Slightly Biased Manga

Yay, finally everyone’s back in Japan.  One of the funnier scenes in the beginning was with Fatty Jr. and his father, where Fatty Jr. was just gesturing wildly with his hands and his dad was saying things like “You pushed a truck 2,000 k?  GOOD MAN!”

The tryouts were in this volume.  I was kind of surprised since I’m pretty sure the team is still short (and the people who sub for them at games mention this… Hiruma calls their names as having made the cut and several of them sound rather confused as to why they’re being called as regular members).  They did make a cut though, which made me extremely sad.  I guess… that’s this series way of not keeping the “you can do anything!” attitude that tends to pervade these types of series.  He’s sticking around though, so I’m sure he’ll come back later.

There was also a very funny scene where Sena got separated from the group along with Chin Fuzz, and the two of them jump on a bus under the latter’s direction and wind up in Nagano.  Chin Fuzz is one of my new favorite characters.  He’s AWESOME.  Unfortunately, I still can’t be bothered to remember his name.

I think this is the only other Shounen Jump title I’m grossly behind on, with three volumes unread on the shelf and a fourth enroute.  Of course, every time I say that, I think of another title I need to read.  I”s.  There, I’m like 7 volumes behind on that one.  Great.

Anyway, I like this one, unlike I”s.  I think I let it sit because I did not like the prospect of training in America.  Though there are many funny moments, there’s just a bunch of weird stuff that happens sandwiched in between a bunch of boring running.  Sena tries out for a professional team accidentally.  The team makes the money for the coach’s debt and their plane tickets home in Vegas.  Ignore the fact that most of them don’t seem able to speak English and are underage… and won an astronomical amount at the blackjack and roulette tables.  I’m glad Monta lost his final bet though, that would have put me off a LOT.  It was a funny joke, too, because it had a Shounen Jump custom magical moment right before that lets you know whatever risk that’s going to be undertaken will come out okay.

We get a new character, and I kind of like him.  Apparently he’s really stupid, but mostly he’s just smarmy.  Hiruma doesn’t even phase him, but he’s got a relationship with Monta the same way the Hah Brothers and Fatty Jr. have.  It’s nice.

Ooh… my copy of this has a bigass scratch across the back of it that I didn’t notice until I got it home from the store. The cover’s nearly punctured. Sad.

Anyway! This is the bulk of the game with the NASA Aliens. Despite the fact that it’s the most hyped game in the series and lasts a total of maybe two volumes, it winds up being a great game. I’ve forgotten about most of this volume, but here’s some of the highlights:

- Hiruma’s subtle mindgames. I love the way he fakes his signals again and again and again. He really does do it for me in this series. He and the coach of the NASA aliens have a wonderful hate dynamic.

- I can’t remember if it was this volume or the last, but the talk Hiruma and the coach have in English, and the various character’s reactions to it. I laughed out loud at that part, it was so goddamn funny. Hard to explain out of context, but feels great in context.

- All of Sena and Panther’s fancy footwork. Those two are also good characters, but in that Shounen Jump Sports Manga-kinda way, the same way Hikaru and Akira are good characters.

Man, the video they used to get the rematch with the Aliens was so awesome. I love this series’s sense of humor, it’s what makes it the best.

The whole Panther thing made me feel really uncomfortable, but it also kind of blew my mind that it was even in there. Really… what the hell?

I liked the way Musashi turned out. There’s usually quiet character moments to show you that Hiruma is still human, and I think Musashi brought out a good one in him. Musashi’s a good level-headed guy to have around amongst all the other silly characters.

I liked the game with the Aliens. More next volume.

This was not a favorite volume for me, as it featured the end of a game I was not particularly fired up about, and about half the volume was dedicated to a game THAT DEIMON DIDN’T EVEN PLAY IN. GOD DAMMIT.

Yeah, I hate when that happens. That game just served to display a team that they will meet up with much later in the series, but they were assholes and I didn’t like them. We got to see Shin again, who isn’t an asshole, but I’d like to see some training and a rematch with Ojo before I see teams that are competing against Ojo in the final games of a tournament.

And I didn’t particularly care for the Taiyo game, but it wasn’t bad, either. I don’t care for defense that much, which was the focus, but you gotta have something for each team.

Have I gotten to the backlog with this series yet? I’ll go back and write about the other volumes if I hadn’t, I read a bunch of this one all at once.

I was actually pretty disappointed with this volume. The end to the NASA game was kind of lame, and the trip to America seemed like so much exposition and so much Shounen Jump “training.” Amidst these downers though, there were still a lot of parts that made me smile and laugh. One of my favorite parts was when Hiruma said he needed to go pick up something that was followed by a half-page panel of him holding a huge brace of heavy artillery and looking positively radiant, followed by the gun store guy saying something like “You’re not getting those back into Japan!” Also, soon after that, where someone said something about pansy-ass Japanese people not being able to hold a gun, then Hiruma hitting the target by firing through a window and through the hands and arms of the two men. AWESOME.

