alien super bio weapon, the Ultimate Kirin and the Kirin Armor, was stolen by some crazy woman who wants to kill everyone and once again all the martial artists of ancient China must unite to defeat the invinicible Kirin Armor. No idea how anyone's going to fight the Ultimate Kirin, but maybe more alien technology will do the trick. Remember, the premise of the story is that martial artists have been fighting off alien threats since the beginning of time, and they're kind of like the MIB of history. The story is fairly nonsensical but the action is actually quite intense.
Tiger Shark The Beginning - Apparently there should be an English version soon because the guy who wrote this is trying to see if someone from Hollywood want to make Tiger Shark the Movie so he's trying to make a pitch to the western audience. Compared to the other junk made by the same guy this is surprisingly decent though I sure don't see how he can possibly get anyone interested. The premise of the story is that the Deep Blue, a bunch of super powerful hippies, plan to kill 99.9999% of the world's population because that's what hippies do, and a guy code named Tiger Shark is earth's last hope to stop their doomsday plan. Inexplicably, the whole teaser never had the female lead, Hitomi, showing up at all, and I don't think they even mentioned her name at all other than alluding to the fact that the nutjobs that compose of Deep Blue had a little sister. That's totally going to make a good sales pitch for an action movie with no female lead. I mean I'll even give them credit that Laser Eye and Orca are pretty interesting, and even Great White kicking an aircraft carrier aside is kind of cool, but I don't think you're going to get very far in an action movie with only guys beating each other up or throwing large structures at each other. The power system has been Americanized so that even the lowest power guy is level 7 (out of 10), with the top tier guys like Orca being 9.7 or so and everyone is a winner. But that actually kind of defeats the point of the original 500K exponential power level system. It was something like 100K power level can block nukes, and 250K is the limit of human ability, and to get 500K power level you basically need 2 250K guy's power multiplied... which is also the normal state of Hitomi, who normally sits in a wheelchair but can turn gravity off if she needs to actually move around because her leg is crippled and can't move normally.
Captain Tsubasa - From watching the World Cup it seems like Team Japan isn't able to do double jumps to outjump guys a whole foot taller than they are, or dodge 21 guys at the same time. Spain also failed to get the memo to hire Jesus for their World Cup team, who was last seen in Captain Tsubasa walking across water while standing on a soccer ball. Jesus has surprisingly solid fundamentals, as during one of the games Jesus was defending against 2 guys doing the usual Naruto clone stuff, and Jesus said that you only have to watch where the soccer ball is and ignore the clones. I'm reminded of the Onion Sports where they have news like Jesus Returns to NBA but in Onion Sports, Jesus wasn't that great of a basketball player. In Captain Tsubasa, Jesus is probably the strongest soccer player in the world, but I'm sure Tsubasa will beat him because that's what Tsubasa do.
108 Fighters - AKA Suikoden, and not that video game stuff that barely resembles any sembalance to the original. Of course being a Hong Kong manga there's random martial arts fighting for no reason but the characters are roughly corresond to their counterparts. As you might already know from the Suikoden games, the leader of the bandits is always the Tenkai Star, and like the original this guy is actually some guy with a lot of brain and charm but no real fighting ability (Odessa probably should've been the Tenkai Star, except she died). The usual embellishment is pretty funny, like the Tigerslayer killed a single tiger in the original Suikoden barehanded, but in 108 Fighters he killed 500 tigers bare handed in one night. I'm trying to figure out where he could possibly have gone to fight 500 tigers in one night.
Cross Country Soldier - Commonly agreed as the best current HK manga, and it's pretty darn good. Unlike most manga in general that insists on selling you a stupid main character, Cross Country Soldier's author seems to be aware that nobody actually like the main character, Cross Country Soldier (this name is not as weird as it sounds in Chinese), so he's usually nowhere to be seen in the major fights. Right now, shortly after the rise of the Song Dynasty (whose Emperor was immediately killed but the martial arts illuminati no doubt had a body double just in case), the alien super bio weapon, the Ultimate Kirin and the Kirin Armor, was stolen by some crazy woman who wants to kill everyone and once again all the martial artists of ancient China must unite to defeat the invinicible Kirin Armor. No idea how anyone's going to fight the Ultimate Kirin, but maybe more alien technology will do the trick. Remember, the premise of the story is that martial artists have been fighting off alien threats since the beginning of time, and they're kind of like the MIB of history. The story is fairly nonsensical but the action is actually quite intense.
Tiger Shark The Beginning - Apparently there should be an English version soon because the guy who wrote this is trying to see if someone from Hollywood want to make Tiger Shark the Movie so he's trying to make a pitch to the western audience. Compared to the other junk made by the same guy this is surprisingly decent though I sure don't see how he can possibly get anyone interested. The premise of the story is that the Deep Blue, a bunch of super powerful hippies, plan to kill 99.9999% of the world's population because that's what hippies do, and a guy code named Tiger Shark is earth's last hope to stop their doomsday plan. Inexplicably, the whole teaser never had the female lead, Hitomi, showing up at all, and I don't think they even mentioned her name at all other than alluding to the fact that the nutjobs that compose of Deep Blue had a little sister. That's totally going to make a good sales pitch for an action movie with no female lead. I mean I'll even give them credit that Laser Eye and Orca are pretty interesting, and even Great White kicking an aircraft carrier aside is kind of cool, but I don't think you're going to get very far in an action movie with only guys beating each other up or throwing large structures at each other. The power system has been Americanized so that even the lowest power guy is level 7 (out of 10), with the top tier guys like Orca being 9.7 or so and everyone is a winner. But that actually kind of defeats the point of the original 500K exponential power level system. It was something like 100K power level can block nukes, and 250K is the limit of human ability, and to get 500K power level you basically need 2 250K guy's power multiplied... which is also the normal state of Hitomi, who normally sits in a wheelchair but can turn gravity off if she needs to actually move around because her leg is crippled and can't move normally.
Captain Tsubasa - From watching the World Cup it seems like Team Japan isn't able to do double jumps to outjump guys a whole foot taller than they are, or dodge 21 guys at the same time. Spain also failed to get the memo to hire Jesus for their World Cup team, who was last seen in Captain Tsubasa walking across water while standing on a soccer ball. Jesus has surprisingly solid fundamentals, as during one of the games Jesus was defending against 2 guys doing the usual Naruto clone stuff, and Jesus said that you only have to watch where the soccer ball is and ignore the clones. I'm reminded of the Onion Sports where they have news like Jesus Returns to NBA but in Onion Sports, Jesus wasn't that great of a basketball player. In Captain Tsubasa, Jesus is probably the strongest soccer player in the world, but I'm sure Tsubasa will beat him because that's what Tsubasa do.
