I decided to look at some of the older manga I have and wrote up some thoughts about them.
Tenchi Muyo
Tenchi Muyo seems to have some big overall view and the individual adapation never seem to make much sense in the grand scheme of things. They're quite literally all just 'yet another day at the Masaki household', which is fine except it seems like whenever the manga/anime went past a certain point they feel obliged to go back to the main story which literally has nothing to do with what's happening before. Even until the end it's never clear what the 3 Goddesses are doing or what the heck is a Light Hawk Wing or why did Ryoko never got all 3 of her jewels back. In one of the various Tenchi Muyo manga it begins something like, "This is a story that can happen anywhere, or nowhere" and that's probably a good way to sum it up. It'd be better if the series either somehow flushed out its big ideas, or just never bother with them in the first place. That doesn't mean Tenchi can't use the Light Hawk Wings, for example, but don't make them a central theme to the story when nobody knows why he can generate those out of thin air and turn into a living god.
Saint Seiya
If there was no Dragonball, we might be talking about how a lot of stuff are Saint Seiya clones. Similar to Dragonball, this early pioneer of the action genre got something right with fighting. If nothing in your series makes sense, it's best to not explain it. For example, the Bronze Saints have a fist speed of mach 1, while Silver Saints have a fist speed of mach 2-5, but the Gold Saints have a fist speed of the speed of light. How did we go from 1, to 2-5, to roughly 1 million times the speed of sound? There was never any explanation. The Gold Saints are just that uber. There are many spinoffs on the original series, with the Lost Canvas probably the best adapation since even though it's a prequel to the Saint Seiya, it's clearly done with all the lessons of the original Saint Seiya in mind.
Phoenix Ikki is probably the most ridiculous Deus Ex Machina guy. Like his name suggests, he can't die. If you kill him, he regenerates instantly and becomes stronger than before. When fighting Shaka, the Phoenix literally said that even if Shaka is strong enough to kill him a million times, he will still be defeated by his one million and first incarnation, though in the interest of saving time the Phoenix just self destructed himself and took Shaka with him (and then resurrected himself). The funny thing is that the bad guys did sort of figure out how overpowered he is and tried to work around his invinicibility. For example Kanon tried to toss him into the Event Horizon (a black hole would kill the Phoenix and then he'd immediately escape after he resurrected himself) which, to his credit, kept the Phoenix trapped for something like 15 minutes before he was able to get back. In Lost Canvas, when Doko fought the Dark Phoenix he attempted to use the move where he grabs a guy and flys off to outerspace and killing his opponent via friction (Doko, who has the Gold Armor, can last longer than anyone not wearing Gold Armor), and the Dark Phoenix is like, "You know just because I turn into ash from the heat doesn't mean I die." In Hero of Heroes, some other spinoff, the evil mastermind is in his tower of evil saying it's too late for anyone to stop his plan and the Phoenix showed up, and the Phoenix is like, "If you claim to be omnipotent you should know that the Phoenix always shows up in the boss room at the most convenient time" (which is 100% true). And of course there was never any explanation on why the Phoenix is so powerful. He's just the Phoenix, and in fact you feel sorry for the bad guys because every time when it seems like they're finally going to win, you know the Phoenix is going to show up on the boss room and spoil their plans.
GTO
I'm kind of ambivalent toward this. For one, it's kind of stupid how it turns into a 'hackers rulz' somewhere after Urumi showed up, probably because Urumi is somewhat of a hacker. There's obviously a 'might makes right' attitude though to be fair, that's because we're dealing with some messed up kids who thinks they somehow rule the world so maybe a lesson is in order. GTO probably could've ended at around volume 15 and that's actually pretty hard to do to be able to go through so much content in a short time, especially compared to today's manga. It dragged on a bit longer than it should to the low 20s, but it's not a big strike against it.
