One Punch-Man
One-Punch Man

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Recommendations: read a good superhero comic. watch a good superhero cartoon. watch a good superhero movie, animated or live action.

This series started as a comedic/parody manga adaptation of a comedic/parody webcomic. As it goes on, the series has become much much longer than it ever needed to be. One Punch man is right now a full on battle shonen with all the cliche associated with it. It has an overpowered protagonist, lots of bullshit power ups, villain groups, tournaments, long dragged out fights and more.
It's comedy has completely run stale and telling the same joke over and over isn't funny.

It has led me to ... believe that the author has seen this and took the series in another direction.
It is still very much complete shlock and not in the best kind of way.

I appreaciate art, so I will say that the series still very much looks great and has highly detailed art. It's generic stuff, monsters tend to have lots of spikes and look like what you'd expect from a generic monster but done in stunning detail regardless.

At this point nothing separates it from the other run of the mill battle shonen except it has really pretty art. It doesn't have a story to tell, it isn't following a plot at all and has no interesting characters.

Lately, Murata starts to create stuff like a kid. And creating lots of inconsistencies while trying to act like "now I'm gonna make kaabooooM!" . How that planet will be safe by the end of the series idk. Murata hyped up The ONE's scalings too much. Webtoon is a much better series but lacks the art.

Also, I'm sick of re-draws. Murata literality invented manga-filler. Also, his drawings getting a bit sloppier still much better than the average monthly series but not as once he did.

It was supposed to be a superhero genre and battle shounen genre parody but it becomes the joke's itself. Garou's arc ... is a lousy and cheesy battle shounen arc. and Garou is the protagonist.

So, Murata's version ain't have any charm or awe anymore for me. Borderline boredoom.

It is probably one of the best action conduited mangas out there as well as an intelligent satire about power fantasies and the art is top notch but a little generic despite that designs are really cool most of the time, however that are all the good things I can say about OPM. It is not bad by any means but in 150+ chapters the story becomes progessively less interesting. The misteries around the hero ranking are a good hook up but it gets old quite early. It is a fun watch but nothing else. Would recommend the first animated part as it is delightfully ... made and really fun.

This manga is garbage. But it is also "gourmet garbage".

The premise was incredible. The parody was on point. The characters were charming and great. The art of Murata is one of the greatest I've ever seen, as well as his use of the composition and visual narrative of a manga to convey the story.

However, as time has gone by, the quality has suffered immensely.

The characters became boring, predictable and way repetitive long ago. The action, while spectacular and brilliantly drawn, gets too long for its own good, and barely has any impact on the reader besides the chaos. There ain't no strategy, there ain't no ... emotion and, worse of all, there ain't no story. It's just a random colision of characters that seem to be equal in power (with some exceptions) and at the end, one will defeat the other with some unknown attack they had never displayed before. That has happened so many times it's laughable, and paired with the terrible extension of the fights and the lack of story in them, they become, as I said, boring as f*ck. We're just waiting for most of them to end and go to an interesting point of the plot, which have also become a rarity these days. Also, I can't be the only one who just can't get behind the fact that NOBODY dies in this manga. And we better not talk about the treatment of the female characters...

I know, you can't actually take One Punch Man seriously. It's a parody... Well, yeah, but the thing is... This isn't a parody anymore. There's no commentary. There's just mindless action. And it's really fun when it gets to the apocalyptic and absolutely out of this world parts with cathartic universal destruction... But that just means this comic became what it used to laugh at. And that's sad.

But holy hell, it is still enjoyable. The art is still amazing. When Saitama is involved, the action is incredibly fun. And what's fair is fair: it has done a magnificent job creating a world full of powerful characters that are able to generate amazing hype and stakes that keep us the readers intrigued. And that is not easy.

Damn, what it could have been. If it was the webcomic we were talking, I would have probably given it a 8 or even 9.

TLDR : The manga kinda lost itself and became a simple shonen instead of a parody of shonen. Some fights are drawn out and dont feel like much is happening. The pacing is slower and events are overall drawn out, this gives less impactful and emotional scenes. Some informations are very unsubtle, it almost gives us no room for thinking and interpretation, which gives us a story with less depth unfortunatly. It just became a simple shonen for casual anime fans ... (not necessarily bad but quite far from its origins).

/!\ SPOILERS /!\ (review not finished, might update it)
However, we are talking about the manga and compared to his counterpart, he leaves a lot to be desired. This will mainly be talking about the Monster Association Arc, since it has taken such a long time to develop it (atleast in the manga). We have to aknowledge first that they are a lot of differences between the 2. The first is that there is a lot of added content, and I mean a lot. The martial art tournament is one example, and a good example of almost useless new arc and borderline boring. Since this tournament have a lot of new characters, it is quite uninteresting to watch because we already know that saitama wont loose and because the new characters are only briefly introduced, we don't really care for them nor root for one. This gives us a dried out tournament with almost not interest to give in. Furthermore, it almost is totally useless, only used to have an excuse for saitama to be busy while the monsters are rampaging and to introduce a certain character.

