Feng Shen Ji

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These days, seinen, geared towards young adult men and older, are thought of as the mature, intelligent evolution from shounen. In turn, shounen are seen by some as mindless and flashy acts of violence and softcore eroticism meant to feed young boys’ growth in testosterone. Both vast opinions have flaws, just like any opinion born from the extremely flawed mind of a human, but the stereotypes of each genre are true in some way: shounen are indeed geared toward young boys and seinen are geared towards men who want a story with more mature themes. Having this in mind, the manhua Feng Shen Ji completely ... fits said expectations.

With mild gore, deaths, eye-catching artwork, and strong (almost tiring) supernatural themes such as reincarnation, the story begins with a bang large enough to keep one’s attention for one reason or another. From the first chapter, Feng Shen Ji is put across in a quick and entertaining way, leaving what seems to be room for growth but is really just lazy storytelling. There’s little explanation—and what’s elaborated on is done so in a simple fashion—because no one cares about that, right? Chapter by chapter, Feng Shen Ji becomes less like a coherent manhua and more like an uninspired, stereotypical autobiography completely lacking in depth.

The plot, consisting of a mess of vehement creatures, divine powers, and gods, starts something like this: While chaos rages, a tragedy happens to the young prince Wu Geng, and his life continues because he somehow cheats death (this is a theme that isn’t rare throughout the manhua). He lives life and fights with one purpose: freedom and prosperity through his hardships.

The main problem is that you don’t know why. Any reader deserves a reason as to why someone does what they do—something more complex, something attributed to deeper emotions. While freedom and prosperity are all fine and dandy, it’s been done before; with nothing grittier, the characters turn into a puddle of soup seasoned with a lack morals and direction. The characters’ uninteresting personalities are stemmed from their most evident trait: a simple, juvenile mindset. The story that they’ve been placed in is no better, with the same amount of thought put into it as the amount of times the main character sounds intelligent.

Every direction the plot goes seems like its come straight out of a book called “Clichés and How to Sugarcoat Them.” (Pick it up if you’ve never heard of it.) Feng Shen Ji chose to sugarcoat these clichés with two methods: Artwork of such quality that it was almost distracting and not putting serious emphasis on anything. Most occurrences in the manhua go by dully, walking across a fun little road named Monotony. There was no true conflict or plot twists because of how rooted it was to unoriginality and even the most important events just happen, devoid of gripping themes. The question of what is more at fault—the lack of compelling characters or the plot stripped bare of complex themes—is almost unable to be answered.

In fact, it is the art that breathes more life into the characters than anything else. Its best asset is that it’s not merely black-and-white lines, but is fully colored and fitting of the manhua’s atmosphere. Muscle-bound men adorn the pages, accompanied by graceful, silky-haired women. Gods look the part of the villain particularly well. Sceneries are skillfully drawn. Every few pages, Feng Shen Ji trades its normal style for a painted counterpart meant to give emphasis to important parts of the story. Most importantly, the combat is easy to take in and understand.

But despite how the art pops with color, there is a deep sense of black-and-white within the manhua. You can tell those who are “evil” from those who are looking to serve a plate of justice to the world within seconds. Characters have little that keeps them going on, keeps them fighting, or causes them to act the way they are—they’re just that way. The enemy gods are generally taken care of quickly once the clash has been established and the plot follows a plain cycle of working/training for freedom out of a situation, conflict, and a large change in scenery.

Semblances of growth in characters are just flukes. Wu Geng, the main character, sorely lacks morals and likability from start to finish. He’s impulsive and juvenile, but if I could say one thing, I would say that he acts his age. While he thinks he has the audacity to punish others, the largest problem with his character is that his personality is not only put across in an uninteresting way, making him immediately unlikable, but he also rarely gets enough punishment for his own ignorance. The only thing that makes him different from a usual idiotic lead is that there’s little to no attempt to make him interesting besides his immature monologues. The only growth that he, or any of the other characters, have are changes in appearance and status from year to year.

