Well Drag if you ever feel like I can hook you up through perfectly legal means. Join me in my quest!
On the subject of weird mediums: I've always wondered about a Shaman using his oracle bell (i.e the Patch tribe device they wear attached to their arm) as the medium for his oversoul. Wouldn't that be wild (and also absurdly risky).
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Shit I got hit with the nostalgia bug too. Remember watching the anime when I was kid, fun times. Its why I did the big manga search. I may not buy the volumes but ya know its nice to know if I have the option to or not. I technically do since I can buy the original localized Jump volumes from Amazon but I would like the option to buy the new Kodansha versions too.
Definitely interested in that art book. Granted I have not seen much of the manga artwork, not helped by the SK wiki not having a gallery for the characters unlike most wikis but what I've seen of the character models look pretty good.
Pretty sharp & clean. That's actually my favorite type of art.
Edit: Man I don't know why those wiki links are so uncooperative.
Edited by slimcoder on Jun 15th 2020 at 11:21:00 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."The new anime will be 108 episodes long. 108 is an important number in Buddhism and is used as an Arc Number frequently in this series. The show will be broken up into 3 seasons of 3 cours, 36 episodes, each. The first season will end on chapter 108, when Yoh wakes up in the Patch village for the first time.
I've been reading the manga and caught up the rescue ren arc, and one problem I have with it is that the pacing feels a bit rushed. It might just be me, but it feels like Ren changed his philosophy and worldview a bit too quickly (it would have been nice for us to see a more detailed flashback of his childhood or something, we get some glimpses but that's it). I can't speak to whether this is a problem in the original anime since it's been years since I watched it.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Jun 16th 2020 at 10:15:28 AM
The anime is pretty much the same on that regard, to my reckoning. Possibly with slightly moreso on the Ren family dynamics due the occasional filler.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Y'know what? Forget I said that. Clearly, the next course of action is to bring back Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo.
He had the ability to read minds and since A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read and Humans Are Bastards he decided to destroy humanity and build a world solely for shamans in its place.
His mother being killed by people who thought she was a demon didn't help matters, either.
"I squirm, I struggle, ergo I am. Faced with death, I am finally, truly alive."In his current life (he's had three incarnations that are shown, we are following the third) they also tried killing him at birth, but those were Shamans, not humans and he doesn't even seem to hold a grudge for that.
A underlying irony of Hao's story is that humans haven't been a significant problem for him specifically since his first life like a thousand years ago. Since then his first and foremost opponents were basically the rest of Shamankind recognizing him for a absolute madman and trying to stop him.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."The mind reading thing was a power he couldnt turn off. He got it when he accidentally absorbed the spirit that was his only friend as a child. It happened when he ran out of furyoku defending himself from and then killing the monk that killed his mother.
Edited by Zeromaeus on Jun 17th 2020 at 11:51:37 AM
After a brief stop, my watch of the anime continues to the final portion, stopping basically at episode 54, right before the X-Laws and Hao finally take the center stage for the home stretch.
This is where shit goes really fucking off the rails and into fully-anime storylines. Stray observations:
- Once they arrive in the Patch Village, the anime decide to give A Day in the Limelight to goddamn everybody, mostly involving wholly original Shaman teams too:
- Tao Ren gets a episode where he fights a team of other members of the Ren Clan with the previously mentioned filler character Tao Ginny coming back and two more Canon Foreigner cousins. He gets to confront them and the legacy of his family a bit more making amends with the last of his estranged family.
- Ryu fights Team Arabian, a Team of Arabian including a woman Ryu befriends (and has a crush on) and her abusive husband.
- Horohoro fights Team Sabbath, who are (and I kid you not) The Fundamentalist evangelical preacher types (and the BR dub really leans on this) who are anime versions of none other than rock legends Ronnie James Dio, Ozzy Osborne, Tony Iommi and they all have Spirits/Attacks named after rock music (with Ronnie's spirit being named White Snake and having the memorable finishing move "Rainbow in the Dark").
- Faust fights Team Enseioth, a team of Greek Shamans afflicted by some kind of rare disease (similar to the disease Elize had).
- Chocolove gets kind of one in an episode where they fight Nyorai, a Dark Messiah type who fuels the darkness people's hearts and makes them fall into misery, but it's more of a collective Team The Ren Episode. Chocolove is the key of the group working together though.
- Amidamaru of all people gets one where the whole tournament grinds to a halt because a group of Knight Templar Buddhist-Hindu exorcists are exorcising everybody's spirits.
- All those work rather well, though they're a bit rushed and the quality of the fights drops a bit. The best one by far is the Faust-focused one, as it shows Faust's Character Development wonderfully and addresses how he changed from his psycho days early on (and Manta remembers it quite well). We even get to see a budding (and quite sweet) friendship between him and Manta. The implication that Faust sees in that Shaman family what he and Elize could have been is also quite the heartbreaker. The worst is the Ryu one, due the moderately stereotypical Arab depictions and a abusive relationship that somehow ends still together (after the wife convinces the abusive husband to stop being a dick).
- There's a somewhat forgettable training episode in the midst of this, but it is useful to show how outmatched they are against Hao even after the whole Training from Hell (when they win the fight against another filler team by the skin of their teeth).
- Lilly Five Vs Yoh: The most absurd match-up in the history of Shaman King, but I'll be damned if it isn't great seeing the comic relief pull out a Beware the Silly Ones against Yoh and a collateral Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu? against Hao. Curiously, it provides Foreshadowing for the final bit since the Lilly Five's stratagem is a All Your Powers Combined thing (and Hao does the same).
- X-Laws position themselves for the center stage as Lyserg gets a angel of his own.
- In brief, it seems like this half of the final third was a result of the team behind the anime finding the "Shaman of the week" bit at the beginning and so they repeated the formula here.
Tomorrow I go into the end of it all.
Edited by Gaon on Jun 18th 2020 at 6:57:56 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Speaking of which, what I find interesting about Shaman King is that the Monster of the Week format in the beginning of the manga doesn't last very long. In chapter 6 we meet Ren already and by volume 2 the shaman king tournament is already introduced. Compared to something like Bleach which takes a long time to introduce Soul Society for instance, it's rather brisk.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Jun 18th 2020 at 9:42:20 AM

This new announcement has made me nostalgic for Shaman King. It's one of my favorite battle shounen from back in the day, but I never actually finished the original anime and never read the manga. This has gotten me wanting to read the manga from scratch to see the difference, but if I do that I'll probably get lazy and not watch the new anime lol