YMMV / Dog Soldier

• Catharsis Factor:
  • Hiba throwing a bunch of man-eating ants at Takechi as retribution for all the times he's forced Hiba to kill targets he had complete respect and sympathy for multiple times, especially because of how smug and haughty Takechi acts towards him and Fudo.
  • Hiba killing the most depraved of his targets in very brutal way (like for example Muammar Gaddafi and High Priest Tenkai) is pretty satisfying after seeing all of the horrible things they done.
• Complete Monster: Owing a great debt to American action films, especially those of The '80s, this manga has some very nasty villains:
  • "Zardoz" & "Big Shot": Zardoz, founder and leader of the New Revolutionary Army, is a vicious terrorist responsible for countless attacks, including one that claimed the lives of the parents of John Kyosuke Hiba. In present, Zardoz's men bomb a jumbo jet that is filled with passengers, planning to use the distraction to kill President Ronald Reagan. When this fails, Zardoz has them hijack another plane to fly it, with all passengers, into Reagan's meeting place. When he learns Reagan is in Tokyo, Zardoz and his forces attack an airbase and slaughter all the soldiers before taking the President hostage, planning on seizing control of a nearby nuclear arsenal with no compunction in burning Tokyo to ash.
  • "A Lonely War": Muammar Gaddafi himself, the dictator of Libya, is secretly working with Dr. Göppel, a nuclear scientist who wants to get back at the US for cancelling his research on nuclear weapons. When the two cause a plane, which Göppel is on, to make an emergency landing in Libya, Gaddafi takes the crew hostage. When Hiba and his friend Fudo go on a rescue operation, Gaddafi has all three hundred passengers massacred, including a father in front of his young son and tortures Hiba by carving a grid into his back and ripping off chunks of his skin. Having worked with Dr. Göppel to design an ICBM hundreds of times stronger than the nuke, and Göppel having set off the weapon with his dying breath, Gaddafi plans to nuke the entire West. When he and Hiba engage in a duel to the death, Gaddafi boasts of consuming the entire West in nuclear fire, not caring that he'll sentence his own people to death by retaliation in the process, as he can simply hide out from the retaliatory strikes in his nuclear bunker.
• Fridge Horror: One of the unique abilities that Zardoz has is that he's able to hypnotize others, which brings up the question if all of the members of his New Revolutionary Army have joined it out of their own free will or not, given his aforementioned hypnosis abilities and how it's quite literally, a cult in all but name, given that Zardoz proclaims himself as being a "Prophet of Allah".
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Devil Island Tycoon arc has a climatic battle where Zhang and his evil brother Shen-long both take off their shirts to reveal their dragon tattoos, years before that became a tradition in every Yakuza game. To make it even funnier, Shen-long even has his tattoo on his back, just like Kiryu and other protagonists.
• Tear Jerker: High Priest Tenkai trying to kill Fudo and Hiba by burning down the mountain his followers were chasing them on, as they were just ordinary citizens who were brainwashed into doing whatever Tenkai wanted them to do, and it's shown that there were young children who had entire lives ahead of them, elderly people who couldn't hurt a fly, housewives that had husbands and kids waiting for them back at home, and even the Yakuza that were in the crowd presumably had somebody that cared about them.

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