manga grabbag
PostPosted:Tue Jul 19, 2011 3:16 am
Sealing of the Gods Part 2 - The Priestess returns and continues to cement her place as a successful female that is a slut and a credible villian. "All man can be broken. It's just a question of how long." Assuming nothing unexpected shows up, it's pretty clear that The Priestess is not going to be very strong. She got hurt badly when the Hero broke her Clairyovance spell and that's like one week after he learned how to use his powers, but it's pretty clear she didn't rise to her position as a result of her ability to throw fireballs. Right now the Hero is training to make a new arm to replace the one he lost during his initial counter against the Gods, and the author says it's going to be one of the following 4: normal, mech, tentacles, or cannon (with a sketch of how all 4 of them would look like). I'm guessing it's going to be the cannon, but given the nature of the story I wouldn't be surprised if it's tentacles. Guess we'll find out next week.
Ravages of Time - This apparently got moved to the 'Do not pirate' list. Maybe the battle of Guan Du offended people more than I thought. In one of the arcs in Sergent Keroro, Dororo was saying people who sucked the whole time gets praised if they do something remotely good, and people who are always good gets blamed for making an occasional mistake. This describes the situation pretty well since as bad as Ravages of Time currently is, it is still significantly better than the horrors that people still pirate, but the dropoff between around volume teens to 40s is huge, and it's very sudden as opposed to a gradual descend to oblivion like Bleach or even One Piece. I was saying Zhang Liao needs to just kill Yuan Fan in one hit to try to salvage it but of course that didn't happen. Zhang Liao didn't even use the Sword Formation and still countered Yuan Fan's Cosmo Formation pretty easily, though that's mostly done by having Zhang Liao just killing everyone by himself as opposed to any tactical manuever. I suppose one can argue this is a setup since eventually Zhuge Liang, who is most well known for the Cosmo Formation (rough translation, the direct translation is meaningless in English), but really nobody cares about Sima Yi or Zhuge Liang at this point. Right now the battle literally goes like this:
Yuan Fan: Cosmo Formation variation 1: The Don't Die Strategy!
Zhang Liao: Sun Tzu's art of war: Kill them all!
Random guy: Sir, our guys are getting killed!
Yuan Fan: Cosmo Formation variation 2: The Kill Them All Strategy!
Zhang Liao: Sun Tzu's art of war: Don't die!
Random: OMG these guys aren't dying!
And yeah the Cosmo Formation has 8 variants and right now we're only on variant 3 but this thing is getting ridiculous given Zhang Liao is like Goku and Sun Tzu combined. His Sword Formation has never lost to any strategy thus far in the series, and even if that doesn't work he's more than capable of killing a million guys by himself. The only time he's ever lost a duel is against Zhang Fei and Guan Yu at the same time, or if he's using the wrong weapon.
Bleach: I saw a post saying Bleach should just change the current story in a horror film call: "He is your cousin." It's downright scary how bad everything currently is.
Naruto: The current arc reminds me of Bleach's 'trapped Aizen for a while' that turned out to be 3 volumes and 1 year of real life time (to resolve that time). You got these fight that was going on 'for a while' and a while looks like a couple years in real life time before they're done. I think it took an year to get past the first day, and there's no sign the trend will be changing anytime soon. It doesn't feel like it's dragging on on-purpose, but the fights just keeps on going and going and going like the Energizer Bunny. I can't say it's actually bad, but it's kind of like watching one of those 3D fan movies that has characters beating up each other for 30 minutes nonstop and after a while you just wonder if the guys ever stop beating each other up.
One Piece: I honestly have no idea who any of the new villians are. I think there are 3 of them, but they all look alike anyway. They all have the "I am a bad guy and I'm nobody important" face and everything is a pure waste of time. I thought Luffy was supposed to become Super Saiyan after his 3 year in training and yet he's having these epic battles against guys who aren't important enough to have a unique face.
New Prince of Tennis: Prince of Tennis never ceases to deliver. It's bad but unlike bad like Bleach-bad, it's always trying to set a new bar in how low you can go. You know POT isn't trying to just drag stuff out for another buck. POT is actively redefining what it takes to be a bad manga. The latest one we have a guy whose speciality is a headbutt attack. Now how in the world can you headbutt someone in TENNIS? Apparently he tries to do that to someone while you're shaking hands at the net. Again with POT the question isn't whether any of this stuff is legal. You always have to ask 'does any of this actually help you better at tennis?' Earlier we have Atobe getting X-Ray vision to deal with World of Ice that already makes you wonder why (I guess you can argue it's a Naruto thing, got to have a high level eye power to counter the enemy's eye power), but at least you can argue if you had those eye powers in Naruto it'd probably work pretty well in tennis. I really don't see how, even in fiction, trying to headbutt someone in tennis is at all an effective move given you're almost never next to your opponent in tennis.
