Both Dororo and Hyakkimaru are incredibly charming, yet troubled personalities, struggling to survive and find their identity in a pseudo-mythological feudal Japanese setting. The various demons from Japanese mythology are well drawn, and the visual story telling is as sharp as any of Tezuka's other works. However, you can feel the pace of the story slow down as Tezuka begins to noticeably lose interest on Dororo. As stated before, Dororo is a story about trauma and the effects this leaves over time, but also a story about characters. This tends to clash with itself, and leads me to believe Tezuka understood creatively he would be limited to "telling a story about demon slaying" and eventually just gave up. To really tell the story of Dororo would require telling it over years, and with Phoenix already in the works, Tezuka had little need to write a second decade long shonen-like epic. This taste was, clearly, taken up by the generation that followed him, and successful accomplished thanks to the patterns and themes Tezuka laid out.
At the end of the day, Dororo is cut a little short. Unlike many other manga with 3 or 4 volumes, that leave you realizing there isn't that much to work with for another 15 volumes, Dororo is a story that makes the reader say "there is so much here, I need to keep this alive". In many ways, that's exactly the message, and lesson, Dororo embodies, and ultimately why despite this works lack of a real ending, and lazy final few chapters, Dororo is a classic.
Dororo's often under represented influence on modern classics is something that has begun to remedy itself in recent years. This was hindered by the fact online access to the manga is limited, but with Vertical's release on the Omnibus, it is now affordable and easily purchased, thus making this required reading for anyone interesting in the history of manga.
