On the surface Feng Shen Ji seems like a mix of Hokuto no Ken and God of War. Buff Chinese dudes going around punching gods and the art looks great, what’s not to like, right? As it turns out, plenty.

In case you were attracted by the extremely well drawn covers and some painted panels then you’ll probably notice the gaps between them and everything rest. Basically there’s two types of panels in this manga. Some are painted from scratch and are usually really detailed and good looking. The rest is usually normal drawings that are later colored with various degrees of success.

While by no means ugly, the art in the latter is much weaker compared to painted panels. Wonky proportions are not rare, especially the further away from viewer characters get. There’s no shortage of dull angles, most of the manga felt flat with and on rare occasion you got some low and high angles shots, nothing extreme though. This kind of meekness when it comes to expression runs throughout the manga.

Even though artists seem to have a decent grasp of anatomy when it comes to muscle they rarely play with proportions and perspective to create really cool and dynamic action scenes but instead they always feel stiff and rigid. Speaking of action scenes get ready for some family friendly violence. Nobody in this manga gets noticeably injured when it’s involved, I feel like this is an issue of censorship more than anything but nonetheless it removes a lot of impact from action scenes when instead of opponents actually getting eviscerated you just see a bunch of yellow lines and red splashes telling you that something is indeed happening even if it doesn’t feel like it. On occasion there is some pretty brutal stuff like someone ripping through their opponents rib cage but it’s all blacked out to avoid showing violence.

I’d want to commend the artist from coloring entirety of the comic but at times it felt like pages would look better if it instead was just black on white images without half-assed coloring ruining the contrast and crisp lineart.

When it comes to writing the situation gets better. While the opening chapters are very rough to get through due to comically bad amount of exposition and ridiculously big speech bubbles, they peter out soon enough and the story actually gets going.

For the most part Feng Shen Ji 1 is a bog standard shonen affair. It’s a story about an underdog hero slowly getting powers to fight back against the baddies, along the way he follows the typical cycle of losing, training and winning but where I think it stands out is in creating interesting scenarios that make it worth reading. Even though the plot is not gonna show anything different the situations characters find themselves in are fairly interesting. Authors are never afraid to throw a few wrenches in the wheels and they follow through on things like that. Usually in shonen everything has to exist in some stasis, nobody is allowed to actually get injured or die cause it might make story more complicated. In Feng Shen Ji one of the key characters loses a hand and they just roll with it. As nice as that is however don’t expect too much depth from characters either. While protagonist constantly evolves and goes through quite a few changes to adapt to his life the rest of the cast are a collection of one note archetypes.

Another thing I liked about the writing is that characters actually talk to each other. While yes there is a lot of dry exposition at times and the duologue is hardly insightful at any point it’s still so satisfying to have main hero who doesn’t just get talked at but shoots back when he can and taunts his opponents. A small thing but I think it adds quite a bit of enjoyment in the long run.

Important thing to note is that for some reason MAL decided to divide the full run of Feng Shen Ji in 3 parts so what you get here is essentially just a set up episode. That doesn’t mean there’s no good ending, there are individual character arcs that do good progress throughout the story but don’t expect a complete story if you just want to read this and not he other two episodes. Otherwise if you’re into shonen and the theme seems interesting to you this might be a decent casual read.