Prison arc: 7/10, basically baki goes to prison to whack up Oliva after failing to do so in new grappler baki, there he has the goal of defeating Oliva while being rivaled by his cellmate (if I remember correctly it was his cell mate) Jun guevaru, what I did like about this arc was the return of one of the old characters and how they finally stopped lengthening out the fights with explanations in this one, they still did it in this arc but nowhere near as much as other arcs, what I didn't like was that baki was an outcast in this arc, might as well be named grappler jun guevaru and grappler Oliva tbh, it was a lot more centered around these two and baki was quite irrelevant in this arc until the Jun vs Oliva fight and the ending, and Jun guevaru is a cocky sob
Pickle arc: 10, this isn't just the best baki arc but one of the best arcs in all of manga history of you ask me, basically pickle the 170,000,000 year old dinosaur hunter is found by archaeologist frozen while in a battle with a dinosaur, he gets defrosted and the first thing he does is probably the most funniest and surprising shit I have seen, I will leave you to see it, but anyway all the fighters get rock hard when they hear about pickle and everybody want to challenge him, pickle was an amazing character, at first he was a scary savage beast that didnt sense any emotion, but later he get some seriously good character development, (what I'm about to say may contain spoilers, but there is barely a story in this manga so it doesn't really matter, don't read on if you don't want to get it spoiled for you, you have been warned) first he feels struggle against retsu, his first time ever experiencing struggle, then experiencing pain for the first time ever when against katsumi, later against Jack he feels fear for the first time and finally with baki he feels friendship, pickle truly was an amazing character and feels human by the end of the arc, all the fights were amazing and the jack vs pickle fight easily being the best in the series, I don't know what the mangaka for this series was smoking at the time he thought of baki vs pickle, it would have been a much better fight only if it wasn't lengthened so much, it was so annoying I had to skip half the fight to the end, the fan translation in this arc was also really poor but that is only something to watch out for not criticism cos it isn't an official translation, also the characters feel much more human as well rather than creatures with the only objective of fighting what ever breathes, katsumi and retsu probably got the most development out of all the characters and theres was really good too, sure not as good as pickles but it was damn well good
Retsu boxer arc: 3/10, bad, like really bad, I skipped quite some chapters cos I hated the arc, I was only interested in that awesome fight between baki and chiharu Shiba in this arc but other than that this arc was trash, basically Retsu wants to get back into fighting after what pickle did to him in the last arc so he takes baby steps to his goal and starts with the basics: pro boxing, well those baby steps were more like Sperm steps cos he is so frickin overpowered and 100,000,000x better than all his opponents, what I don't get is that the mangaka (forgot his name) just forgets about all the times he criticised boxing for not being a good fighting style and makes a whole arc praising boxing, well he didn't do boxing any justice cos the boxers were pretty shit compared to retsu, this arc was just the opposite of the Ali Jr arc and the Ali Jr wasn't executed in the right way but this arc was irrelevant and bad and if I have to be honest I don't think it could have been executed any better
Baki vs yujiro: 9/10, easily the most emotional arc in the entire series, had me damn near crying from the emotions yet also had me laughing quite a bit, they really humanised yujiro and baki in this arc and I loved it, you know what I said about the story? I take that back, this story is amazing, in my opinion I don't think this was just about a father vs son match, it was also because yujiro needed someone equal to him to be able to protect the weak (spoiler warning: you have been warned), the weak see him as a god and during the fight many African immigrants flood in to pray to yujiro for protecting them from the strong, yujiro really cares about people but he shows it in a very extreme way, the reason he is so hard on baki is because when his time comes the world will need another person to take the his place, his role is so important so he needs the best to take his place just like how he took yuichiro's place, baki is the only person capable of doing so and at the end yujiro finally realises that the world will be in safe hands when he is gone
