Reviews

Garouden is my favorite martial arts manga ever, even though i love grappler baki, the last sagas really took a tool on me, Baki dou and Baki dou 2 are really a turn off for the fans, but that is not the subject here ! Garouden is one hell of a ride if you are a martial arts fan, praticioner ou just someone who enjoy combat sports, i am a martial artist since 12 years old, and series like hajime no ippo and baki, especially baki, made me dive into that and train in many styles, and Garouden only made that flame for fighitng inside me burn even more. The story follows Tanba, who is a karateka and also a dojo crasher, he jumps into a wrestling gym that belongs to the FAW, which ends up to be the greatest wrestling federation in Japan, run by the man himself The Great Tatsumi, who is based on the real life wrestling legend Antonio Inoki, there Tanba ends up beating beaten by a wrestler that later becames a fan favorite in the federation, after the lost, Tanba dissapears for 3 years, training around and learning new methods, implementing wrestling techniques to his main karate style. Later he ends up meeting the karate demon Shozan Matsuo, based on the legend of karate, founder of kyokushin styles, Masutatsu Oyama (the style of karate i trained btw XD), when hearing about Tanba, Shozan also creates a interest on the boy, and there the story goes, no spoilers here go read it ! And now i will to a technical review for you to see if that is worth the read.
Before i put the points on, it is really worth it XD, the story is nice, but not that dense or elaborated, there are no plot holes or "author forgot" moments, but, there are no super interesting plot twists or stuff like that, the main thing here are the fights, they are realistic, but surreal at the same time, there are no energy blasts, astral projections or weird techniques like some of the Baki ones, even though, there are a lot of superb throws and strikes, but it is nice to see and you know it haha. A great positive point for the series is that every character gets they spotlight, and the protagonist has to grow alongside everyone, he is not super milestone ahead of the others, from the beginning there are real treats, and then there is the major positive point for me, they show how someone who is blindfolded by their style will always be wrecked but strong fighters, like karatekas who got twisted by wrestlers and jujutsu specialists that got crashed by karatekas, the ones who train eveything are the strongest, the ones who refine their styles, who are flexible, like bruce lee used to say, we cant stick just to one style, we got to mix it up and make it functional. With that in mind, the major and pretty much only negative point for me, is the fact the story never got a endiing, it is on hiatus since the last chapter, every previous arc was finished, but the last one "the terror of Gozo murase" barely started and the manga ended, sadly we propably will never know how did it end, but it is still worth it, give it a chance guys, i am sure you will LOVE it, i know i did, see ya !