O-Parts Hunter 19

Seishi Kishimoto – Viz – 2009 – 19 volumes

I missed volume 18, but it seems like most of what happened was just fights with all the different groups of characters, who I don’t know anyway.  The beginning of this volume has them all meeting up, and then they buckle down for the final battle.

I haven’t read very much of this, but I do know that the thing I like best about O-Parts Hunter is Jio Freed.  All the other allies stand and fight Amaterasu Miko (which is a strange name for a character in this series, which borrows all its themes and powers and whatnot from the kaballah and Judaism) and… uh, Zenom, but they aren’t any match for him.  He quickly gets everything that he wants and begins dispatching all the characters, but then Jio shows up and just starts beating on him.  Jio’s power seems to be to absorb/negate other power, which is useful in fighting Zenom since it looks like he’s using a lot of power.  The other characters ward off physical attacks while he uses his skills to do what needs to be done.

But then armageddon happens anyway, and the story flew through more biblical allusions than I can count.  I don’t think a lot of what was going on here would have made sense even if I had read from the beginning, but it was okay in its way.

I knew Jio had put the kibosh on Satan, but this being the last volume, I knew we’d get to see him anyway.  I wasn’t disappointed.  It was kind of like Nora and Cerberus in the volume of Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom I read.  I knew it would happen there, too.  It doesn’t take a psychic to figure that out, though.  It’s just shounen manga.  Satan’s appearance was about as cool as I could have hoped, except where he recounted a long, boring story about what he was, the origin of all things, and… lots of other biblical stuff that almost made sense.

We learned what Jio was, too, something that Jio has expressed no interest in learning.  The origin of his name is one of the most hilarious I’ve read in any manga ever.  That alone was worth reading every volume of this series that came my way.

The ending was a bit unexpected and slightly abrupt.  It looked like everything had gone well, but then… prevention happens, and it goes a bit badly.  Hm.  I kind of liked it, since it deviated from the usual shounen manga ending.

I liked the series, ultimately, and I still really like Jio Freed.  I’ll probably wind up picking up random volumes of this series as they cross my path to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.  I didn’t like it enough to rush out and buy 15 volumes of it, and it didn’t exactly break new ground in shounen manga, but it was good all the same, and I don’t regret reading it.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.