Hoshin Engi 18

Ryu Fujisaki – Viz – 2010 – 23 volumes

YES. Much better now that the sendo war is over! Taikobo is sent after Taijo Rokun, who is the best character we’ve had in a long while. He’s not on any side, doesn’t have ties to any of the others or the worlds they belong to, and he’s lazy, so there’s nothing Taikobo can really say to convince him to come along. He’s also very funny. The first half of the volume is Taikobo tracking him down in the village he… I don’t know if he created it, or the environment in which it exists, but it’s extremely just, and Taikobo gets into a lot of trouble while he looks for Taijo Rokun.

When Taikobo finally locates Taijo Rokun, he has to speak to him in dreams, and they discuss human nature, Taikobo’s ultimate goal, and then train on super paope. It is absolutely cosmic, and one of the reasons I read this series through the boring parts. I know I will always be rewarded later. The best parts are these wonderful fantasy sequences, that take the Sennin world and show off just how different it is from reality. The worst parts are where we just see sennin versus sennin, with nothing to show us the scale of what’s going on. But since the themes of the series are the sennin pulling out of the human world, there’s more of the former than the latter.

After all that is taken care of, the characters confront Chokei, the master of Menchi castle and Bunchu’s disciple. This is a sennin fight, and it’s punched up a little bit by the fact Taikobo debuts his new paope, but the fight quickly (very quickly) ends, and Taikobo and Chokei go to the Hoshindai. This is… strange to say the least, since I’m not sure we’ve ever really seen the Hoshindai as a real place. Not one to let the opportunity go to waste, Fujisaki makes the trip fun with a turtle guide and a Galaxy Express 999 angry train taking them to their destination. We learn what it really is, and that Taikobo’s known all along. And best of all, we get to see Chokomei again, which is never a bad thing.

And now we are at a human war, and a crossroads. This is clearly the beginning of the end, and I’m pretty excited to see where things go from here. Certainly this war won’t last five volumes?

This was a review copy provided by Viz.