Slightly Biased Manga

As much as I love this series (and I love it a lot), I’ll be the first to admit this volume wasn’t very good. It’s started into another tournament-style section with a bunch of different characters fighting. Everyone involved with the end of the tournament has been introduced, and in addition to the different groups of characters fighting (5 people on Ueki’s team plus 5 on an opposing team, a lot of times the characters fight in pairs that switch off throughout), there are also a ton of spectators that are shown, presumably all characters who Ueki will fight before the series ends in five more volumes. First and foremost among my pet peeves is too many characters, and having this drift in that direction is breaking my heart.

On the plus side, there are still some pretty insane things going on. The tournament is held on an island full of “sleeping fruits,” which are gigantic angry fruits with gaping mouths full of sharp teeth, and the characters spend a lot of time dodging these fruits and using them as part of their strategy in battle, which is pretty cool. The object of this leg of the tournament is to find a treasure, and each party is given a map with a piece that is revealed every time an opponent is beaten. The treasure could be on the first piece of the map revealed or the last piece. Plus the powers of the opponents are getting crazier, especially since a lot of these people now have “level 2″ abilities. I don’t really want to spoil that surprise though, since that’s one of my favorite parts of the series.

EDIT: Let me not fail to mention the excellent adaptation in this volume. There’s a section near the end of the book where a character has to constantly make puns, and the puns have to match up with the action. The puns don’t have to be good, and in fact the puns are supposed to get progressively worse, but I can only imagine the number of sleepless nights the translator and/or editor sat up thinking of how to make a pun out of a charging rhino and whatever other random things were going on. Also, the text on the back cover was very funny. I don’t normally read that, but I probably should, because it seems like I’m missing out.

So yes, I still like it, but geez. Maybe all these people will be eliminated in another 2-3 volumes and I won’t have to worry about too many characters anymore. That would be great.