Hakaijuu

[THIS REVIEW CONTAINS VERY MILD SPOILER]

First off, to give you a quick summary, I pretty much enjoy this manga overall, but definitely not the opening. Right from the first chapter, you can see it doesn’t have a good hook. Things even slowed down for the next 3 or 4 chapters, but I believe this buildup is necessary for the story to take off later. If you stick to around 25 chapters and you still don't like it, I say drop it. My overall enjoyment: 8.8/10 (Fun read). Re-reading value: 6/10. (Suspense is what keeps this manga good, by re-reading you've known all the details). Anyway, here's my detailed review:

1/Opening: 7.5/10: Can be a little misleading. Without reading the genres or seeing the cover first, you would think this is a basketball romance manga after several pages, and I don’t blame you. However, toward the second half of the first chapter, you will realize that uh oh, things are getting tense! However, this opening is cliche at best, with monsters appear and kill everyone, seems like a scene taken straight out of Godzilla
Not only is the opening not hooking, but it also drags on for a little while. This has both pluses and minuses. On one side, it is necessary to depict the terror and ignorance of the survivors of the situation, of what is going on, and their quest to gather forces. On the other, 75% of the first 5 chapters is just monsters destroying building, after a while it gets repetitive, which might lead to high rates of dropping (Remember, the first few chapters are crucial as to whether a reader drops a manga or not). Furthermore, the premise of the manga is not stated explicitly until many many more chapters: what are these creatures, where did they come from, how to stop them, etc. If you stay with it, it could be rewarding though.

2/Plot: 8.8/10: It is primarily a survivor manga. Thus, it shares many characteristics with the likes of Gantz, but it also has a few uniqueness.
Similarities include: the suspense, the killing of characters, and several internal conflicts, which give way to character development.
Differences include: The characters don’t pick up information and intelligence as they progress in the game. In Gantz, the players have to find out for themselves the functions of the armor, how to win, etc., in Tenkuu Shinpan, the players have to explore the functions of the masks, and learn about the powers of the “Close ones to God” ALONG the way, which makes for an interesting “adventure,” so to speak. In Hakaijuu, the characters just run and fight, not until VERY later on did everything get laid out ALL AT ONCE, BY AN AUTHORITY, which I find not as fun.
Pros:
+ The fact that it kept you in the dark for a really REALLY long time. It gives the readers the feeling of actually being the manga characters: fear, ignorance of what’s going on, etc.
+ It gives you a rainbow-after-the-storm vibe, you know, all the couples take off and the happy-feel-good motif. However, to be honest, it is not really detailed. I’m ambivalent about this. (more under character development)
+ The most prominent feature of this manga is the 3 “breaks,” or “intersections.” If you have read Kamisama no Iutoori parts 1&2, or 20th Century Boys, or Code Geass Parts 1&2, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The story temporarily stops with a cliffhanger, and goes on to depict a whole other frontier, with new characters and everything (Code Geass). Or it ends with a “Great Battle,” and doesn’t show the aftermath, but rather flashes forward to what happens after it (20th Century Boys). It is not until very later that these 2 “seemingly parallel” theaters converge, and both sides start trading information, and what happened is actually revealed. This is extremely satisfying to me for some reasons. Not the best way to put it, I’m sorry, but I’m sure you’ll get it when you read it. All the mangas I reference have 1 of these, this manga has 3!!! All of which are well crafted, which shot this manga way up in my list.
My dislikes:
+ 50% of the mangas is just the author showing off his drawing skills of monsters and buildings. It is beautiful, but after a while it gets really repetitive and boring.
+ The author uses the same motif over and over again: the characters get exponentially stronger, while the monsters get EVEN MORE exponentially stronger. Imagine Dragon Ball Z. The difference between SS4 Goku and Goku is achieved in 500 chapters. Now shorten it by 15 times! You get this manga and its progression of power. Thank God he doesn't use the power of hope and friendship!
+ The author recycles portrayal of characters (more under art)
+ Mediocre re-reading quality. It is a fun ride, but it’s definitely not half as exhilarating as the first time, since you know all the “breaks.” Cherish your first time, fellas.

