The structure of this manga was quite interesting. It set up what seemed to be quite the interesting duel, one between a single armed samurai and a blind samurai, each with an incredibly strong disdain for each other, and then spent the vast majority of the manga explaining how the two came to that point. This worked well, because it framed everything that would happen such that the focus of the reader was on how that was leading to what would eventually come to be. The majority of this was establishing the character of these two duelists pretty strongly, fleshing out their backgrounds, motivations, and how they're connected to each other. All of this involving a good amount of pretty solid action. And after all this, it finally gets to showing their final duel. Now there's a lot that's well done here, however there was something about it that personally made it pretty hard to enjoy all of this, mainly that it was quite savage and brutal. I don't just mean in terms of the gore, of which there was quite a bit of. But just in general how everyone was treated and how awful things were for everyone. The ending especially felt so depressing that it actually felt somewhat dumb. It was also kind of annoying how it kept on showing things that were just essentially happening in a character's imagination during battle, as it messed with the flow and just in general made it when things did happen have less impact because the reader isn't immediately willing to accept them as actually having happened. The art was solid and high quality I would think, but similarly to how I didn't like the brutal tone of the manga in general, I wasn't much fond of the art either.
