This story starts out nicely and relatively small scale. A couple of odd battles here with Kiyomaru our protagonist making friends along the way. Everyone questions whats the point of having everyone fight each to be king and Zatch likes to avoid them if needed. The story is really neat when it acts as a slice of life with the tournament to decide the Demon King is put in the after thought. The first 1/3rd is a nice little read. '
However, the later 2/3rds of the series is taken up by 3 major arcs all in a row. Each one terribly drawn out. The first 2 major arcs throw a wide array of characters at us, over 2 dozen each. Some people complain about One Piece introducing 10 new characters for new arcs, Zatch Bell blows it out of the park. So many characters I don't know and never will care for. So many useless battles. It becomes sluggish to push through the series. This is ultimately what made me stop/start read the series until 6.5 years had passed.
To add to the problems, the consequences within Zatch Bell fell into the shonen power trap. The escalations of failure continued to grow to monstrous size. It goes from one demon wanting to genocide humans, to another demon wanting to genocide demons lol. The clashes turned from small scale fights that can happen in a field, to mountain busting, to a full on space battle.
Speaking of tropes. The ending was worse than Naruto and Fairy Tail combined. Power of friendship? Zatch Bell takes the cake easily with an unexplained power up having the spirits of the fallen demons coming to back Zatch up in his final fight lol. This is a massive problem from the beginning since the series failed to establish power rules or a power scale.
There's a mess of other issues. Racist depictions of black people, never explaining the politics of the demon world which is the source of every single problem, attempting to redeem every single character by giving them a sad backstory or saying the power they held is what made them evil. That includes both genocidal maniacs. There's also stupid reasoning that we shouldn't kill people even when dire circumstances call for it. At one point someone could've shot the book owner of one of the genocidal demons, effectively stopping the demon from using his power. Which was very much needed because a giant demon he was controlling was about to destroy to Japan. But noooo, we cant kill people, that'd make us just as bad.
To fixate on another issue, I mentioned prior how the last arcs introduced far too many new characters, This not only resulted in boring fights, but also diluted the use of the main stay characters. Many really good characters within the series got shafted to do something else so Zatch could be the forefront of attention. We never got to see the really unique fights that could've occurred between the other main stay heavy hitters. A travesty in storytelling setting up the less interesting protagonist to be the savior of all. Horse cock and bullshit is what it is. Fuck you, Bari is a better character. Fuck Raiku for shitting all over him.
I could go on and on with the issues of Zatch Bell citing more detailed examples, but you get it. Now I will focus on the positives.
Cute and badass character designs. Multiple amazing double spreads straight out of some kaiju world. There can be some really great character moments in mid-fight too.
That's it. Fuck this mess. Hopefully Raiku improved his craft in Animal Land.