Ranma 1/2
Whereas Inuyasha dragged on way too long on a story that fell apart very early and Rinne of the Boundary is way too episodic, Ranma 1/2 was probably about right with the 1/3 to 1 volume long episodes. There are enough characters but not so much that you lose track of who's who, and while the characters are silly a lot of them are surprisingly normal guys beyond whatever their 1 zany trait is. I don't know if Ranma 1/2 could've continued to something like 100 volumes if it didn't stopped at 38, though Inuyasha was just so bad I can't see even a bad Ranma 1/2 unless Rumiko Takahashi got tired of writing about it. Rinne of the Boundary is okay but the whole 'one chapter per story' thing really makes it hard to care about the characters.
Dragon Quest: Dai no Daiboken (Dragon Quest: Dai's Great Adventures)
Living proof that video game turned into manga can be good, but probably the only success story. The first 10 or so volumes is surprisingly bad, which might explain that it was more of a cult following thing because the whole 'level up and gather friends' part just isn't very exciting. The story didn't really go anywhere until Pop, the Archmage, started coming into his own, even though Dai is the hero and the main character, but Pop is where the strength of the story is. Unlike most self-proclaimed 'normal' guy, Pop really is a normal guy. As he pointed out, in the hero's party you got:
Dai - The Dragon Knight and the Hero
Mamu - Her parents are the Warrior/Priest of the last generation's Hero
Heinkel - A guy who turned to the dark side and then turned back to the light, that's got to mean you're pretty awesome
Leona - Princess
Pop - Son of the weapon shop owner
It really is a story about a guy who barely made the cut for the 'hero's team' who eventually turned out to be the strongest human. It's actually pretty ironic that Pop was more than capable of beating both Myst Vearn and Kill Vearn, who are the right/left hands of Vearn, but due to a lack of intelligence the hero's team always avoided this matchup since Pop has a spell call Annihilation which kills basically everything but it is vulnerable to reflect, and it turns out that neither Myst nor Kill can use reflect even though it seems to be a spell any high level opponent would have. About the only silly part of the story is that Kill Vearn turned out to be a double agent, because nobody would possibly suspect a guy named Kill Vearn is trying to kill the demon king, Vearn. To be fair, Vearn, who can be thought of a genre-savvy foe, was literally like, "I think I must employ a guy whose name is Kill Vearn to show how powerful I am". He also famously has the quote, "There is always another miracle for the good guys, so it's not over until I tear the hero's body to pieces!" (and sure enough Dai stands up again immediately after he said that even though he was left for dead).
Hunter X Hunter
Not quite finished, though it might as well be. It's also still on serial in Shonen Jump along with Bleach. The difference is that Bleach occasionally comes up with brilliant stories like 'Aizen and his chair' while HXH is just permanently on a hiatus. This, along with Jojo's Adventures and probably Kingdom, has the biggest concentration of rejecst who aren't cool enough for read Bleach. To be fair, HXH is better than those two since Jojo's Adventures and Kingdom looks like they're drawn by a 6 year old guy and the fans always tell you don't mind the fact that everyone in there is literally too ugly to live because there's a good story underneath. From what I can tell the story is never quite good as people claim, and certainly not enough to put up with drawings that can be considered cruel and unusual punishment. HXH's drawing is quite good, but between its brilliance you have stuff that totally makes no sense and like The Emperor's New Cloth you can just tell people to go back to Bleach/Naruto/One Piece/Dragonball if they don't get it. The initial premise of HXH seems to be the world is ruled by an Illuminati like titular organization Hunters. While the world of HXH looks like our world, it's explained that there's a secret source of power by those in the know. That is, LeBron James isn't better at basketball than a normal guy. He is someone who uses the power of aura for basketball. Solid Snake would be someone who uses aura for espionage. Using aura for example allows you to get hit by a bullet and not die, but that's just because it's got a D&D 'requires silver to hit' concept. Later on you'd see aura coated bullets that will easily kill anyone if it hits them on the head.
