Hoshin Engi 14
Posted: January 7, 2010 Filed under: Hoshin Engi Leave a comment »Ryu Fujisaki – Viz – 2009 – 23 volumes
As is customary, since I’ve got three volumes of Hoshin Engi built up, I will now indulge in a little marathon. Again, I love this series dearly, and it’s worth the extra work to follow along with the plot and characters, but man, it can get confusing to keep everything straight. Hence the marathons, it helps make everything a little more clear.
Unfortunately, this volume marks the beginning of a slow, rather uninteresting sequence where Taikobo et al fight a war inside Kingo Island, which basically means lots of battles against their Juzetsujin. The Juzetsujin battles are only okay – each uses a paope that sucks the characters into another dimension that they control. The battle that takes place at the beginning of the volume is with a Juzetsujin that controls toys, which was kind of cool, but didn’t really take advantage of it so much since we are clearly going to have to fight each and every one of the Juzetsujin over the next couple volumes. There are… twelve or thirteen? If memory serves, the group took down at least one last volume, and two or so here. Otenkun is one of them too, but I assume he and Bunchu will be the last ones in this battle, since they are the only ones who have even a little character development. Sigh.
To fight the Juzetsujin, the twelve elite sennin of Mount Kongrong mobilze. I didn’t realize that’s who all those people were supposed to be until I was reading the appendix in the back. It doesn’t matter. I’m not looking forward to sitting through all their battles. I just… I just want to see Taikobo fight a war, not sit through this repetitive nonsense.
Admittedly, I believe this probably has to happen. Taikobo wants a human world free of sennin interference, and it seems like the purpose of this war may simply be to have all the sennin and yokai sennin kill each other off, so there just won’t be any more interference.
I like this series… but yeah, I can tell I’m going to have to weather a rough patch here.
