Never in my life have I read a manga with as much wasted potential as this one. The first 30 or so chapters were genuinely decent and had promise of potential. The idea of an MC needing to hide his powers and live a double life is a neat gimmick, and the MC had a nice bromance going on with his best friend. I liked how Kafka was some 32 year old loser working a dead-end job, and decided to give his dreams a second shot after befriending Ichikawa. They had a nice dumbass-and-straight-man dynamic going on, and it made the early chapters of the series pretty charming. I liked how the MC had a little circle of friends who knew his secret while the rest of the defense force considered his alter ego to be an enemy. Nothing great or revolutionary, but it was enjoyable. For a while, I thought Kaiju no. 8 was going to be a fun series that told a story that's somewhat different from its contemporaries in the shonen demographic.
Now if you look at the other reviews for this series, you see how over time the majority of the reviews go from "recommend" to "mixed" to "not recommended"? That's cause this shit falls off HARD. Without going into spoilers, there is a specific moment 30 chapters in where everything the series had going for it flies COMPLETELY out the window. For the past 60 chapters (2 thirds of the series as of the time I'm writing this) the series has been nothing but aimlessly fighting flesh monsters with what is by far the worst powersystem I have ever seen in a battle manga. Whatever charm the MC had as a goofy everyman loser vanishes entirely. The problem with Kafka, the MC, is that he originally worked because he was a loser who no one outside of the two other leads respected. It made him sorta charming and relatable. However, he just doesn't work when he's taken outside of that context and becomes this dude who everyone realizes is hot shit and is primarily defined by his desire to hang out with his childhood crush (Who, in spite of how much she's pushed at the start of the series, barely gets any development) and do the right thing. While I'm not against having somewhat standard "good guy" protagonists, Kafka lacks the substance or charisma that makes protagonists like that work.
And speaking of characters, the series throws so many minor characters at you, but barely any of them are actually interesting. You'll constantly get characters referring to people who showed up in maybe one panel and the story somehow expects you to remember. In the more recent chapters, it tries to make the cast more interesting by doing the whole "mid-fight flashback" thing again and again, but it overuses this so much that you can't find yourself giving a shit about any of them. I can count on one hand the amount of characters I actually give a shit about: Ichikawa, Hoshina, and Shinomiya. Ichikawa had a kinda fun dynamic with Kafka at the start of the series, but he hasn't appeared in so long he's pretty much irrelevant. With Hoshina, you can TELL the author wishes he made him the MC instead of Kafka. Despite not being considered a "main character" he probably gets more focus than the actual main character. He is at the very least somewhat more entertaining than Kafka (I don't even think Hoshina is that "good" of a character, just... fine). Shinomiya, the heroine, is genuinely the only character who I would say was decently handled. She's easily the character who has the most consistent focus and is the only character who's gone through something of an arc. Even if said arc isn't particularly unique or interesting ("I'm a strong confident prodigy!" -> *gets saved* -> "That was humiliating :( I need to get stronger" -> *gets stronger*), it's still SOMETHING, which puts her above the rest of the cast.
As for the plot... it's barely even there. The series had an initial plot hook of Kafka wanting to hide his identity as Kaiju no. 8, which was sort of interesting for a bit. However, that eventually disappears entirely. The closest thing to a "plot" in Kaiju no. 8 is that there's this one mushroom-head guy who wants to kill humanity (for no defined reason) and REALLY has it out for Japan in particular. And not having a concrete plot isn't even a dealbreaker for me, since (To compare Kaiju no 8 to an actual good series running in the same magazine) the closest thing there is to a "plot" in Dandadan is the male lead trying to get his testicles back. The difference, however, is that Dandadan has a cast of charming characters and puts them in crazy situations that are actually fun to read about. Kaiju no. 8 meanwhile has the cast fight a boring flesh monster... and then they fight another boring flesh monster... and then they fight another boring flesh monster, and so on.
Now I know what you're thinking: who CARES about all of that? Kaiju no. 8 is a battle manga, and so everything I just said can be forgiven if the series has cool and entertaining fights. After all the series has KAIJU in the title, so I'm sure most people are going into this series for the sake of reading about giant monsters hitting each other with buildings.
And therein lies the single most damning flaw of Kaiju no. 8: the fights are TERRIBLE. Kaiju no. 8 has some of the most boring, played-out, and sterile fights I've ever seen in a manga. I binge read the whole manga and I think the only fight I thought was kind of interesting was when Hoshina attacked Kafka in the second arc. While the manga has the word Kaiju in the title, the fights lack any sense of scale or weight that makes kaiju fights interesting in the first place (Another thing Dandadan does better than this manga, by the way). There's NOTHING going on in them. No interesting abilities or fun banter or strategy. They hit each other back and forth until the character with the higher powerlevel wins. I think the ONE time the series did anything interesting with a fight was when Kaiju no. 9 was having some villain monologue, and Shinomiya attacked him from behind and she sliced his dialogue box in half. And that isn't even a crazy hype moment or whatever. Just a neat-ish moment because I REALLY cannot name any other moment that I think is worth bringing up.