One problem that I already said is a lot of new content (not necessarily bad), but a lot of it is useless/doesn't bring anything to the table, such as the many variations of monster Centipede, the elongated battle of Psycho vs Tatsumaki, the lot of meaningless drawn out battles, ... This impacts a lot the impression of the fights left on us. The pacing feel slow, fights drawn out, which could be interpreted as a parody of the shonen genre, but even though the pacing is slower, you still dont feel that much is happening. The new added content doesn't feel like it helps necessarily the plot, sometimes even acting against it. Garou in the webcomic seems cold hearted, concise but overall he doesn't necessarily seem like he could be a good guy in the inside. After the fight, Saitama is the one making us realise how actually Garou isn't as much evil as we were lead to think at first. However, in the manga, there isn't a lot to think about. Since the start, Garou doesn't feel like much of an evil guy, much of a monster. He feels as just an asshole,the manga is very on point since the start on what Garou is. It doesn't leave much to think about.

With the art improvement, comes the failure of the jokes. A lot of the jokes fall way more flat to me personally at least than in the webcomic. This leads to point out that the webcomic which I could easily categorize as a parody of shonen. For the manga, I couldn't categorize as easily as a parody. It feels more like a generic shonen (with great art and choreographed fights tho). However, even as a simple shonen, Murata could have profited of the better pacing, suspense and building of One's webcomic.

[Edit] Let me start by saying that I've dropped the manga at chapter 106. If you are reading reviews to know if it is worth committing your money (or your time) to buy/read the mangas I say: "Yes" - if you love artwork. However, I would say, "No", if you like storytelling. Here is why.

Although One Punch-Man is extremely well drawn with beautiful frames and multiple characters, the storytelling comes to a dreadful fault after the first arc (the first season of the anime). Since Saitama is a God-like hero, the author knows that the story can't focus on him too much, so Saitama becomes ... a tertiary character that basically appears in 1-2 pages each 3-4 chapters. The focus abruptly shifts to the other heroes. But here is the thing: you might think "OK, cool, it is nice to see expanded lore and more heroes". However, the narrative was not crafted the way you expect. For me, the other heroes, with few exceptions, are absolutely not interesting and the author fails to make them enjoyable. They are all extremely similar in personalities. For example, all S-rank heroes are arrogant, know-it-all people who have little-to-no development. I was expecting some level of character development for someone else aside from Genos, but guess what: nope. All the same, all static. The author explains their past, but that's it. Remember, "backstory" is different from "character development". You will just follow other heroes do stuff, but they will neither develop, nor they will provide you with a good time in terms of narrative.

I dropped the series because I was awfully bored with the narrative. The author created an interesting hero (Saitama), with cool sidekicks (Genos, King, etc.). And good villains (especially Garou), but he has an inconsistent focus on them. Your attention will be constantly dragged away to see subplots that are absurdly irrelevant and boring and accompanying heroes that are just not interesting. The anime, at least, is more focused than the manga and more fast-paced. If you know the anime I can only say that the manga is not as direct. You have a lot of filler - and 80% of that filler is absolutely not worth it.

In a nutshell, I do not recommend buying the mangas unless you love having beautiful artwork in your collection.

one punch man is a story about a guy named saitama, the titular "one punch man". he lives in a world where heroes and monsters are the norm, and despite being basically one of the strongest beings alive, saitama lives a normal life, unable to feel satisfaction from fighting villains as he's too powerful to ever truly experience the thrill of a fight. that's basically the initial premise and focus of one punch man and i really like it! so what's with the mixed rating?

the main character, saitama, is probably one of the most interesting characters ive seen in a manga so far. while never ... put so bluntly, its made it pretty clear that saitama has some form of depression as he is rarely able to express extreme emotions in his daily life, and is unable to experience happiness from the fights he once loved to participate in when he was younger. there's a sort of comical nihilism expressed in the story as saitama is constantly stuck in a loop of monotony even in spite of his god-like power status.

what balances out with this potentially repetitive element of the story is the interactions saitama has with other people. there are so many memorable characters, even minor ones, that stound out all on their own, but compliment themselves even further with how they interact with saitama and others. there's a great character named king who has a conversation with saitama about saitamas inability to feel extreme happiness anymore, and its such a real situation that stands out from the rest of the story. there are a lot of other moments like this, too, with other heros and friends.

sadly, despite what i love about the characters, the recent arcs in one punch man have.. kind of drained that life out of the story. there is a much larger focus on powerscaling-esque dynamics and large scaled worldbuilding. there are entire sections of the manga where saitama basically isn't doing anything because there needs to be screentime for other characters to have fights with villains i don't really care about. unlike earlier OPM where it was a mainly character focused action/comedy that managed to balance out the fact that the main character could kill basically anything, it feels like recent OPM is trying its best to write the main character out of the story so there is screentime for "cool art, i guess" moments.

that's not to say that all of the recent fights are completely worthless or anything. the art in one punch man is some of the best in the medium and there were a few fights that really stood out to me, but the manga truly begins to feel its flaws once the fights start to keep coming and coming, and you start to notice the blatant, unnecessary fanservice and sexualization of characters. i don't need 4k HD fucking boobs and uncomfortable sexuality in my fights in place of well written character development.

recently, there are rarely ever any moments like that king/saitama conversation i was talking about earlier. any of those moments now feel shallow, half-baked, as if they're only referencing those points from the original webcomic. this really shows itself in garou, whos a character whos initially very well recreated in the first half of the story but slowly becomes more and more of a caricature of his former self as the story strays away from the original webcomic, with core beats in his developement being scrapped, as to have more room for the aforementioned "cool art, i guess" moments. it really is disappointing.

i know a lot of people love this manga but, could it be, idk, perhaps, maybe... mid? no, it couldnt be...
yeah i think it is lol thanks for reading