Besides him, the rest of the characters blur together and are easily forgotten, seen as interchangeable by the writer. What makes them unique is the fact that, unlike many characters these days, there are no cheap, flashy spices added (the same spices that, ironically, makes them unbearable). Their personalities come from the common archetypes stripped to the bare minimum. Perhaps, in the writer’s mind, this approach made the manhua more realistic.

Little to no emphasis is put on psychological growth, and instead the focus is on the mindless entertainment quality (through gore, deaths, and a hint of sexuality) and how pretty the package it’s wrapped in looks. Still, it is a manhua with mature themes, thus it caters to an age group that can handle such themes. For those reasons, yes, Feng Shen Ji is a seinen.

In no way did that make it mature.

On the surface Feng Shen Ji seems like a mix of Hokuto no Ken and God of War. Buff Chinese dudes going around punching gods and the art looks great, what’s not to like, right? As it turns out, plenty.

In case you were attracted by the extremely well drawn covers and some painted panels then you’ll probably notice the gaps between them and everything rest. Basically there’s two types of panels in this manga. Some are painted from scratch and are usually really detailed and good looking. The rest is usually normal drawings that are later colored with various degrees of success.

While by no ... means ugly, the art in the latter is much weaker compared to painted panels. Wonky proportions are not rare, especially the further away from viewer characters get. There’s no shortage of dull angles, most of the manga felt flat with and on rare occasion you got some low and high angles shots, nothing extreme though. This kind of meekness when it comes to expression runs throughout the manga.

Even though artists seem to have a decent grasp of anatomy when it comes to muscle they rarely play with proportions and perspective to create really cool and dynamic action scenes but instead they always feel stiff and rigid. Speaking of action scenes get ready for some family friendly violence. Nobody in this manga gets noticeably injured when it’s involved, I feel like this is an issue of censorship more than anything but nonetheless it removes a lot of impact from action scenes when instead of opponents actually getting eviscerated you just see a bunch of yellow lines and red splashes telling you that something is indeed happening even if it doesn’t feel like it. On occasion there is some pretty brutal stuff like someone ripping through their opponents rib cage but it’s all blacked out to avoid showing violence.

I’d want to commend the artist from coloring entirety of the comic but at times it felt like pages would look better if it instead was just black on white images without half-assed coloring ruining the contrast and crisp lineart.

When it comes to writing the situation gets better. While the opening chapters are very rough to get through due to comically bad amount of exposition and ridiculously big speech bubbles, they peter out soon enough and the story actually gets going.

For the most part Feng Shen Ji 1 is a bog standard shonen affair. It’s a story about an underdog hero slowly getting powers to fight back against the baddies, along the way he follows the typical cycle of losing, training and winning but where I think it stands out is in creating interesting scenarios that make it worth reading. Even though the plot is not gonna show anything different the situations characters find themselves in are fairly interesting. Authors are never afraid to throw a few wrenches in the wheels and they follow through on things like that. Usually in shonen everything has to exist in some stasis, nobody is allowed to actually get injured or die cause it might make story more complicated. In Feng Shen Ji one of the key characters loses a hand and they just roll with it. As nice as that is however don’t expect too much depth from characters either. While protagonist constantly evolves and goes through quite a few changes to adapt to his life the rest of the cast are a collection of one note archetypes.

Another thing I liked about the writing is that characters actually talk to each other. While yes there is a lot of dry exposition at times and the duologue is hardly insightful at any point it’s still so satisfying to have main hero who doesn’t just get talked at but shoots back when he can and taunts his opponents. A small thing but I think it adds quite a bit of enjoyment in the long run.

Important thing to note is that for some reason MAL decided to divide the full run of Feng Shen Ji in 3 parts so what you get here is essentially just a set up episode. That doesn’t mean there’s no good ending, there are individual character arcs that do good progress throughout the story but don’t expect a complete story if you just want to read this and not he other two episodes. Otherwise if you’re into shonen and the theme seems interesting to you this might be a decent casual read.