So our heroes passed the Hunters exam and begin exposed to this world and started out with an encounter with the Mafia, who is not high enough to know about this concept and they got annihilated by a group of thugs that do know about it. However, it's pointed out repeatedly that thugs with auras isn't going to even have a chance against a professional army, not to mention a professional army will have aura-piercing rounds while the Mafia only has normal machine guns (which can't harm a human empowered with aura). And then we have the Chimera Ants invasion, an alien race who has mastered aura bent on annihilation of humanity, starts fighting our heroes for no apparent reason. Although each of those guys could probably fight Goku minus the destryoing the planet part, apparaently you're suposed to believe a bunch of Bruce Lees could fight guys who each can fight a major power's entire military and still win. And of course it turned out that even the weakest of their enemy is something like 10 times stronger than the strongest human, but don't worry the good guys have a nuke for backup that somehow didn't hit any of their own guys. Of course, Meryem, the leader of the Ants, survived a nuclear blast and was only seriously wounded but quickly healed himself by absorbing 2 of the Royal Guards, but don't worry the humans put some deadly poison in the nuke they launched which finally killed Meryem and ended the threat.
I know Cross Country Warrior is way ahead of its time, but 'heat destroys poison' should be something anyone who took Organic Chemistry should know. Heck, even if you never took Organic Chemistry, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that the heat at Ground Zero of a nuclear blast is going to screw up whatever fancy formula you concoted in a poison by instantly vaporizing it. I've heard that this story took the same time as when the reactor in Fukushima blew up so it was supposed to be radiation poisoning, but I find it hard to believe that political correctness is a factor in story where the Ants landed in North Korea and killed older Kim as their first step in invading Earth. I mean, the story isn't as bad as it sounds, until they got to the point of 'we literally have no way of defeating this guy so we need to use nukes'. Whereas most manga tries to build up a sense of hopeless against impossible odds, maybe HXH is too successful and not even the author knows how the heck they're supposed to beat those guys.
Tenchi Muyo
Tenchi Muyo seems to have some big overall view and the individual adapation never seem to make much sense in the grand scheme of things. They're quite literally all just 'yet another day at the Masaki household', which is fine except it seems like whenever the manga/anime went past a certain point they feel obliged to go back to the main story which literally has nothing to do with what's happening before. Even until the end it's never clear what the 3 Goddesses are doing or what the heck is a Light Hawk Wing or why did Ryoko never got all 3 of her jewels back. In one of the various Tenchi Muyo manga it begins something like, "This is a story that can happen anywhere, or nowhere" and that's probably a good way to sum it up. It'd be better if the series either somehow flushed out its big ideas, or just never bother with them in the first place. That doesn't mean Tenchi can't use the Light Hawk Wings, for example, but don't make them a central theme to the story when nobody knows why he can generate those out of thin air and turn into a living god.
Saint Seiya
If there was no Dragonball, we might be talking about how a lot of stuff are Saint Seiya clones. Similar to Dragonball, this early pioneer of the action genre got something right with fighting. If nothing in your series makes sense, it's best to not explain it. For example, the Bronze Saints have a fist speed of mach 1, while Silver Saints have a fist speed of mach 2-5, but the Gold Saints have a fist speed of the speed of light. How did we go from 1, to 2-5, to roughly 1 million times the speed of sound? There was never any explanation. The Gold Saints are just that uber. There are many spinoffs on the original series, with the Lost Canvas probably the best adapation since even though it's a prequel to the Saint Seiya, it's clearly done with all the lessons of the original Saint Seiya in mind.