3/Art: 8.5/10: the art is good from the beginning. The building and every monster is drawn very detailed (although the monsters can be a jumbled mess and indistinguishable sometimes). Most impressive are the armors and technology. Looking dope as hell! However, what I hate most is that the author recycles his portrayal: he draws immediate family members exactly identical (mom looks exactly like daughter, dad looks exactly like son). This is the biggest turn-off for me. At least change something yo!

4/Character development: 6.5/10: The biggest disappointment for me. This story features very limited character development, even for the protagonists. While other survival mangas focus on the change in personalities of characters after facing death, this one focuses too much on fighting and action. The author should have cut down on his monsters and build more onto his characters. The romance develops very subtly, it’s just like “boom, we’ve been together since day 1 after so many battles, so I guess I’ve fallen in love with you at some point.” There’s very few moments of introspection, you know, when the characters just stop to realize and reflect on the journey and their feelings and all. You see none of that here. Also, in other survival mangas, the MC usually man ups and resolves to fight when something tragic happens to him (love interest dies, friend dies, shame of not being able to protect anyone, blah blah). In this manga, however, the guy just become totally badass overnight. Biggest turnoff for me so far. In short, you don’t see the roads (moments of introspection, shocking deaths), you only see the destination (couples just take off, MC just become super brave overnight).

5/Suspense, thriller, and buildup: 9/10. Extremely good due to the fact that we are kept totally in the dark. We ask ourselves wtf is going on. The battles are extravagant, and I usually get a Star Wars vibe at the big battles!

6/Ending: 8.5/10: This is not a great ending or an ok one, it’s somewhere in the middle. High in the spectrum. The finale has a big twist which I really like. I won’t spoil it. It also sees a big change in a character, but to some it may be entirely bullshit and cliche and plot armor, but again I really enjoy. Overall, as a Shounen, it is obvious that a happy ending is expected. It satisfies the typical ending and ends on a high note, giving its readers a feel-good vibes. It provides proper closure, as well as the “look forward to the future” and the “people marry, live happily ever after,” and it does so in a not so cheesy way, but a lighthearted way which leaves me feeling kinda bittersweet (I guess?).

Note:
+ If you finish this series, and are crazy about it, you can always shoot me a message and have a friend to discuss it over with! I love this manga but (somehow) it is not popular, so the need to discuss it off my chest is real!
+ There is no full English scanlations of this series so far as I’m concerned. I read this in my native tongue, which is Vietnamese, in case you were wondering how I managed to finish this.

Everything begins at a high school where a normal student, Akira Takashiro, is getting ready for a basketball game against his friend Eiji Kudo, the winner will ask a girl out. When he goes to get a ball there’s a very strong earthquake and he loses conscious, when he wakes up he realizes the school is full of monsters eating people, he joins those who have survived and escape in search of a safe place, just to see the monsters are everywhere and there’s no place to hide.

From the first moment this manga looks like another sports manga of two friends who are fighting to be the star of the team and for the same girl, but soon it becomes in a horror story full of unexpected moments, of people trying to survive and get answers of what’s happening. As the story advances we get to know more survivors and their stories of what they were doing when all started, some of them are ready to help and others are already mad thinking they can beat the monsters by themselves. In the last numbers the story becomes in something weird, with special stormtroopers looking for monsters to take to laboratories to study them, or people who has been infected by the monsters and now they’re one with them, but never trying to help survivors to get to a safe place.

