The Shrine

If you have ever wondered what it'd look like if there was a manga version of a guy throwing 200 hadokens while the other guy was blocking them and died from chipping damage of blocking 200 hadokens, this is it. This is one of the hyped up fights in the series, and while I always thought HXH's fights is somewhat overrated, I don't think anyone was expecting Kuroro to just hide in the audience row during the entire fight while summoning more clones and setting up land mines the entire time. I mean I get where the idea comes from. It'd be like if you play a pet class in a MMORPG and the first thing anybody would try is to just keep on summoning more pets until you have a few thousand of those and then send them all in at once. But there's also a reason why this doesn't work in games and that you don't see anime or manga trying to depict such a wussified way of fighting. I get that Kuroro isn't meant to be a tanky guy and he's cheesy, but him running into the audience is faker than the WWE. I mean, even in WWE when a guy rolls out of the ring to avoid getting pummeled, they eventually have to get back in and I think they're supposed to be back in a certain time too even though that never actually matters. Here you basically have a guy just roll out of the ring as soon as the fight begins and then spends the next 5 chapters summoning more clones with bombs to slowly chip down Hisoka's health. That wouldn't even pass in the WWE. Not even Naruto "I got millions of clones" ever fought in such a wimpy way, and he certainly never fought anyone while his original self is safe in some location that his opponent cannot possibly get to unless someone accidentally bumped into one of his clones while they're out somewhere.

At this point, even the old fights where two guys make poses and you've the narrator telling about how incredible their strategy is, and then a guy pulls out a gun and shoots the other guy and would be like "LOL bet you didn't see that happening" is better than what we got. I mean Kuroro once fought Silva and Zeno at the same time, and sure I get that all he did was getting beat up and sure he already used his power to know that he's got a plot bailout so he literally has nothing to lose, but at least he acted like he's awesome and fearless.

It's kind of sad that the best manga I'm looking forward to comes from Hong Kong now, which isn't traditionally a manga powerhouse.

Akita Girl Ebina-chan is about the only decent new thing I picked up, since it seems to actually get what made Himouto Umaru-chan good. Then again, I don't think it's just a matter of perspective. Umaru is just flat out not that interesting because she's a couch potato. To this date I still don't get why Himouto Umaru-chan makes the assumption that people will be more attracted to Umaru more than Ebina in the first place. I mean, Ebina has been pretty much blowing out all the other girls away in popularity ever since Himouto Umaru-chan started and it's not even close.