Middle-aged dude wish-fulfilment manga…
A lot of ‘normal teenage boy gets endowed with awesome powers’ series usually ends up having some sort of explanation as to why this particular actually-not-normal boy is the chosen one. Did they ever give a reason for why Kafka was the one chosen by Kaiju No.8? If not then this truly is a wish-fulfilment series for middle-aged guys. Which is fine, it just means that it isn’t aimed at me. Which I knew from the beginning. So why did I continue with this series? I guess I was in the middle of hate-reading Hero Aca and I kinda figured this was gonna be a ‘next big anime’ and I didn’t want to find myself in a similar situation where I felt I needed/wanted to catch-up. It was also a pretty early Manga Plus simulpub so it didn’t seem like too much effort to keep up to date. Well things sure are different now haha. If it were to release right now I wouldn’t invest the time.
Other than the premise, I’m not good with series where the protagonists are forever on the back-foot. How are you expected to win the war if you are bleeding resources the entire time? I’m not too familiar with Kaiju series, but I did watch that one movie (googles it – that’s right it was called Pacific Rim) and it kinda made sense in that story because it forced them to have a one-last-ditch operation to end the Kaiju threat for good. But in this series, the Kaiju are still around despite all the stuff they had to do to defeat No.9 and whatever it was that was controlling it. So it wasn’t very satisfying to me.
Harvesting the defeated Kaiju for weapons was interesting at least. But it would have been more fun if they were like Hoshina and whichever number he ended up with. Where it was sentient and so they were kinda working together, because their goals happened to align. That was the most interesting part.
Reno (is that his name?) ended up playing a much smaller role than I thought. I guess Kikoru was more popular? Mina was ok, she kinda felt a bit lacking in personality. The captain of squad 1 was fun, but a bit stereotypical.
I don’t really understand how Captain Shinomiya managed to give Kafka a heart in the end, but the scene showing him telling the vengeful spirits to move on with him was funny at least.
Categories: Manga Plus Simulpub Review
Leave a Reply