The Other Worlds Shrine

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  • Helck

  • Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
 #168866  by Don
 Tue Jul 26, 2016 11:45 pm
Once a while something worth reading shows up for manga. Helck is the sub genre of the 'hero beats the evil demon king and then something else different happens'. Shortly after the evil demon king was defeated, the Demon Empire works on electing a new demon king to replace the slain one, but the level 99 human hero Helck defected and joined the tournament to become the next demon king and wants to lead demons to annihilate the human race! Although initially not trusted by Vamirio the Red, the level 78 demon that oversees the tournament, Helck eventually earns her trust and together, can anything stop them from destroying all of humanity in possibly the most lopsided good versus evil battle ever? It's an interesting take on the 'humans are baddddddd' genre and the story is surprisingly serious even though Helck and Vamirio basically can faceroll their way throughout the entire world.

Other stuff of interest:

Bleach - After it's getting the axe, Aizen comes back to do some last minute salvage and at least he's interesting unlike the alphabet guys that nobody remember their names.

Beet the Vandel Buster - It's basically exactly like Dai-no-daiboken (same author), but a lot worse. The characters basically have a 1 to 1 relationship to the cast but somehow end up being way less likeable. The premise is that humans are at war with a race called the Vandels but all I see is a bunch of kids pillaging and sacking Vandel cities just because Vandels do the same, and while some Vandels spared the hero and his friends out of honor, the hero immediately backstabs the said Vandel after getting a power up and looted their corpses for money that they probably wasted on hookers or something. There's a rather unbelievable level system where you got to be level 40 or higher to be a Broad Buster, who is some kind of elite Vandel Buster, and defeating a 7-star Vandel that can easily take out a nation apparently is enough to level you up from level 25 to 27. Hilariously enough, the hero's party has a level 41 Broad Buster who gets KOed in one hit against a 7-star Vandel but of course the rest of the guys at level 20-30s can totally tank the hits just fine. If you don't mind tha the heroes are quite unlikeable it's a pretty solid boy saves the world fantasy manga, though the power balance is handled incredibly badly. In Dai-no-Daiboken, for the most part the humans and the demon race are fairly equally matched throughout the ages which is why even a newbie team of heroes can survive pretty long if they got the right connections. In Beet, it looks like the Vandels easily could've hunted humans to extinction but a bunch of kids can totally turn the tide just because.

Kaku Gurui - So the main character refused to bet her life on her latest gamble because she wanted something that's worse than death, and after getting that, inexplicably the student council president decides that it'll be to the death anyway because... worse than death is not as bad as death? The adventure of the gambling addict continues but this seems like literally a filler to meet some deadline.
 #168893  by Don
 Sun Jul 31, 2016 1:15 am
Seems like Helck is actually ending pretty soon based on chapter 75. One thing I've noticed is that when you don't have training sequences the manga doesn't actually last very long. Vamirio and Helck starts out as the highest known level characters for either side so there's actually nothing that involves them fighting anything less than an army at once. This is a surprisingly hard topic to handle and I think the author did a great job at it. This isn't like Rouroni Kenshin where you've a guy who is supposed to be uber and then somehow gets newbified against any opponent so it might as well be your standard manga. So far, the only serious fight involving the main characters is the battle against the Warrior of Darkness, who is probably stronger than the entire human nation put together and it's a powerful scene just because it's the first (and so far only) time where the invincible duo of Vamirio and Helck have to fight seriously. Even the recent major encounter against the human army you get the feeling that the fight could've ended in the time it takes Vamirio to say "Bakaaaaaaaa!" Although it's not meant to be something about fancy strategies , the human commander wisely withdrew the troops and didn't go form 2, noting that even going form 2 would likely have lasted one page before getting wiped out.

One interesting thing I noticed is that to humans, Azudora represents Fear and Vamirio, though humanity never encountered her prior to the story starting (would be unlikely to live to tell the tale) would obviously be the Rage, but they're Life and Compassion in the Demon Empire since the perspective is different. I think Helck did a good job illustrating the hilariously wide gap between humans and demons (demons consider human a threat rated as E on a scale of E to SSS) and although the demons are pacifists and the real good guys in the world of Helck, it's understandable why humanity would be mortified sharing a border and knowing there are demons like Azudora and Vamirio that can wipe them out if they feel like it. Heck, humans don't even know Azudora and Vamirio exist at the beginning of Helck and thought that the subordinates under Azudora was the overall leader of demons, even though they're only in the level 50-60 range compared to Azudora (73) and Vamirio (78).