Shaman King

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This review is going to be very short and concise, so I suggest anyone wanting to give this a shot should consider reading my review. The rest of my review after the paragraph after this sentence goes a bit more into detail, so whether you choose to read it or not is up to your discretion. Again, I suggest anyone wanting to read this to check out this review.

Imagine a car driving up a hill. The only way up this hill is a very steep and treacherous one way slope. Just when that car is about to climb up to the peak, like literally just ... when it happens, it stops. That's right, it completely stops functioning. The engine goes off, the headlights stop beaming, and it does a completely nose dive backwards into the ravine and causes a big ass explosion.

That's this manga tbh.

Hao is still the same person he was when he first debuted. He's still that dude who wants to annihalate all the humans who don't believe in shamanism, and he gets little character development at all, even after making peace with his Mom, which was the source of the reason why he was doing what he was doing.

It'd be one thing if he'd change a bit, but nope. He's still the same. It's like Hiroyuki's message was that nothing will ever change. Which it most likely was, and that's why I can't accept it or how it ended. For a manga that wasn't as long as the Big Three (in manga and perhaps animu as well) but still managed to sell more/outclass/rival the Big Three, the way it ended was just all around bad to me.

So yeah, I wouldn't recommend this manga to anyone, but don't take what I'm saying to heart as this is just my opinion.

Shaman King, much like most other shonen manga is a story made to appeal to, of course, children as the primary audience, so I'm going to go out of my way instead of spending time being productive to allocate effort on writing a review on a 20 year old manga not aimed towards me as the primary audience.

I like Shaman King despite its flaws, the first half of the story was fantastic and held up as a shonen worth reading. Things start to get rotten plot-wise when resurrections are introduced to what seemed like a pretty straightforward story.

In Shaman King, if you suffer a near-death ... experience, you get a higher power level, which is called mana, so you can control your ghost partner and power yourself up with them depending on how you expend your mana.
What's worse than a shonen manga with no sense of risk/reward? Terrorism, but this isn't about that, what I'm complaining about is the countless fake-out deaths the main and supporting cast go through to justify getting powered up.

The battles, character interactions, artwork, and setting had enough of a charm to lull me into a false sense of security, and I only finished this manga before realizing it was too late, with the epiphany that what I've been reading the last 100 or so chapters were a trainwreck. Characters are killed off at first with buildup and drama, not knowing if they're going to make it through their near-death state, but the author kept providing fake-out after fake-out. As a reader you quickly realize this is going to be the norm, where for example, a character named Horohoro is foreshadowed to have a tragic backstory as he keeps quiet about his true name, and a few chapters later Horohoro along with some other main characters are laying face-down in a hot bath drowned to death, killed offscreen. Since there wasn't any closure you can safely assume he'll be back, and hey, shows up he does.

At a certain point the deaths become more common than actual battles, and the characters able to resurrect the dead become less and less rare as more Jesuses pop out along with frequency of death. As you can assume, it becomes hard to track who stays dead and who is resurrected, since there are some characters who have very emotional deaths and have to be hammered into the head of the reader that "THIS CHARACTER IS DEAD AND WILL STAY DEAD FOR THE REST OF THE SERIES", when they can easily be revived, which loses its impact.

OK that's my review. Good art, very good characters, I fairly enjoyed the first half, but overall it's not good.