The power system in Kaiju no. 8 (and even using the term "power system" is being EXTREMELY generous) is by far the worst I have ever seen in a battle manga. The characters get these suits that allow them to harness a certain amount of power that varies between characters, which in practice means that they all have their own powerlevel. That's... honestly all there is. With the exception of Hoshina and his whole sword gimmick, the characters all use the exact same set-up, with all the differences like Narumi's gun or Shinomiya's axe being so inconsequential that even mentioning them feels like I'm giving the series too much credit. The choreography is messy and it's hard to understand what's going on a lot of the time, but it doesn't really matter because it all just boils down to the bog-standard set-up of "Grrrr this kaiju is stronger than I expected -> *flashback* -> *powerlevel increases* -> "I'm not strong enough yet" -> *powerlevel increases again* -> *oneshots the kaiju*. That's every single fight in this manga, until the rest of the cast jobs against Kaiju no. 9 and Kafka comes in to oneshot him because the author wants him to be Goku. I can get enjoying a manga for the sake of cool fights and nothing else, but it's just not here. If you're looking for fights, I'd recommend ANY series over this one.
As a kaiju manga, Kaiju no. 8 fails entirely. The entire appeal of kaiju movies is that you're watching these all-powerful goliaths go at each other, and Kaiju no. 8 just doesn't have that. The kaiju in this manga feel less like kaiju and more like generic fodder monsters. If you watch a Godzilla movie, Godzilla and whatever kaiju he's fighting that movie completely tower over all of their surroundings. Even if you can tell you're just watching a guy in a lizard suit, there's still a strong sense of scale. They always show the kaiju alongside skyscrapers or similarly huge structures. They do a good job at conveying the sheer gap in size between the kaiju and humanity. Kaiju no. 8 just lacks that sense of scale. None of the kaiju are THAT big, or at least it never feels like the kaiju's size actually matters. Even when the kaiju are "big," the human characters are all agile enough that they can jump up to the kaiju's eye-level in a single bound. At most, you'll get some throwaway line where a character says "Damn this kaiju's skin is too thick. I can't injure him with my cuts," and that simply isn't the same as watching Godzilla casually walk through pylons and trample tanks. And on that note, not only does this manga do a bad job at emphasizing the kaiju's size, but it does a bad job at emphasizing their power. The better Godzilla movies will spend a good chunk of time on human characters who are completely helpless against these gods of destruction. In Godzilla vs Mothra, for example, I'd say maybe a bit over half of the movie is about the military trying and failing to stop Godzilla. Humanity simply stands zero chance against this behemoth, so when Mothra comes in and puts up a serious fight against Godzilla, it feels like a big deal. Whenever a character in this manga is unable to defeat a kaiju, it's simply because their powerlevel wasn't high enough. And then what happens is that either said character has a flashback which raises their powerlevel and allows them to oneshot the kaiju, or Kafka comes in and oneshots the kaiju anyway. It's hard to take the kaiju seriously as a threat when they're constantly getting oneshotted left and right. If Ghidorah or Mechagodzilla could get oneshotted by Godzilla, no one would take these guys seriously, and yet I'm expected to still care about Kaiju no. 9 after he's gotten his ass handed to him time and time again. While it's understandable that Hoshina or Shinomiya are able to hold their own against kaiju, given that they themselves are infinitely stronger than the average soldier, the problem is that since the vast majority of the manga is spent following Hoshina or Shinomiya, their powerlevel is the baseline to which all other characters are compared. This manga TELLS us that the kaiju are a major threat, but it does a terrible job at SHOWING it.
The art is... fine. It's not great or anything, but it's pretty to look at and there are a couple of spreads that make me go "Hey that looks pretty good." Nothing I'd want to write home about, but it's worth bringing up I guess.
In conclusion, Kaiju no. 8 is not well-written nor is it entertaining. It had an interesting and charming premise, but dumped it down the drain. It feels like the author resorts to the most predictable of shonen cliches, not because he thinks they're good, but because he's only doing this shit for the money and is throwing shit that other series do in the hopes that something will stick. I haven't "dropped" this series, not because it's good, but because each chapter takes maybe 30 seconds to read so what's even the point of dropping it? The single most interesting aspect of Kaiju no. 8 isn't anything in the manga itself, but rather how this shit is somehow still selling solid numbers in Japan. I have no idea why anyone would still be enjoying this series enough to spend money on it, but I guess that's their perogative.