Phoenix Ikki is probably the most ridiculous Deus Ex Machina guy. Like his name suggests, he can't die. If you kill him, he regenerates instantly and becomes stronger than before. When fighting Shaka, the Phoenix literally said that even if Shaka is strong enough to kill him a million times, he will still be defeated by his one million and first incarnation, though in the interest of saving time the Phoenix just self destructed himself and took Shaka with him (and then resurrected himself). The funny thing is that the bad guys did sort of figure out how overpowered he is and tried to work around his invinicibility. For example Kanon tried to toss him into the Event Horizon (a black hole would kill the Phoenix and then he'd immediately escape after he resurrected himself) which, to his credit, kept the Phoenix trapped for something like 15 minutes before he was able to get back. In Lost Canvas, when Doko fought the Dark Phoenix he attempted to use the move where he grabs a guy and flys off to outerspace and killing his opponent via friction (Doko, who has the Gold Armor, can last longer than anyone not wearing Gold Armor), and the Dark Phoenix is like, "You know just because I turn into ash from the heat doesn't mean I die." In Hero of Heroes, some other spinoff, the evil mastermind is in his tower of evil saying it's too late for anyone to stop his plan and the Phoenix showed up, and the Phoenix is like, "If you claim to be omnipotent you should know that the Phoenix always shows up in the boss room at the most convenient time" (which is 100% true). And of course there was never any explanation on why the Phoenix is so powerful. He's just the Phoenix, and in fact you feel sorry for the bad guys because every time when it seems like they're finally going to win, you know the Phoenix is going to show up on the boss room and spoil their plans.
GTO
I'm kind of ambivalent toward this. For one, it's kind of stupid how it turns into a 'hackers rulz' somewhere after Urumi showed up, probably because Urumi is somewhat of a hacker. There's obviously a 'might makes right' attitude though to be fair, that's because we're dealing with some messed up kids who thinks they somehow rule the world so maybe a lesson is in order. GTO probably could've ended at around volume 15 and that's actually pretty hard to do to be able to go through so much content in a short time, especially compared to today's manga. It dragged on a bit longer than it should to the low 20s, but it's not a big strike against it.
Ranma 1/2
Whereas Inuyasha dragged on way too long on a story that fell apart very early and Rinne of the Boundary is way too episodic, Ranma 1/2 was probably about right with the 1/3 to 1 volume long episodes. There are enough characters but not so much that you lose track of who's who, and while the characters are silly a lot of them are surprisingly normal guys beyond whatever their 1 zany trait is. I don't know if Ranma 1/2 could've continued to something like 100 volumes if it didn't stopped at 38, though Inuyasha was just so bad I can't see even a bad Ranma 1/2 unless Rumiko Takahashi got tired of writing about it. Rinne of the Boundary is okay but the whole 'one chapter per story' thing really makes it hard to care about the characters.
Dragon Quest: Dai no Daiboken (Dragon Quest: Dai's Great Adventures)
Living proof that video game turned into manga can be good, but probably the only success story. The first 10 or so volumes is surprisingly bad, which might explain that it was more of a cult following thing because the whole 'level up and gather friends' part just isn't very exciting. The story didn't really go anywhere until Pop, the Archmage, started coming into his own, even though Dai is the hero and the main character, but Pop is where the strength of the story is. Unlike most self-proclaimed 'normal' guy, Pop really is a normal guy. As he pointed out, in the hero's party you got:
Dai - The Dragon Knight and the Hero
Mamu - Her parents are the Warrior/Priest of the last generation's Hero
Heinkel - A guy who turned to the dark side and then turned back to the light, that's got to mean you're pretty awesome
Leona - Princess
Pop - Son of the weapon shop owner
It really is a story about a guy who barely made the cut for the 'hero's team' who eventually turned out to be the strongest human. It's actually pretty ironic that Pop was more than capable of beating both Myst Vearn and Kill Vearn, who are the right/left hands of Vearn, but due to a lack of intelligence the hero's team always avoided this matchup since Pop has a spell call Annihilation which kills basically everything but it is vulnerable to reflect, and it turns out that neither Myst nor Kill can use reflect even though it seems to be a spell any high level opponent would have. About the only silly part of the story is that Kill Vearn turned out to be a double agent, because nobody would possibly suspect a guy named Kill Vearn is trying to kill the demon king, Vearn. To be fair, Vearn, who can be thought of a genre-savvy foe, was literally like, "I think I must employ a guy whose name is Kill Vearn to show how powerful I am". He also famously has the quote, "There is always another miracle for the good guys, so it's not over until I tear the hero's body to pieces!" (and sure enough Dai stands up again immediately after he said that even though he was left for dead).
