Dr. Stone has finally reached the 50 chapter milestone and I've decided to give it a review. I'll probably update every ~50 chapters or so if I can, to keep things up to date. Tl;dr ratings below

Story 9/10
Art 10/10
Characters 7/10
Enjoyment 10/10
Overall - 9/10


Story - 9/10

I'll be upfront, I'm baised here because I really enjoy the survival style, man vs nature conflict that's present in many parts of this series. Nonetheless I think Inagaki has done a fantastic job with the story of Dr. Stone so far, and made use of both man vs nature conflicts and man vs man conflicts to keep the story very engaging throughout all 50 chapters. Each arc in the story has had good pacing, and with every new chapter I've felt as though something notable happened to progress the plot and drive Senkuu to reaching the arc's goal.

The one major issue I do have with the story is that quite a lot of it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. It's only natural given that the series is science heavy while being set in a post-apocalyptic world, but that's why I've rated the story portion a 9 instead of a 10.


Art - 10/10

I love Boichi's art. There hasn't been a single chapter so far where I'm not thoroughly impressed at the detail and attention that has been put into a lot of the art, especially things like double page spreads. I'm even more impressed considering that Boichi is also doing the art for his other weekly series, Origin, at the same time as he's doing art for Dr. Stone. It seems like a ridiculous quantity of work yet he still maintains that incredible quality as well.


Characters - 7/10

The weakest point of this series is by far the antagonist, who at times seems like he was made to be an extremely perfect and extremely overpowered character. It does set up a very nice ideological conflict between him and Senkuu, however this can also feel a bit forced or absurd at times.

Aside from the antagonist(s), I think the rest of the characters in this series are written well. Interactions between Senkuu and the characters around him are always interesting and there are a lot of lovable side characters introduced. Although very few of the characters in the series have been developed in much depth, it is only chapter 50 so things will likely change as the story itself progresses. This rating will quite likely go up by chapter 100 if more characters are developed well


Enjoyment - 10/10

I really enjoy man vs nature conflicts, post-apocalyptic settings and science driven plot in their own rights. Mashing those together is really a winning strategy for Dr. Stone. It's the manga I look forward to reading every week the most, tied with One Piece. Every chapter is a treat to read


Overall - 9/10

Dr. Stone has a bit of everything - comedy, action, adventure, and most importantly a hell of an entertaining story. You'll be consistently amazed by the art and entertained by the characters, certainly all the way through chapter 50 and likely beyond.

It's well worth a read if you like the idea of a non-standard shonen series that focuses a lot on the adventure and less so on the action, but still has a good mix of the two.