Fire Force is not bad.
Mangaka Ookubo put a lot of work into it. Fire Force published for nearly seven years, and contains a unique world with its own powersystem and a large share of characters.
You might have read in some reviews that Fire Force is a prequel to Soul Eater. While this is hinted at in the ending, fire force basically has nothing to do with Soul Eater, and you won't miss out on any crucial lore details if you don't read Fire Force.
Fire Force was a Manga that was in the back of my mind and on my watchlist since quite a while. As a Soul Eater fan myself i was suprised when i fround out that both Manga are written by the same Mangaka. This, and the character Shinmon Benimaru (whom i had seen in some clips), got me into reading this story.
So let's start with the chracters. There are quite a few, and they definetly span the whole spectrum from bad to good. As I had stated I started reading partly because of Benimaru, and he measured up to my expectations, although I would have liked it if Ookubo gave him some more engaging fights, as he is often just a mentor figure for our main characters.
Other characters i didn't know before reading but loved in the story were Arthur, Charon and Hinawa.
But sadly there are also a ton of characters that make the reading experience worse and even boring at times.
I didn't really like Captain Hibana from the start, which is sad as she plays a big role especially in the beginning of the story.
Tamaki is basically a fanservice character, which can be annoying at times. She does have a few cool scenes, like her storyline with "assault" and her training with the two girls in Asakusa, but that's about it. Her "final fight" (She was more of a bystander but still the center of the fight) was completely weird, and didn't strike a cord with me.
Many other characters just "exist" and don't really mean a lot to the reader, although it is often stated that they have a deeper connection to the main characters. Other are only introduced shortly before they are needed in the story, like Benimarus Mentor, which i am not a big fan of.
The main character, Shinra, also wasn't that interesting, he was a pretty basic Shonen MC that never loses hope and always comes through in the end. Which in itself isn't that bad if there was just something more to him.
Similar to the characters, the fights also had a huge quality range. There were two fights that really stood out to me. Hinawa vs. Arrow and Arthur vs. Dragon.
Hinawa vs. Arrow had a great setting and amazing visuals. While being a really cool concept for a fight in and of itself.
Arthus vs. Dragon wasn't a singular fight, but multiple, closely tying into Arthurs overall storyline and really feeling like the completion of a journey from him. Even though I didn't like Arthur that much in the beginning he had some of the funniest and most interesting scenes in the span of the story. The way he himself gets stronger is great and his final enemy fits all of this perfectly. The final fight between Arthur and Dragon was also absolutely insane, and definetly the highlight of the series for me.
Sadly many other fights just weren't that great, my biggest problem is with the final Shinra vs. Burns fight. I think the premise of the fight isn't even that bad but Shinra just wins it without a problem even though Burns is insanely strong and undergoes multiple Powerups in the fight, to me at least, it didn't make sense at all and left me quite unsatisfied.
This brings me to my next point, the powerscaling in this series is all over the place. I never had a good idea of how strong a characters really was. Especially with new characters, that often just exist for the sake of fighting, popping up all over the place. Even now if you would name two characters and have me guess who is stronger, it would be hard to say except for a few exceptions. And you might argue that this is good and keeps fights interesting, and i would agree if it didn't cause for most outcomes to just be confusing.
Lastly i want to touch on the ending, which, as you can read in many reviews, isn't that great. I also dislike the ending, although with that i only mean the final shinra and haumea confrontation. The last third of the story / the last arc had some great scenes (Arthus vs. Dragon, Hinawa shooting at Charon guarding the door...). In my friendgroup we have a saying for this kind of ending, it is a "firepunch ending" which, if you haven't read fire punch, is basically an ending that completely overshoots the scope of the series. We go from firefighters fighting with firepowers to the MC becoming a literal god and creating the world and humanity anew. This is crazy. And even the message that the ending wants to convey to the reader, that we "shouldn't take death as seriously", is debateble.
In conclusion Fire Force is still not bad, even if it sounds like that in this review. If you prepare for a series where the last maybe 20 chapters aren't that good, and some characters overall being rather boring, you can have a lot of fun reading the more engaging and interesting parts of the story. Although this may sound a bit mean to the Mangaka but you can also just stop reading after the final Arthur vs. Dragon fight(272), it just goes downhill from there