Ravages of Time - This apparently got moved to the 'Do not pirate' list. Maybe the battle of Guan Du offended people more than I thought. In one of the arcs in Sergent Keroro, Dororo was saying people who sucked the whole time gets praised if they do something remotely good, and people who are always good gets blamed for making an occasional mistake. This describes the situation pretty well since as bad as Ravages of Time currently is, it is still significantly better than the horrors that people still pirate, but the dropoff between around volume teens to 40s is huge, and it's very sudden as opposed to a gradual descend to oblivion like Bleach or even One Piece. I was saying Zhang Liao needs to just kill Yuan Fan in one hit to try to salvage it but of course that didn't happen. Zhang Liao didn't even use the Sword Formation and still countered Yuan Fan's Cosmo Formation pretty easily, though that's mostly done by having Zhang Liao just killing everyone by himself as opposed to any tactical manuever. I suppose one can argue this is a setup since eventually Zhuge Liang, who is most well known for the Cosmo Formation (rough translation, the direct translation is meaningless in English), but really nobody cares about Sima Yi or Zhuge Liang at this point. Right now the battle literally goes like this:
Yuan Fan: Cosmo Formation variation 1: The Don't Die Strategy!
Zhang Liao: Sun Tzu's art of war: Kill them all!
Random guy: Sir, our guys are getting killed!
Yuan Fan: Cosmo Formation variation 2: The Kill Them All Strategy!
Zhang Liao: Sun Tzu's art of war: Don't die!
Random: OMG these guys aren't dying!
And yeah the Cosmo Formation has 8 variants and right now we're only on variant 3 but this thing is getting ridiculous given Zhang Liao is like Goku and Sun Tzu combined. His Sword Formation has never lost to any strategy thus far in the series, and even if that doesn't work he's more than capable of killing a million guys by himself. The only time he's ever lost a duel is against Zhang Fei and Guan Yu at the same time, or if he's using the wrong weapon.
Bleach: I saw a post saying Bleach should just change the current story in a horror film call: "He is your cousin." It's downright scary how bad everything currently is.
Naruto: The current arc reminds me of Bleach's 'trapped Aizen for a while' that turned out to be 3 volumes and 1 year of real life time (to resolve that time). You got these fight that was going on 'for a while' and a while looks like a couple years in real life time before they're done. I think it took an year to get past the first day, and there's no sign the trend will be changing anytime soon. It doesn't feel like it's dragging on on-purpose, but the fights just keeps on going and going and going like the Energizer Bunny. I can't say it's actually bad, but it's kind of like watching one of those 3D fan movies that has characters beating up each other for 30 minutes nonstop and after a while you just wonder if the guys ever stop beating each other up.
One Piece: I honestly have no idea who any of the new villians are. I think there are 3 of them, but they all look alike anyway. They all have the "I am a bad guy and I'm nobody important" face and everything is a pure waste of time. I thought Luffy was supposed to become Super Saiyan after his 3 year in training and yet he's having these epic battles against guys who aren't important enough to have a unique face.
New Prince of Tennis: Prince of Tennis never ceases to deliver. It's bad but unlike bad like Bleach-bad, it's always trying to set a new bar in how low you can go. You know POT isn't trying to just drag stuff out for another buck. POT is actively redefining what it takes to be a bad manga. The latest one we have a guy whose speciality is a headbutt attack. Now how in the world can you headbutt someone in TENNIS? Apparently he tries to do that to someone while you're shaking hands at the net. Again with POT the question isn't whether any of this stuff is legal. You always have to ask 'does any of this actually help you better at tennis?' Earlier we have Atobe getting X-Ray vision to deal with World of Ice that already makes you wonder why (I guess you can argue it's a Naruto thing, got to have a high level eye power to counter the enemy's eye power), but at least you can argue if you had those eye powers in Naruto it'd probably work pretty well in tennis. I really don't see how, even in fiction, trying to headbutt someone in tennis is at all an effective move given you're almost never next to your opponent in tennis.