Manga/Toriko

Next chapter is here.

Daw, Son Slime misses Ichiryu.

edited 12th Nov '15 6:37:33 AM by Demongodofchaos2

Hold on a second. Accidentally posted that too early. Will revise and repost.

I'm getting this feeling too. The pacing of the manga is all over the place.

I just started this manga a few weeks ago and finally caught up today, so it's all still really fresh in my mind. The human world saga was really slow for the most part - it was just Toriko & co. running around and gathering ingredients without really advancing the core plot too much. The Bishokukai only did anything significant in maybe 3-4 arcs spread over 250+ chapters, and the rest of that time was spent on character work, worldbuilding, and general setup for future plot events.

Ever since the Festival arc, though, the whole manga has been PLOTPLOTPLOTPLOTPLOTPLOTPLOT the entire time. There's barely any room to breathe between infodumps and major turning points. The plot is also way too scattered, with a million things going on at the same time, tons of stuff happening off-panel, and the somewhat annoying overuse of "here's the result, let's flashback to what actually happened" sequences. The Serial Escalation has also gotten insane, going from capture levels of 300 at most to the 3000-4000s on average almost instantly.

The writing style has changed drastically. I think we'll see an ending a lot sooner than we would have expected.

edited 26th Nov '15 10:52:50 AM by MileRun

Chapter's out.

Me during any recent Info Dump:

edited 27th Nov '15 7:05:49 AM by Saiga

Eh, I can follow it just fine.

The Back Channel sure is trippy, though.

I'm thinking of taking a break from this series or just dropping it entirely. All of this is becoming harder for me to follow and I'm not sure I care enough about it to actually try.

Which is goes back to my main complaint about this series: for a long time it feels like it's been trying to be "bigger" than something like it should, if you know what I mean.

It's no harder to follow then Jojos Bizarre Adventure for me, which is already complex enough as it is as of Jojolion.

If you could change one thing about this series, what would it be?

Hard to say when I can't tell what's going on

maybe I'd change it to be something where I could tell what's going on

One of my biggest annoyances with this series at the moment is how often dismemberment is used for cheap shock value.

When Toriko lost his arm the first time, it was a big deal. He had to go to Life to get it fixed, and even then, he almost died during the recovery process.

Nowadays, people just get cut apart like nothing, but it's okay because there are dark cooking techniques that can heal them instantly/they were a poison doll all along/they have life fruits that die instead/they can just kinda regenerate because something something something gourmet demons/it was just a really strong mental image and they were never dismembered at all.

I mean, there are more fundamental things that need to be fixed too (the storytelling needs to be a lot less scattered), but calming down a bit with the body mutilation would make this series a lot more palatable.

To answer my own question, I feel like this series is too big for it's own good.

Like, he's coming up with these really convoluted mechanisms and events to spin the plot in this continued escalation of over-the-topness and for the most part it isn't working for me at all.

I mean, this series was always over-the-top but now it seems a bit ridiculous. Like he's too creative for his own good.

Yeah, I'd mostly agree with that.

It feels like he's just got too much going on to handle it right now. I'd have liked if the timeskip just had them going after one dish at a time, like from Air to Pair. It'd be more predictable, maybe, but I don't think that'd be a bad thing. Suddenly going for multiple dishes at once and seeing them mass producing air and currently cooking God is all just really weird right now.

For me, it's not so much that the info dumps, reveals, and happenings are too weird to follow; it's more that I don't have time to digest them because they come too frequently, and they're kinda all over the map (in this case, literally so). I don't understand why the Another team's storyline had to be interrupted to show the stuff with Midora and Frohze, then with Acacia and the blue nitro and Jirou coming out of nowhere, then to the God team, then back to the Another team after they finished their mission, only there were hyperbolic time clams involved and we have to flash back to what happened earlier. Nonlinear storytelling has its place, and it requires a lot of nuance to pull off properly; Toriko just does not have that down.

I'm sorry if I always sound so negative here, by the way. I avoided this thread for fear of spoilers when I started. I would have been mindlessly gushing about this all the way up until maybe the endgame of the Four Beast arc, and I would still have been a lot less cynical through to maybe the epilogue of the Pair arc than I am now.

Toriko has a very fascinating, well-crafted universe. That's what pulled me in, and that's what's keeping reading the series in spite of its faults. Toriko has a lot of great material, but it has so much trouble weaving it into a proper narrative.

edited 30th Nov '15 9:58:25 PM by MileRun

I don't think you're being anymore negative than anyone else. Your feelings sort of mirror my own on the series besides the parts that I found most engaging (the whole thing in the Gourmet Casino and Toriko and Starjun's big showdown).

For a lot of people those things you mentioned are just one awesome thing after another. And I don't begrudge them for that but we haven't really been staying with each part to absorb the awesomeness I think, and like you said, I still don't see why we couldn't just stay with the Another storyline until it was complete.

Chapter out.

What do you know, animals really do come to Messiah Komatsu so the can they have privilege of being killed and cooked by him.

This series can be retarded as hell.

But that's why we love it.

It has that stupid 80's Shonen feel.

Heracles stats.◊

22 km tall and 30 km long.CL 6200.

DAMN! No wonder even Blue Devil Toriko had to retreat.

Hmm, base Bambina had 6000. Does this mean that when he dwarfs Heracles, they mean true form Bambina

New chap:

Don slime can literally be anyone or anything with his powers. Scary as fuck dude, man.

New chap Whale King moon was actually eaten by Acacia. Holy shit. Even Toriko acknowledged that he has no idea what Komatsu was talking about.

edited 17th Dec '15 10:31:23 AM by Demongodofchaos2

That was just a (really stupid) translation error on Mangastream's part. All he said was that Moon at a piece of Neo, like we saw.

Definitely.

WTF, mangastream.

Oh so that's what happened. I was afraid that Moon worfed off-screen.

Same here; nice to know that Moon wasn't hyped up as the strongest of the Kings just so we could see how strong the pieces of Neo are.

Now it makes me wonder just how the battles against the other Kings are going.

Chapter.

Poor zits.And Guiness still looks dissapointing.

The Eight Kings are as ridiculously strong as ever. Holy shit, Heracs breath pierced the planet!