This manga becomes very repetitive like the author was running out of ideas after the first three or four issues. On the other hand, the design of the characters is really good and especially from those places of Tokyo we always see on pictures like Shibuya, Shinjuku or Akihabara. But not from the monsters, although there are plenty of them, you can see this is not the author’s specialty, let’s say they’re “simple” in the way they look, like those monsters seen in the Japanese films of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

I have to say the author and artist, Shingo Honda, has made a very good job after all, make something alone like a manga on thirteen issues has a lot of merit. Don’t expect to find as scary as other mangas because the story is in some way predictable.

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

What makes films like "Godzilla" so interesting to millions of people worldwide, enough to make it a billion-dollar franchise? And what do the 3 (not counting Godzilla vs. Kong which is looking to be pretty goddamn terrible) American adaptations of the series lack that causes fans to revile them so much? The answer is simple; people come for the spectacle, not the human element. The original 1954 is regarded as a masterpiece for its haunting interpretation of the harm nuclear warfare has caused to the planet, with the titular kaiju an extension of the people of Japans' fears coming off the tail end of World War II. Most people don't remember Doctor Serizawa or his attempts to create a device capable of subduing Godzilla, or his conflict of ideas with his fiancé. Not because they aren't interesting, but because Godzilla is just narratively and physically bigger. But their subplots are woven in between the kaiju's rampage, in a way that makes them compelling enough to drive most of the film when Godzilla's not on screen.

Now, there's 32 or so Godzilla films as of 2021, and a good deal of them tend to make the mistake of not having interesting human characters, and forcing them into the spotlight when people would rather watch men in rubber suits duke it out on a miniature city. The exception, Shin Godzilla, is actually noteworthy for basing most of the film around human bureaucracy and manages to make it work, but Hideaki Anno is a master. Many of the other films in the series weren't lucky enough to have someone like him at the helm, and suffered for it. Just look at the 1969 entry Godzilla's Revenge; a schizophrenic nightmare of a movie focusing on some annoying kid running around with a tiny rubbery version of Godzilla doing absolutely fuck all for 2 hours. Everyone hates this movie. Even diehard Godzilla fans wish it never existed. And almost everyone hates the narratively and visually uninspired Legendary Pictures takes on Godzilla. Nobody goes to see a Godzilla movie to watch 2 minutes of actual kaiju action while 99% of the film focuses on whatever stupid shit the human characters are doing. Nobody goes to see a Godzilla movie to watch the girl from Stranger Things overact and run around with some fucking macguffin every 5 minutes. How does this tie into my review of HAKAIJUU? Because it makes the same exact mistakes as the worst Godzilla films, but somehow manages to be even more insufferable and stupid.

Hakaijuu immediately starts off in the worst possible way: introducing two generic rival shonen protagonists. Within the first chapter I felt like I was reading a ripoff of a better series, like Slam Dunk or Kuroko no Basket. But the hope of seeing two shonen cliches beating down monsters was keeping me from dropping it before I even finished the first 5 pages. When the kaiju attack, the author makes the fatal mistake of splitting up the two in favor for saddling the main guy with some boring schoolgirl without a shred of personality. She's sorta badass at times but mostly a cardboard cutout with Saeko from Highschool of the Dead crudely scribbled over it. We don't see the rival guy again for around 50 chapters, and by then he's already basically a different character. Also, guess what the main protagonist's goal is; finding his whiny, useless girlfriend who looks like a 12 year old and has no personality like every other female character in the manga. Because the author isn't satisfied ripping off more than one series, he decides to start stealing from Gantz. And not even the good parts of Gantz, he's taking all the shitty parts that made everyone drop it during the final arc. How do you steal something that's already terrible and manage to make it even worse? Now we have to deal with everyone elses' drama and whining, because of course there's more characters. There's too many characters, in fact.