There were lots of awesome Hiruma moments in this volume, despite being otherwise lame. Lots of reminders that there will be no series when Hiruma is forced into retirement too, and I KNOW that they will be forced to continue the series long after Hiruma goes. But oh well, we’ll see that when it comes. We get another cute Hiruma/Mamori moment, too. Aww.

Also notable: everyone on the team wants to play. A very good scene at the airport when they go to fly back to Japan.

This series is so good, and usually when I like a series this much, it’s due almost entirely to the presence of one or two really strong characters. Yoichi is, of course, the one who does it for me here. He’s got a lot of personality, no one will give him any shit because he’s so mean, and yet he manages not to be a bully (or at least a conventional bully). I like him a lot, and as I said, with veiled threats of him not being able to play further down the line dropped in the last volume, I’m pretty sure I’ll drop this series if he ever leaves.

The football this time around was also very good. I’m not so big a fan of “the main characters watch other people play football” strategy employed at the beginning, but I was quite fond of the game they were playing at the end of the volume with the Sphinx team, and of course they split it up just as the Hah Brothers pulled out a secret move. I also liked the special training/training from hell, and I like how excited everyone got when they got their new locker room.

The series sense of humor gets me every time, too. Much of this stems from Yoichi, but the character designs help him too. Mostly I’m impressed with the nicknames with “Damn” added as a prefix to each one (Fatty, Fatty Junior, Baldy, Monta (who he justified with Joe Montana when Raimon got mad), Pipsqueak, and the Hah Brothers, who were not impressed by the one locker for the three of them). I also LOVE this lore being built up around Eyeshield 21… the Notre Dame stuff in particular, because I can’t remember if it was ever explained at this point how it is that an American playing for the Notre Dame football team made his way into a Japanese High School and the legistics of that step down in education. But the entire fabricated personality that goes with Eyeshield 21 is also very good.

Yet another Shounen Jump series that has managed to captivate me. My interest is waning in a few of their other offerings at the moment, but I’m hoping this one remains strong for awhile yet.

Yeah. I still really, REALLY like this series. There was a football game here, but it was short, sweet, and awesome. I still like the whole underdog feel the Devilbats have, and I loved team tryouts. Best thing that ever happened to the team. I also love that the team now consists of an even more ragtag bunch that will probably still beat everyone.

I do wonder how much longer I’ll be in love with it though… it’s structured so that they only have one more tournament to play, then Hiruma will have to quit because of school. They can either win it all at that tournament (and I did like how the first tournament was handled), or not win it all and have Hiruma leave. Frankly, I’ll stop reading when Hiruma leaves. But it is a Jump series, so Hiruma will probably never leave, which is all the better.

God, I love this series.

I SWEAR I reviewed volume two, I don’t know what happened to it! At any rate, it was mostly a football game. While I had been fired up over volume one, volume two brought me down a whole lot when I realized I couldn’t get fired up over the characters playing football.

Volume 3, however, completely changed this perception. It had the last part of the game with the White Knights, and I really liked this part because it was more about the characters than the game itself or how to play the game since the Devilbats were at a point where, eh, the game wasn’t important anymore, if I can say that without spoiling anything.

Then, there was the inbetween game part, and they recruited someone else. This is what I love about the series… not so much when they actually PLAY football, mind, but the inbetween parts where the character development happens and they all turn on their magnetism to help the scraggly team pull through whatever it needs to be pulled through. I like this manga because Football isn’t popular in Japan, so in order to be popular it needs to do something else. The in-between stuff is the something else, and it’s great. I’m not totally 100% convinced still, because it could be more about football than the inbetween parts still, but I did really like this volume.

I LOVE this manga. It’s football, but much like Hikaru no Go, it makes me care about football in ways that I shouldn’t. It’s because of the characters really… and even the plot, the underdog football team that noone cares about, both elements are really excellent. And no matter what anyone tells you, Hiruma is the best character anywhere, ever. Well, with the exceptions of Luffy and Vash the Stampede, I suppose. It’s sad that he doesn’t swear in the Viz version, he really needs to.

There’s three people on the Deimon football team, and Hiruma has to blackmail people to play and cheat to win his games, but it’s all good because it’s so entertaining. There’s a slight shadow of “we need to make it to the finals based on our WILL TO WIN!!!” attitude that permeates most sports manga, but overall that’s buried in comedy. All three of the football players are so funny really…

There’s not much I can say other than generalities, but it’s one of the more honestly funny series I’m reading at the moment, and you’ll probably get a good laugh out of it if that’s what you’re looking for. Plus it’s got GREAT characters, and so far the basic plot’s really great. And starting out with a complete game in volume one’s okay by me.