O-Parts Hunter 15

Seishi Kishimoto – Viz – 2009 – 19 volumes total

The only thing I really knew about this series going in was that its Japanese title was “666 Satan,” which is an awesome name for a manga.  I can see why it was changed, but it’s awesome just the same.

I was actually quite put off initially by the religious symbolism that is abused for the structure of the series.  It’s too easy to just take a bunch of symbols and apply them in a way that has no connection to what they actually stand for or mean while… sort of implying a meaning from the name.  If that makes any sense.  Even X, one of my favorite series, is guilty of this.  The symbolism in this one is vaguely Kabbalist in nature, in that it uses the Sephirot ranking to lay out its characters, though other than showing the characters ranked in the same way, there seems to be no other connection.  Perhaps there is more meaning that I am just not picking up from this volume, but considering that the main character can apparently transform into Satan and his friend can transform into Metatron, I’m guessing things don’t run very deep.

Anyway.  Of course there are fights.  Jio and Cross, two of the main characters, wind up fighting Michael, who uses scales of justice to try and erase Jio (they erase people with an evil heart, and since Cross is actually an angel and Jio is Satan… well, that doesn’t work in his favor).  True forms are eventually unveiled.

The second fight is between Ball and a female character versus a character with a third eye… some sort of relative.  The third fight is between a pair of older characters and a man who wields the spear of Longinus (which, again, means nothing here).

Eventually, there is a fight between the survivors of the aforementioned battles and the Government Leader.  This fight actually seems quite definitive, kind of like something that the entire series has been working towards.  This character mentions moving the “recipes” for the angels into other bodies, though I’m not clear on what this means other than Cross is apparently not one of his subjects (?).  Apparently there are four volumes after this one, so there must still be a bad guy out there somewhere.  Or maybe they still need to find the girl they came to the compound looking for.

The fighting and powers are taken care of through O-Parts, the special weapons all the characters wield that have different unique powers.  I kind of like this system since it provided so much variety in the fights, and it seems like the characters either have a lot of them or get new ones throughout the course of the series since several seemed to be first uses in this volume.

I’d actually be curious to read the first volume, but nothing in this volume compelled me to read further.  It strikes me as the type of story one could easily get drawn into, and it’s not a terribly long series (19 volumes), so I’d probably like it if I started at the beginning.  On the other hand, there are definitely a lot of shounen action comics out there that are equal to or better than this one.  Apparently the author’s brother draws one such series.  One with ninjas in it.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.