Hakaijuu makes the exact same mistakes as every other terrible apocalyptic manga; shoving in dozens of irritating dead weight in the hopes at least one of them will be sympathetic to the readers. Unfortunately, none of them are. Unless you like every other dialogue coming out of character's mouths being "NOOOO!" or "KYAAAAH!". If you find that shit as exhausting as I do you will feel the urge to drop this mess every time you turn the page. Because incoherent screaming and whining is 99% of the dialogue in this shitshow. Wanted to see the government fighting the kaiju with weirdly implemented futuristic technology? Here's one page out of the hundreds of people acting like unlikeable screeching idiots who can't shut their fucking mouths for one chapter and do something other than be a complete burden. Also, 99% of these character die pointless, infuriating deaths due to their own stupidity and the fact that they can't stop standing in place, looking at the kaiju and screaming like deer in headlights. Even the protagonists do this sometimes, but the author hates us and always makes them survive. The only character who didn't make me regret reading this was the crazy, inexplicably buff teacher who gets way too attached to the main girl. And guess what, he turns into a fucking cyborg. Remember what I said about ripping off Gantz? Yeah.

Turns out there's an entire government faction turning people into robots and Power Rangers to fight the kaiju. They turned Tokyo into a giant laboratory, somehow, without the millions of people noticing. This is when the manga ascends from garbage-bin levels into true absurdity, some kind of Dadaist statement in manga form. Honest to God mecha fights happen in this. Halfway through it doesn't even resemble what it was trying to be at the start. You have to wonder what exactly the author was thinking.

After this inexplicable turn of events, the hulking mass of a man, using the power of NANOMACHINES SON, suddenly becomes the best character. The other two are so boring they totally lose all agency and get dragged along everywhere for a while. But of course, once they make it to the next part of the story we have to deal with the incessant melodramatics of Boring Protagonist #1 and his dumbass girlfriend, who stops having any narrative potential after a single chapter and becomes a boring damsel in distress who can hardly even function without crying an entire river every 5 seconds. So basically the girl from Gantz. Speaking of girls, i can't even remember what happens to the original girl from the start, I think she just gets sidelined. This manga sucks.

By the last few chapters Hakaijuu has all but devolved into complete tedium and nonsense in a loss of all narrative cohesion. The ending is hollow sequel-bait that hopefully never comes into fruition, and when it was finally over I physically sighed with relief, as my trial was finally over. The burden of trudging through this manga was no longer mine.

Hakaijuu is all the worst parts of large-scale disaster series crumpled up into one miserable heap. It just gets worse and worse every chapter. The only thing that isn't constantly degrading in quality is the art; it's not half bad, sometimes even great. The monsters are nightmarish, finely illustrated, and the just about only thing in this manga more frightening than the atrocious character writing. The grotesque bio-mechanical designs of the mechs were somewhat cool, even if nothing about them made sense. But while it was fun at first to see how much the craziness could escalate, it eventually stopped being fun and felt more like the author was just throwing as much as they could at the wall as possible. There's way too much stuff going on, so you just end up rooting for the kaiju to end everything prematurely and give your head a rest.

This manga needs way more attention. The art is simply awesome, the plot is very captivating, keeps you on your toes constantly, and I don't even mind all the gore, to be honest. Every single chapter is a small step to the core of the story, so even if you don't understand it at first, I say keep reading, it's worth it. I don't want to include any spoilers, so I'm just going to say that some points of the plot remind me a bit of Attack on Titan, but I'm not going to go into more details, 'cause I don't want to ruin both stories for you. To me Honda Shingo is a genius, and that's that, thus my high score. It's been a long time since I enjoyed a manga to this extent.

i will say, the beginning of this manga is good and just what you think it is. a horror story about surviving a monster apocalypse. but as the story goes on, it starts to go from a survival horror to a gory shonen that has no idea what it wants to be.

after about 30 chapters, the story jumps the shark and starts to become Gants and Parasite the maximum.

after another 16 chapters, it becomes a kaiju battle with a little Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann thrown into the mix.

it then just keeps going from their with the story not knowing what it wants to be never really settling on anything.

the art itself however is very good. i like how they depict a lot of the deaths and a lot of the early monsters are great.

if your not looking for a heavy story manga then this is a ok read. nothing really special about. it.