The Shrine

Picked this up yesterday. It's actually pretty bad, but these two pages are totally worth it:

http://www.mangareader.net/rurouni-kens ... flame/1/27
http://www.mangareader.net/rurouni-kens ... flame/1/28

Too bad this didn't actually happen. I think he could've had something epic going on with "Shishio and his 10 men need to train harder to overcome a random fodder guy on the street that owned Shishio in two pages".

Eh while Shishio was a decent villain in this series, possibly the best (certainly better than the last one), I just don't find myself wanting more of him. The series was cool because I wanted to see Kenshin and crew do shit. If I was going to expand on ANY character OBVIOUSLY it would be Hiko fucking Seijuro. I mean how is anyone else even an option.

I'm not a big fan of Shishio but I think they should've totally taken the concept here and expand on it. Shishio gets owned by a random guy on the street and then goes back to training. Heck, he should go through the whole 'good thing I have a metal plate on my forehead or I'd have totally died to a random fodder on the street' thing.

It's actually pretty hilarious like this volume is about Shishio and his ten man fighting the 'overwhelmingly' odds of 200 soldiers who never used their guns, except for the guy who tried to fire on Soujiro, the one guy you can be sure that won't get hit by a gun. I mean, Sanosuke at the beginning of the series can probably take on 200 unarmed guys (because those soldiers never used their guns so they might as well be unarmed, maybe they have swords but I never saw a guy drawing a sword either).

I also bought Dorabase since it looks like nobody's ever going to pirate it, but unfortunately since I didn't buy volume 16 and some other guy in the world bought the only other copy of volume 16 now I can't complete my collection. While it's obviously a cheap spinoff of Doraemon, it's an interesting take on the 'obviously fake Japanese baseball' genre, since it's played by all powerful Dora-cats (robotic cat overlords of the 22nd century) and cheating is officially built into the game and I guess the point is that Dora-cats play totally rigged baseball games instead of say, enslaving all of humanity. However, volume 15 has some serious disconnect of power level. On one hand, we got the American pitcher who was practicing throwing a curveball with a bowling ball to increase his power, and then the Japanese #1 hitter counters this by practicing how to slice a mountain in half with a sword, because ancient Battou techniques are always useful in baseball. So when the two met, the American cat easily overpowers the Japanese cat with his pitch, but how does this possibly make sense? Throwing a bowling ball as a baseball probably requires what, 10 times the strength of a human? In the picture it shows with a real baseball he basically crush it into play-dough and then throw it and he does a Super Saiyan thing where the whole earth is shaking. That is pretty intimidating, but his opponent can slice a mountain in half with a sword! Even if the American cat was throwing a real bowling ball at the Japanese cat, someone who can slice a mountain in half can easily hit the ball back. It's also shown earlier that the Japanese cat can hit a giant boulder falling off from the mountain he just sliced in half back with his baseball bat after he completed his training, and I'm pretty sure a freefalling giant boulder hits has more momentum than a bowling ball. Yes USA is always the boss team and their cats are probably all roided up and stuff, but I literally see no way the Japanese cat could've been overpowered by someone who is merely strong enough to throw bowling balls as baseball.