Hunter X Hunter
Not quite finished, though it might as well be. It's also still on serial in Shonen Jump along with Bleach. The difference is that Bleach occasionally comes up with brilliant stories like 'Aizen and his chair' while HXH is just permanently on a hiatus. This, along with Jojo's Adventures and probably Kingdom, has the biggest concentration of rejecst who aren't cool enough for read Bleach. To be fair, HXH is better than those two since Jojo's Adventures and Kingdom looks like they're drawn by a 6 year old guy and the fans always tell you don't mind the fact that everyone in there is literally too ugly to live because there's a good story underneath. From what I can tell the story is never quite good as people claim, and certainly not enough to put up with drawings that can be considered cruel and unusual punishment. HXH's drawing is quite good, but between its brilliance you have stuff that totally makes no sense and like The Emperor's New Cloth you can just tell people to go back to Bleach/Naruto/One Piece/Dragonball if they don't get it. The initial premise of HXH seems to be the world is ruled by an Illuminati like titular organization Hunters. While the world of HXH looks like our world, it's explained that there's a secret source of power by those in the know. That is, LeBron James isn't better at basketball than a normal guy. He is someone who uses the power of aura for basketball. Solid Snake would be someone who uses aura for espionage. Using aura for example allows you to get hit by a bullet and not die, but that's just because it's got a D&D 'requires silver to hit' concept. Later on you'd see aura coated bullets that will easily kill anyone if it hits them on the head.
So our heroes passed the Hunters exam and begin exposed to this world and started out with an encounter with the Mafia, who is not high enough to know about this concept and they got annihilated by a group of thugs that do know about it. However, it's pointed out repeatedly that thugs with auras isn't going to even have a chance against a professional army, not to mention a professional army will have aura-piercing rounds while the Mafia only has normal machine guns (which can't harm a human empowered with aura). And then we have the Chimera Ants invasion, an alien race who has mastered aura bent on annihilation of humanity, starts fighting our heroes for no apparent reason. Although each of those guys could probably fight Goku minus the destryoing the planet part, apparaently you're suposed to believe a bunch of Bruce Lees could fight guys who each can fight a major power's entire military and still win. And of course it turned out that even the weakest of their enemy is something like 10 times stronger than the strongest human, but don't worry the good guys have a nuke for backup that somehow didn't hit any of their own guys. Of course, Meryem, the leader of the Ants, survived a nuclear blast and was only seriously wounded but quickly healed himself by absorbing 2 of the Royal Guards, but don't worry the humans put some deadly poison in the nuke they launched which finally killed Meryem and ended the threat.
I know Cross Country Warrior is way ahead of its time, but 'heat destroys poison' should be something anyone who took Organic Chemistry should know. Heck, even if you never took Organic Chemistry, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that the heat at Ground Zero of a nuclear blast is going to screw up whatever fancy formula you concoted in a poison by instantly vaporizing it. I've heard that this story took the same time as when the reactor in Fukushima blew up so it was supposed to be radiation poisoning, but I find it hard to believe that political correctness is a factor in story where the Ants landed in North Korea and killed older Kim as their first step in invading Earth. I mean, the story isn't as bad as it sounds, until they got to the point of 'we literally have no way of defeating this guy so we need to use nukes'. Whereas most manga tries to build up a sense of hopeless against impossible odds, maybe HXH is too successful and not even the author knows how the heck they're supposed to beat those guys.
