This review will contain spoilers up to the marked chapter.

A modern-day take on the ancient battle of Athens and Sparta with new twists and turns. What happens when one day all of humanity is petrified by an unknown light and humanity must rebuild? Enter your cast of The Brain, the Brawn, the Girl and the Enemy. Dr. Stone starts off strong with an engaging premise that has a ton of potential something that I wish was explored more often in anime and manga - the rebuilding of human society after a mass tragedy. Most of the time we see the after-product without seeing the process that was used, the mistakes that were made and the things that were learned. Dr. Stone shows us all of this but that's about one of its only strengths.

I don't believe a lot of what Dr. Stone goes out to accomplish is done well. Our protagonist, Senkuu is a prodigy of the sciences, so much so that he built his own rocket that exited Earth's atmosphere before the tragedy happened. Prodigies are totally acceptable but knowing this creates an aura around Senkuu that just seems like he can find himself through anything. Specifically, in the tournament arc where one of the gags is that the heroes want to rig the tournament in a specific way, of course, they have to rely on chance for it to work out. Luck is against them in every shape and form and the worst matchup happens first. But the story can't just throw out it's most important character of the arc right away right? Of course, so through sheer luck, he wins. While this bit was executed well, it solidified that the aura around Senkuu was strong and I had predicted by this point he would succeed in the tournament and I was correct. I'm a believer in that you need a certain level of predictability in your work so the consumer can understand it, even if it only makes sense in hindsight. However, this isn't the only time Dr. Stone is so obvious. Upon its reveal of antagonist Tsukasa early in the story - his appearance is just so genuinely evil that there's no reason for you to question his allegiances from the moment he's introduced. You just know he's not gonna be allied with the heroes from the minute you see the guy.

Tsukasa and Senkuu create an interesting and philosophical duality. Where Senkuu wants to rebuild the world and Tsukasa wants to purge humanity and create his perfect world. It's nothing new, we've seen it in Death Note, Code Geass, Evangelion, Durarara, JoJo and more by this point. Tsukasa hasn't had his time yet to shine so his character is still very underexplored but this is an interesting part of Dr. Stone that has potential to be great. Likewise, the exploration of science through Senkuu's character is interesting but as smart as Dr. Stone portrays itself with science and philosophy it has a few glaring issues that it doesn't take Newton or Plato to find out.

First, when we learn of the village of survivors, later to be descended from Senkuu's father we know they've passed down 100 Stories known as the Hyakumonogatari, we even get an entire chapter dedicated to the establishment of the stories. But none of these descendants knew how the old world used to be. They passed down knowledge of what foods, materials and other items would be necessary for survival but no stories of the past, where they came from, what they could strive for? It's not like it was out of the realm of possibility for this either. They made 100 Stories, why not 101 where one is just a brief history of the past. Another glaring issue with the Hyakumonogatari is the original generation of surviving humans seemed to gamble on the entire idea that Senkuu would even emerge from this rock slumber. In the possible case that he never awoke, they never took any precautions for that.

Second is a bit of an ongoing issue but it deals with the humor. The humor exists in primarily three ways: sex jokes, facial expressions, and vocal inflections. I don't really need to explain why the first one can get old real fast so let's focus on the latter two. Facial expressions are probably the most common type of humor in Dr. Stone and it's very hit and miss. While the artwork does the expression justice, constant weird face making does not make good comedy. Tell me some good jokes, give me some funny dialogue, both of these are to be found in Dr. Stone but not all that often. Most of the dialogue based jokes kind of fail too, not as a result of poor writing though but because certain lines require an inflection of the voice. While most manga run into this issue Dr. Stone doesn't do much to mitigate against it. Sakamoto desu ga and Watamote were manga that had me laughing out loud, and Dr. Stone has the potential to have some laugh out loud moments. But if all of your jokes in this vein rely on the same kind of drawn out line like Spongebob saying "Reaaaaaaaaaaaaally?" you have a bit of an issue. In fact, I'm sure as an anime, most of the humor would work in general just because of how fluid it would work and the timing it could have. As a manga, Dr. Stone misses out on some of the comedic timing it needs for the jokes it uses, so if it ever gets an anime adaptation I totally expect the humor will improve.

Overall, I'd love to love this series it just has so much potential underneath all its problems. Nothing is extremely standout about it, but nothing is extremely offensive. But as a series based on science and the on-going themes of Brains vs. Brawn and ambiguous evil, there seems to be a huge level of suspension of disbelief I need to not question some of the things that are actually happening. If you've been through the song and dance of 100 shounen before and are bored of the same old same old, Dr. Stone probably isn't for you. But if you're looking for something with a different premise with the same general storytelling techniques you'll like it. But I'd rather go for Death Note or Hunter x Hunter personally both of which contain better twists, better philosophies, less predictable outcomes, and a smaller threshold of things that I need to accept to believe in the world and what's going on. They've also both been published in the same magazine as this so why not just grab those?